Some of you may remember me; I was an occasional poster to this site a few years back, before the video card on my WinXP machine died. At the time, I found my system couldn't handle a couple of mid-price replacement cards I tried, and so I wound up switching to the nForce integrated graphics on my mainboard for the duration, which worked O.K. for general computing stuff but, of course, was no good at all on FSX, so I wound up putting flying on the back burner for awhile.Recently, I've been looking to upgrade my Adobe CS to 5.5, which also means upgrading to a 64-bit O.S. Rather than lose what I've got on my current system, I've decided to do a new-build Win7 machine and move my old PC to my daughter's room, where she needs a machine that can handle Sims 3 (with every add-on in the universe).Since I'm building a new PC, I've obviously been checking here to see what H/W configurations would work well with FSX as well as my Adobe products, and am probably going with an i7-2600K with a Z68 mainboard and GTX560 GPU. However, reading here about Microsoft refusing to validate FSX for Win7 64-bit, I admit I'm a little concerned.1) If I build this new system, with Win7 64-bit, will I be able to install and run FSX?2) Are the problems one poster reported with Microsoft refusing to "validate" FSX on a 64-bit system merely due to him trying to get a manual reactivation on a previously-activated installation, or is it something that will automatically happen any time someone tries to install FSX on a Win7 64-bit machine?3) If the former (the problem is with trying to manually validate a previous installation), would buying and installing a new copy of FSX straight out-of-the-box solve the problem? If not, is there any other way I could install FSX on such a machine?4) Do I have to also install Acceleration (which I don't have yet) to get FSX to work on a 64-bit system, or will it work by itself?Thanks in advance.

not to worry - FSX will validate just fine on a 64bit system or a LOT of us would be screaming foul. SO1) yes with no problems2) I believe it was specific to the OP on that thread - not able to duplicate with others3) You will have to do a complete reinstall anyway so as long as you have the original DVD for FSX, it's not an issue. Trying to copy from an old install may cause you more problems that it's worth.4) Acceleration is a plus but not required but you should at least install SP2 to get the benefit of multi core operation.Bottom line - build your system - stick in the FSX DVD and install - it will activate just fine.Vic

I had the activation issue when installing the acceleration pack, but not the main FSX. I forgot what it said exactly but it wasn't letting me activate it. I did a google search on the error message it gave me and found a simple registry edit to take care of it, not a big deal. Tried registering again and it worked great. Also had an issue with a DLL that kept crashing the SIM if I accessed the menu in FSX. The name of the offending file is "UIAutomationCore.dll". Also googled it and found the solution was to simply download the Vista version of this DLL and place it in my FSX folder. That took care of that problem. FSX runs great on my recent build. Only issues I've had are that one of my OCZ Vertex 3 drives would suddenly disappear from the RAID 0 array leading to a BSOD. Just today I've flashed them both to the new firmware so we'll see how it goes.