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Escaping from locked-up CFS3?

ndicki

ndicki

Charter Member 2016
What do you do in Windows XP to get out of CFS3 when you get the dreaded missing pylon (or in my case, incomplete mod, etc) lock-up? After all these years, all I've found is the escape button, which as it simply cuts off the power, is in the process of corrupting one hard drive after the other. There must be a better way...
 
If it's not too tightly locked-up, what about the
three-fingered salute...Ctrl Alt Delete?

This should bring up the Task Manager, and you
can 'End Task' through the Applications tab.
 
Could this work? I wrote it to the knowledge base back in 2010 after getting irritated myself.

greycap.raf said:
For those moments when it freezes in the UI menu.

We've all gone through the waiting after selecting a loadout that doesn't work, trying to fly a mission that requires an aircraft we don't have, you know the drill. And the sim hangs for good. Time to reboot...

...not. The trick is to refrain from clicking on absolutely anything until the uimusic stops, the hard drive light calms down, the sim has done its "thinking". If you click on the menu bar it'll somehow deactivate the application and shifts the attention to something running in the background by which time you'll have to try Plan B but I'll get to it later. In the meantime go with Plan A.

Plan A: when everything is quiet and still (and you haven't clicked on anything) hit Alt + F4. Simple as that. It should - read, should - kill CFS3 and throw you back to desktop. Problem solved, fire it up again.

Plan B: if you panicked or Plan A didn't bring results hit Alt + Tab, Alt + F4. Keep doing it until the next program in the line is CFS3 and the hang is released. The downside of this approach is that you'll probably go through several programs which get closed as well but hey, rebooting doesn't give them much chance either.
Click to expand...
 
One method I use when modding and testing (which frequently locks things solid) is to run cfs3 in windowed mode (details in the knowledgebase).
That way it's easy to shut it down. :)
 
My approach is similar to Greycap's. I deliberately have another program open (usually Windows Explorer) and make sure it is not minimised, before I run cfs3. In that way I imagine it is easier to cycle from the window of the frozen cfs3, to the open windows Exploer, using the Alt+Tab option Greycap mentions. However sometimes it just don't seem to work. I think these days with multi-core computers, the Alt+Tab option is more effective than it used to be. Once you've cycled your view to another program, you can decide whether and how to close cfs3.
 
Many thanks to all of you for your answers!

Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work, insofar as the pop-up appears BENEATH the fullscreen that CFS3 is using. If you are lucky, it sometimes happens that you click on the right things by chance, but you have to be bloody lucky!

I've made a note of the other tactics, and next time I get stuck, I'll try and see which one works best...
 
No joy. It locked up on the splash screen - incorrectly identified sound alias - and none of the above did any good. I had to use the escape button again. Time I looked into Clive's suggestion for windowed mode...
 
westview said:
Ctrl-Alt_Esc will return you to desk top, if that helps at all.
Click to expand...

Never heard of Ctrl-Alt_Esc! It works really well when CFS3 is running, this is a great way to get to the desktop shortcut to the _mission.xml file, to alter the skill settings at the start of a campaign mission!! :tickled_pink:

Thanks for that. NB I haven't thus far tried it with CFS3 locked up.
 
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