Today, I found out what all the fuss was about. While taxiing to takeoff at KORD, my screen went kind of grey and the little blue circle started spinning. I have flown about 50 flights, and this has happened a couple of times before, but only lasted a couple of seconds at the most. Today, after waiting for 10 minutes, I finally exited out of the program. BUT, the interesting thing is .... this was my FIRST FLIGHT with my new TrackIR. I was panning for traffic to cross a runway when it happened. Maybe this will help someone diagnose the difficulties. I'm not going to submit a support ticket, unless it happens again, and again.

I don't have TrackIR, but I do have many other addons like Skai Traffic and the LVLD 767. That MAY be the problem, one of those addons or my others.

In one test, i was able to cure the freezes by reducing the size of the textures, and in a second test i got rid of it by removing a dll from another addon from dll.xml.. there is some precedent that theres more of a connection than memory being involved there, but i dont truly have a real clue. If it continues for you, simply remove a DLL from DLL.xml and try again..Pam

How to reduce texture sizes and is it reversable?

Hey Dennis I'm not sure that what you had was one of the dreaded panel freezes. I do on occasion get the "busy" cursor and the grayed out screen whilst my processor catches up, but the panel freeze is different in that occasionally (every flight for me) fsx seems to keep going but my main panel, cdu,.. mcp etc stop working. Sometimes it has been several seconds before I realise that there is a problem.Hope a fix is coming soon.Darryl Critchley

Darryl is spot on. The "panel freeze" issue is exactly what the name implies, a panel freeze. Screens, flight controls, etc. freeze, while the aircraft continues to "fly" (fall). What you had apparently was a fatal error, but since you posted no error message, it's hard to say why. Check your reliability history and look for the time/date you got the lockup. Windows logged the error I'm sure.

In one test, i was able to cure the freezes by reducing the size of the textures, and in a second test i got rid of it by removing a dll from another addon from dll.xml.. there is some precedent that theres more of a connection than memory being involved there, but i dont truly have a real clue. If it continues for you, simply remove a DLL from DLL.xml and try again..Pam

Curing the Freezing by reducing size of the textures, is pretty much a "Cut & Dry" indication that the Freezing was bing caused by a lack of sufficient memory. ( FSX's memory managemnt really does suck -- no question about that).

How to reduce texture sizes and is it reversable?

I used photoshop. Is it reversible?? not really. but at 2048 x 2048 you wont really notice a difference in high definition. Still the bottom line truth is, you can always take pixels away from a picture, but you can never put them back.. Its best to experiment on a texture thats unimportant to you or that you can easily replace such as i did..

I used photoshop. Is it reversible?? not really. but at 2048 x 2048 you wont really notice a difference in high definition. Still the bottom line truth is, you can always take pixels away from a picture, but you can never put them back.. Its best to experiment on a texture thats unimportant to you or that you can easily replace such as i did..

Always, ALWAY back up files. I learned that the hard way...

Interesting about the Lvld 767, when I installed hotfix 2, my lvld dll spat the dummy. So I uninstalled the 767, removed any mention of it in the fsx.cfg, removed from the dll.xml, and not had a prob with the NGX. Julian Evans

Curing the Freezing by reducing size of the textures, is pretty much a "Cut & Dry" indication that the Freezing was bing caused by a lack of sufficient memory. ( FSX's memory managemnt really does suck -- no question about that).

That was my initial summation as well, till i flew the 900 with normal textures and simply by removing a dll file from dll.xml was able to circumvent the freezing. Besides, in FSX its not so much a matter of the size of the image or the number of poly's it has to cover, but rather the number of textures used to cover any given set of items.

Hey Dennis I'm not sure that what you had was one of the dreaded panel freezes. I do on occasion get the "busy" cursor and the grayed out screen whilst my processor catches up, but the panel freeze is different in that occasionally (every flight for me) fsx seems to keep going but my main panel, cdu,.. mcp etc stop working. Sometimes it has been several seconds before I realise that there is a problem.Hope a fix is coming soon.Darryl Critchley

Well, that would be good news, I think. Don't remember getting any of those "panel freezes" you describe. Thanks for that welcome info.

Darryl is spot on. The "panel freeze" issue is exactly what the name implies, a panel freeze. Screens, flight controls, etc. freeze, while the aircraft continues to "fly" (fall). What you had apparently was a fatal error, but since you posted no error message, it's hard to say why. Check your reliability history and look for the time/date you got the lockup. Windows logged the error I'm sure.

Checked Windows reliability monitor .... logged the event ... the old AppHangB1.

".....this was my FIRST FLIGHT with my new TrackIR...." Track IR5 active or not does not make any difference on my side : the NGX freezes from time to time but the freeze only lasts 10/15 seconds at the most. your presumed clue linked to Track IR might be irrelevant

That was my initial summation as well, till i flew the 900 with normal textures and simply by removing a dll file from dll.xml was able to circumvent the freezing. Besides, in FSX its not so much a matter of the size of the image or the number of poly's it has to cover, but rather the number of textures used to cover any given set of items.

One again, by removing the addon (ie Removing it's dll from being activated by dll.xml, you reduced the amount of memory being used by your system, which in turn, reduced the likelyhood of the crash. Its all about MEMORY usage and TIME. Unless you have a LOW memory usage, eventaully, after a time you WILL have a Crash. This is dues to FSX's very inefficient memory management, with inefficient memory allocation & de-allocation. After a time, the memory gets so fragmented, that when FSX request a "Contigeous" new block of memory, the memory is so fragmented, that the OS cannot supply that request. There is still PLENTY of FREE memory, but no one free contigeous block of memory that is big enough exists, because of fragmentation. In many cases, FSX does not handle this (No exception handling) and the RESULT is -- CRASH -- and if you are lucky, some form of error message. Tthe bottom line is -- FSX (or its addons) cannot get the memory they are requesting, this results in consequences that typically are not dealt with, and eventually. FSX locks up or crashes.

Geoff,Does having a non windows managed swap file make any difference ? I have 8GB ram, have set page file at 3172. Have not experienced OOM's but still does not mean I won't get one.Just wondering if setting your swap file instead of windows managing it would decrease the likley hood of fragmentation, and improve memory management. Your thought's ? Cheers