This appears to be a WinXP (Home) - FSAutostart - TrackIR3 (With Vector) - FS9 - Active Camera combined with a Sata (Raptor) boot drive Problem.Everything was working and fantastic at that until I did two things:1. Installed FSAutostart (and of course disabled a bunch of stuff)after which all seemed okay for several days (probably three flights of 1 hour or more duration.2. Installed my new TrackIR3 with Vector.I set up the TrackIR3 and Vectoring using the default FS2004 profile included. Started up FS and after a few minutes Track IR started shaking. (I had already disabled Active Camera head latency, so that wasn't the problem.) I quit and checked everything, connections, software version etc. and was up to date. Fired up FS again and flew for about 10 minutes and then the screen froze. Cntrl-alt-del would not bring up the terminate window, would not re-boot. I had to push the reset button.Now it gets worse. The re-boot would not pass the Asus logo (press DEL for setup) step. Just sat there doing nothing. Tried to get into bios - just sat there doing nothing. Did a hard shut down - waited more than 20 seconds, turned it on.This time it went through the startup check and got to booting up from operating system and the Windows Boot Screen came up but very dim - like low power setting on a laptop (this is a desktop). Just sat there never going into Windows and no scrolly progress bars. Nada!Hard shut down again. reboot - F8 - picked last successful configuration - same thing - nadaHard shut down, reboot -F8 - Safe Mode. Took two tries but finally booted up into safe mode. Check devices - all looked good. Start - Shutdown - Restart and Windows booted normally.Disconnected Track IR3 Uninstalled program.Rebooted normally.Started FS9 - flew for about 20 minutes - screen froze!Same thing all over again.Finally got it restarted normally. Why do I think FSAutostart may be involved? Probably because of something I "stopped" that should have restarted if I had been able to exit FS9 normally - but since I could not do that and had to RESET I think FSAutostart could not "RESTART" what I had stopped. Through this process I had decided to boot up with the WINXP CD to REPAIR the OS. This is when I found that the WINXP boot CD doesn't recognize the SATA Boot drive © and would only give me the option to start from the CDDrive - And that wouldn't work because the Choices given were:1. D:WINDOWS"Which operating system would you like to boot from?"Press enter to quit and reboot"Now I know I'm not a genius by any means - but what the heck was that about? I typed in "1" but nothing happened - hit enter and yep, it rebooted and I was back where I started. Tried D:WINDOWS and yep, hit enter and rebooted back to where I started. My conclusion is there should have been another boot up option for C: sata drive. Am I right ? Or, is there something I don't know about how to start up from the CD and repair the OS on the C: Sata drive. Sleepless in Oregon

Hi!Well I have never ever tried to repair an OS I have just reformat and reinstalled it.Seem like a really tricky problem there. Shouldn

FSAutoSTart does not disable any services, so if you reboot, and service that was stopped by FSAutoStart will start back up as normal (even if you reset your computer before FSAutoStart was able to restart the services)On my computer (with a SATA drive) I had to supply drivers during OS installation. Sounds like the drivers for your SATA drive went bye bye some how?

Did you by chance have a "Restore Point" that you could role back XP to an earlier date when everything was working OK?I am interested in the IR Tracker equipment and would like to see if you can get yours up and running as they demoonstrated on their website. I belive it will help bring FS2004 and newer version to a higher level of simulation realism.Good luck,Terry

I think you may have a cooling problem. It doesn't matter what FS Autostart or any other program did/didn't do, everything is zapped from the RAM the moment you hit the reset switch..so there would be nothing "running", preventing the computer from getting past the BIOS/POST. The only thing that *does* remain is the heat generated by the CPU and GPU, and this only goes away after you leave the computer off for a while.I'd check that the CPU and GPU fans are spinning and if they are, install a temperature monitoring program and log the temperatures to see if they rise severely just before the lockup.

The problem lies with a conflict between TrackIR3 and Active Camera. Whatever happened, it affected Active Camera because I was getting freeze-ups even after TrackIR was uninstalled. There was no problem with it prior to TrackIR installation. The only known conflict that I was aware of was the Head Latency which I turned off. I removed Active camera and re-booted everything was normal. FS9 behaved properly and I flew a long (45 min) test flight with lots of button pushing, changing A/C and weather/ airports, etc.. No problems.Re-installed TrackIR and re-configured it, fired up FS9 and flew for an hour with no problems whatsoever, except headache - most likely caused by my glasses which are due for change-out.To Ken - I'm glad to hear that FSAutostart can't let a nimbno like me screw things up! I only suspected it might have something to do with the problem because I had just installed it as well as Track IR.How a conflict between TrackIR and Active Camera could cause such a major boot-up problem is mystifying to me. I would think the problems would be only apparent in Windows - not the boot-up process! But once the two programs were removed, all was okay. I am seriously considering using an IDE boot disk and use the Raptor as the FS only disk. I am not that impressed with the marginal speed gain in windows operations - especially if I have emergency boot up problems with SATA.The SATA drivers are native to the board chip on AN8-SLI Deluxe. I may have to Flash the bios but I have never done that. The ASUS manual makes it look idiot proof, but they never planned on me trying it!TrackIR with vectoring is a neat concept. It will take some time for me to decide if it was worth the $200. There aren't a lot of configuration choices and one thing that bothers me is the visual impact of all that movement - like turning my head to find a keyboard key - my peripheral vision picks up the rapid panning to the cockpit floor - and back again - Maybe I'll get used to it. I do like the idea that I don't have to use the hatswitch, though. I'll post something about it after I give it some time.Thanks for the replies!

Good Point, but it's not cooling. I have temperature monitoring and history of all temps, fans, and voltage - That was my first concern too, but the history shows temps, fans and voltage were steady and withing limits - also had the case open to check that fans were running and provide additional cooling after the first hang-up. All was good.Dave

Overheating doesn

The symptoms elad me to suspect maybe a poorly seated RAM stick or the graphics card. It would be worth removing and reseating these.Just a hunch..... :)

Well, I finally figured it out! I had two problems which combined to make life miserable for a couple of days, but all is well now - (I think!)1st: When I initially installed WinXP It asked for the RAID driver disk. I did not want a RAID array so I skipped this....UH OH! My boot up problems were related to the SATA drivers not being installed, which are combined, I guess, with the RAID drivers. I did not notice this as everything seemed to be working and boot ups were uneventful. I did not have any os crashes - so thought all was cozy.2nd: When I installed TRACKIR3 and tried to use it, it conflicted with ActiveCamera and caused FS9 to freeze up which required a reset to get out of it.Evidently, this emergency exit from wind xp translated into the SATA bootup problem. I called ASUS tech and that's when I discovered the SATA driver problem.That is now installed as well as TRACKIR3 with VECTOR (but ActiveCamera removed - I hate to loose the fly-by, but...)I have now flown over an hour with no lockups. So, something in Active Camera (not head latency related as that was disabled already) does not like TRACKIR3 on my system. I am beginning to get hooked on TRACKIR! Especially in Bill and Lynn Lyons Quad-City Challenger - what a kick - lean your head out the cockpit and look down - pan around and see the hot air balloons over Phoenix at sunset! Toooooooo Cooooool!