...my gaming PC has been down for almost a week. Starting to experience withdrawal symptons from simming. For some reason the dedicated soundcard and the onboard sound on the MB have quit working. The guys at the shop can't figure out what the deal is. Unfortunately it's nothing as simple as a corrupted driver or something like that. They're saying that a complete wipe of the HD might have to be done and reinstall the OS (WinXP).

I'm thinking that if they have to do a wipe and reinstall, I might have them install Windows7. Has anyone had any experience with FS9 with it?

If have to reinstall all my FS9 stuff, it will be a supreme pain! But on the bright side, a nicely cleaned up fresh install usually seems to perform better.

The gaming 'puter is coming up on 4yrs old. After all this I'm seriously considering a new one, and relegating the old one for storage on the home network.

Scott
KJMS (or thereabouts)

Hi Scott, I have done it before.
I uninstalled and then very promptly reinstalled FS9.
I was extremely nervous until the entire exercise was complete.
Everything was restored as expected, but, all the same, I am very nervous about doing it all again.
One bonus about modern times is that you can get external drives of humoungeous capacity you could probably stick your entire flight sim collection on one stick drive, (or ten in my case!!!)
Having said that, my flightsim computer still runs XP.

Tony
NZDN

I have W7 32 bit running FS9 & FSX. Previously had XP with FS9. No difference really except that current Motherboard has a dual core processor, 4MB RAM 7 two SATA2 drives & so runs better & it compiles .mdl files a lot quicker. Processor about 2 yrs old & motherboard is a cast off about 4 yrs old!
I still cannot run FSX without turning the wick down quite a lot in order to get reasonable frame rates of more than 15fps! No problems with FS9 - can run everything flat out.
W7 is a lot more stable than XP.
My son ( my computer expert!) is coming to visit me next month to upgrade my prime HD as he suspects that its going downhill - I'm getting the occaisional blue screen- & he is going to bring some 'mirror' software to transfer most things & then only if necessary reload W7.
I understand that if one has a W7 64 bit 'puter & programme its better still from the RAM point of view.
HTH
Keith

Hi Scott,
I've only just tripped over your post, so I may be too late...however, I'm running Windows 7 64bit, which runs 9 and X beautifully. I favour separate sound cards, but my current box has on board sound, and if I play round with it, I lose my warranty. In your case, if not already fixed, try putting in your favourite sound card and when booting up, go into setup, deactivate onboard sound and tell it to use the SB Live!, or whatever. I'd worry about formatting the HD, unless you have full backups.

I don't know much, but I know I like simming!
Cheers, Mike

Thanks for the replies. I actually ordered and got a new box a couple of weeks ago. It has Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit, a Sandy Bridge I7 2600K quad core 3.4 Ghz 8000k, 8GB ram, GeForce GTX560 1GB PCI Express card, 2 1T HD's (one is reserved for gaming - would have liked to get an SSD, but they're so bloody expensive), Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium...and other goodies

Runs FS9 like a dream. Still in the process of getting all the stuff I had on the old computer set up on the new one. Will probably put FSX on it at some point in time.

Cheers,
Scott
KJMS (or thereabouts)