Hi all,My first post here and it's just to let off a bit of steam!I have been flight simming for many years now, both combat and civilian but I have only recently got into more hard core simming. This change in focus started when I picked up DCS:Black Shark a while back and the depth of the systems modelling left me quite excited. However I'm not much of chopper fan so it left me wanting something of a similar depth but fixed wing, that's when I discovered complex airliner addons. I have quite a few now, the first being the Flight1 Super 80 and my latest being PMDG's 747 with time spent in their MD11 and JS41 in between amongst others. For the most part I have been very impressed with the majority of these. Now to my frustration and I think this is more to do with FSX as a platform as anything else. The first thing I do with a new plane is go through the cold and dark tutorial and I am not kidding when I say that I have rarely completed one from start to finish without a crash (and I don't mean into the ground ;-) or some other show stopping event. As much as I enjoy going through these tutorials it leaves me a little disillusioned when I am 30 minutes in and something goes wrong, for example today I had just finished pushback and was in the process of engine start and AI traffic drove straight into me. A little later the same thing again but I hadn't even left the parking stand. That's the first thing, FSX is just plain stupid sometimes! And secondly, these things wouldn't be so bad except the saving and loading of state seems to require some kind of black magic, it occasionally works, some times it kinda works and other times I have a plane at 30,000 feet with the engines switched off! Too many times I have to start a flight from the beginning again.I thought about posting a suggestion in the MS Flight forum, if there is one thing I want to see improved more than anything else it's the ability to save the state of the simulation 100%, not just for crashes and AI stupidity but for redoing an approach or landing when you don't have a few hours to spare to recreate an entire flight. As I said, it works sometimes, but with complex addons not reliably enough in my experience.Does anyone else share these experiences and frustrations? it would be interesting to know.

Have you considered disabling crashes in the Settings menu?

Yes, disabling crashes would be a solution to that particular problem but it was more a general point, there are lots of little issues, some have solutions, some don't. I accept most of them but sometimes a particular session in FSX seems doomed to failure ;-) I might have a 1 hour window for a short haul hop only for much of it to be wasted with FSX's little tantrums!

I find a reboot of the PC helps before flying. If you've been using FSX on and off without a reboot, and browsing or checking email etc, it's worth shutting down and starting up again specifically before starting FSX. I'm convinced I get fewer issues when I bother to do that.

Yes, disabling crashes would be a solution to that particular problem but it was more a general point, there are lots of little issues, some have solutions, some don't. I accept most of them but sometimes a particular session in FSX seems doomed to failure ;-) I might have a 1 hour window for a short haul hop only for much of it to be wasted with FSX's little tantrums!

Sorry, I havent experianced the other tantrums, maybe someone else can help.

what I do is turn crashes onturn on aircraft stress causes crashesBUT TURN OFF allow collisions with other aircraftthis will protect you from AI idiots and yet, still allow you to crash if you screw up!

I accept most of them but sometimes a particular session in FSX seems doomed to failure ;-) I might have a 1 hour window for a short haul hop only for much of it to be wasted with FSX's little tantrums!

I also find myself frustrated due to lack of time. You have a short window to get up in their air so you do your flight planning, load everything up and something stupid happens. I have crash detection off but there are still other things that seem to go wrong. One of the most irritating ones I have found is when painters don't put the correct call sign in their .txt files or omit a flight number. Don't get me wrong, I REALLY appreciate their work but it is annoying to load everything up to find that ATC is calling you by your tail number. I share in the blame because I sometimes forget to check to make sure the callsign is right and that I have a flight number. Either way, it is still irritating. With simple aircraft you can just reload the aircraft but on more complex ones, you really have to reload everything from scratch. Sometimes it is impossible to get the panel back to where it was or back to cold and dark. Before you reload FSX, you really need to restart your computer so basically, you just added another 15-20 minutes to your flight.Don't get me started on irritants - I am having issues with AFCADS all over the place (likely due to use error) - that's a subject I will be posting on in about 5 minutes.

Davey,Here's a wee bit of light on the dark magic of saving and reloading...Some things come from the default flight but most from the actual flight saved.FSUIPC (even unregistered) saves the flight at shutdown - as "Previous Flight".I make this my default flight and also save occasionally during flight.You can certainly save a flight with the approach set up at KDFW and restart at that exact moment and location - engins should be on, AP engaged, etc.. The clouds might not look the same but the time, temp, and Bar' should be the same.There are utilities that will save your flight at regular intervals - perhaps FSUIPC payware version does this.I don't think the detail saved will include all the steps of an aborted startup sequence. The flight would probably restart with either engines off or completely on, no inbetween. It's an affordable SIM, not a $250,000 Simulator. It's going to lack a few things and simplify a lot of others...Loyd

Hi all,My first post here and it's just to let off a bit of steam!I have been flight simming for many years now, both combat and civilian but I have only recently got into more hard core simming. This change in focus started when I picked up DCS:Black Shark a while back and the depth of the systems modelling left me quite excited. However I'm not much of chopper fan so it left me wanting something of a similar depth but fixed wing, that's when I discovered complex airliner addons. I have quite a few now, the first being the Flight1 Super 80 and my latest being PMDG's 747 with time spent in their MD11 and JS41 in between amongst others. For the most part I have been very impressed with the majority of these. Now to my frustration and I think this is more to do with FSX as a platform as anything else. The first thing I do with a new plane is go through the cold and dark tutorial and I am not kidding when I say that I have rarely completed one from start to finish without a crash (and I don't mean into the ground ;-) or some other show stopping event. As much as I enjoy going through these tutorials it leaves me a little disillusioned when I am 30 minutes in and something goes wrong, for example today I had just finished pushback and was in the process of engine start and AI traffic drove straight into me. A little later the same thing again but I hadn't even left the parking stand. That's the first thing, FSX is just plain stupid sometimes! And secondly, these things wouldn't be so bad except the saving and loading of state seems to require some kind of black magic, it occasionally works, some times it kinda works and other times I have a plane at 30,000 feet with the engines switched off! Too many times I have to start a flight from the beginning again.I thought about posting a suggestion in the MS Flight forum, if there is one thing I want to see improved more than anything else it's the ability to save the state of the simulation 100%, not just for crashes and AI stupidity but for redoing an approach or landing when you don't have a few hours to spare to recreate an entire flight. As I said, it works sometimes, but with complex addons not reliably enough in my experience.Does anyone else share these experiences and frustrations? it would be interesting to know.

I totally clean install of FSX is not very problematic at all.   However, when you start to add the add-ons is when you start to have stability problems with FSX.

Newbie-There is a useful utility available at Schirotti.com called Autosavehttp://www.schiratti.com/files/dowson/AutoSave.zipIt was freeware in FS9, but you'll need to have a registered version of FSUIPC4 installed in FSX for it to work. Basically it saves ALL parameters of your flight, save for multiplayer settings, about every te minutes or so (adjustable). That way if you have a CTD, just look for the most recent time entry in your flights folder and load and you're back in action with the same aircraft and all of the radios, time, weather, etc set.Hope that helps!