No H-SPAN in Vista. Going back to XP - FSX questions!

[Guest ThrottleUp]

I have decided to create a dual-boot system (Vista 7 XP) for the sole reason of being able to have a Horizontal Span (H-SPAN) option available (Due to a change in the display driver architecture in Vista H-SPAN is not available). I was wondering if FSX Acceleration will still work under the freshly installled XP or wether I will need a reinstall? CouldI use some kind of RegEdit trickery to "point" XP to FSXs location? Heres my current setup:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[Drive C:] Windows Vista <---- I intend to create a new partition and put XP on this[Drive E:] FS9.1 & FSX Acceleration <---- both sims are on this physically seperate drive-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------As you can see both the sims are on a physically seperate 500GB Samsung drive so they will be untouched. Its just the OS structure on C: that will change. 1. At this time I have FSX Acceleration installed under Vista.2. Once XP is added I guess I will have to reinstall FSX again just for the purpose of "pointing" XP to the correct drive?By that I mean:a. Rename the current FSX folder to something like FSXTEMPb. Rename FSX.exe to FSXTEMP.exec. Reinstall FSX Acceleration under XPd. Once thats done delete the freshly installed FSX foldere. Go back to the original FSX folder (that i renamed in step a.) and give it back its original nameNow XP will "register" where FSX is located.....right?Would this be the correct way to go about it?Lastly - will I have activation problems with FSX? Its the same hardware its just an OS change for the sim.Thanks for reading and I eagerly look forward to your replies :( ____________________________________________________________________The following is simply additional information in case people are wondering just why I want to go back to XP:You see - I bought two identical monitors for one reason - to use the Horizontal Span function so two screens became one big display. I did this because I like to play Microsoft FSX and other games across two screens, the immersion in that flight simulator magnifies a hundred times when spanned across two widescreen monitors.Just to avoid confusion, H-SPAN is *not* Dual View or Extended Desktop. With H-SPAN Windows treats two (or more) monitors as *one* big display. So if you have two monitors each of which is 1680 X 1050 if you enable H-SPAN you will have a 3360 X 1050 display. So your start button will be on the bottom left of the left monitor and the clock/system tray on the bottom right of the right monitor:. I made an illustrationAnyway - along came my nice new Core i7 computer with Vista installed and yea....you guessed it - Vista has no Horizontal Span option Im so gutted and now have no interest in keeping this OS any longer. You have no idea what it feels like to go back from what was essentially a huge 3360 X 1050 display down to a single screen at 1680 X 1050!! :( Now I have been pointed towards Matrox TH2G but I dont see why I should spend even more money on hardware to do a job I can do happily in XP! An OEM XP CD will cost a fraction of what a TH2G unit!So thats it - XP can Horizontally Span and thats why I want it back! :(

[beatle 0]

While you probably could hand-create the needed registry settings, those aren't the only problem. There are several "required" bits that get installed along with FSX (like MSXML4 for one) that might not exist on a base OS install - its for these items that reintstalling will generally be best. Also, quite a few 3rd party addons rely on being installed these days also (to set their own registry settings and install their own prereqs), so again, building from scratch might be best.As to reinstalling to the same place that Vista currently knows about, that should work fine as long as you have the same addons installed under both OSes as well.Another issue, if you have any problems, the first thing folks are going to tell you is to tear down your franken-install and do it from scratch anyway :->Tim

[frakius 2]

I feel your pain, I just upgraded to Vista 64 bit to avoid OOMs in FSX only to discover you can't span monitors (luckily I installed vista on a new disc so it installed as a dual boot system) I got rid of one issue only to find my flight sim xp shrunk to one monitor :( Since the OOMs only happened with my PMDG 747 with VRF Uk installed and mega airport heathrow I now use XP for Ga and VFR flight and Vista for procedural flying in my 747.As to installing XP i am not sure how it would work the other way round, it was very easy to install vista as a second O/S with XP installed but i think its a lot harder the other way round. If you have two H/Ds might be easier to wipe vista, install XP then install Vista again to second H/D as a dual boot, vista automatically sets up a boot option if you do that, ones called "Boot to older version of Windows" or boot to VistaAh misread your post ;-) I think you will have to install FSX again because of the DLL files and the way they are registered in the OS, some games install into a single folder and you can run them just but changing the shortcut but don't think that is the case with FSX. Paul

[Shift_E 0]

I'm not sure if this would help, but you might want to check this out before going back to XP. RTaylor's Weblog: Heads up Vista Dual MonitorThere is also this Extend your desktop.Ron