Slightly off path here as to my situation, I did my reinstall for FS9 and started stacking everything up and all was going well. But when I started reintroducing the gauges and modules all hell broke loose. So, uninstalled again and will rebuild from the ground up more or less. I was able to save a few things so I don't spend 2 months building everything from scratch but is okay. Am going to keep this install streamlined as much as possible since the same HD is shared with a FSX growing. I drew a list of aircraft that I know I want on hand as well as addon scenery. Should be nice and smooth and highly functional when I get done.
Dang... So reinstalling doesnt always help.
DeathFromAfar,
You might check out a seperate additional HD for scenery and certain addons. They say that running scenery from another HD helps the sim to run faster. I cant figure that out, but evidently it does. There are some good external HD's now out there that look pretty cool and are up to 1,000 terrabytes. You can thus load up backups of your FS on there also as well as system backups, and its portable.
As for checking things out. If you 'have a feeling' of a addon (or several addons), you should be able to easily check them out and diagnose the system.
* For scenery, simply 'un-check' the red tick on a scenery installation to deactivate it. (Its still in there, but turned off). Then reboot FS and check frame rates, watch the Resource Meter to check its memory useage.
* For Modules, try dragging one out onto Desktop, Boot up FS and check frames. Repeat until you have gone through them all to see if one of those could be the culprit.
* With gauges, again you 'should' be able to check these by going through and taking the latest ones installed, and dragging them out to Desktop and running FS. However, with gauges, if they are not being 'called up', then they arent functioning/running. Thus they would have to be 'online' (being used by a plane(s) in order to be causing a drainage of resources or crashing.
One such gauge is the sound type gauges, DXD files I believe they are called. they will cause this and many planes can use them, so if you have a certain file out of whack that they all share (I am not familiar with the net of files and module(s) it uses), then that too will crash your system.
When you are a designer and gauge maker, you run into this every so often (too much, lol) and learn to diagnose the issues. Sometimes, inventions in the FS world to enable alot of cool things to be done, can cause issues in a sim. So elaborate addons that use modules, that have a part of their 'net' of bits accidentally deleted could render your sim unfunctional. Reloading your various programs and addons from their 'main' installers can fix such issues.
Also, as was mentioned by someone earlier, you can 'rename' your FS installation and redo the FS installation and then drag and drop your past installations into the new sim, then delete what you want too from the previous install once your new installation is complete and all running fine. (I usually keep a bare bones backup for emergency purposes to use files from so I dont have to use the CD's).
Bill
