I really cannot realistically see a possibility to continue with FSX for the next decade or so. Chance for that is almost zero. First, OS and HW developement may ultimately cause that FSX won't run in future computers: you will need legacy computer to do that and this is no option for me and I believe its the same for majority. Second, there will be a day when FSX starts to look and feel outdated. Terrific 3rd party addons have pumped all out of the FSX/ESP-engine (and even beyond the specifications and thus causing instability problems) and keeping sim modern looking, but I believe we are at the pinnacle. Every single piece of the best software of it's time has become obsolete and it will happen to FSX also. FSX is now 5-6 six years old and it is a long time in computer world. Far too long. I also play other more modern games, simulators and others, and I can easily tell that FSX feels outdated and looking it from the modern standards perspective, it has ridicilous limitations like poor multicore support, texture, graphics and memory handling. It is also buggy and no one is going to develop FSX or fix its bugs, ever.I see it this way: death of FSX, or actually the whole MS FS franchise started from the sacking of ACES team and MS decision to turn towards lighter Flight-franchise. Is MS strategy right from the business standpoint I don't know, but as it is, it definitely isn't for me. Yes, FSX right now is viable platform, thanks to 3rd party, but it isn't going to be like that forever. Simmers wan't better and modern platforms which can take advantage of their monster GPUs and 4+ gig memory spaces. Interest in P3D, XPX and even these kind of threads are a proof of that. In my opinion P3D looks like the best option for FSX simmer as it continues FS heritage maintaining at least some backwards compatibility and openess for developers to work with. XPX is of course one option, and I believe it will have the most growing user base in the near future as people are looking towards more modern platform after FSX, but after spending some time with the demo, something of it just doesn't fit for me and I don't get excited about it. In any case, if future is not for P3D or XPX, we're pretty much running out of options when it comes to serious civilian simming.

With respect to the OP, I think you are speaking wholly from your own personal experience, without entertaining the fact that other people may have very different experiences to yours.Personally, I don't use FS9 any more. And I only use FSX at present. but;- To me, even on a like for like basis, FSX is not smoother that FS9. FSX to me, has more of a tendancy to microstutter and generally feels less smooth.- Vista... you're kidding right? ...... even fully patched out, Vista was a hog for me, and Win 7 is hugely less resource intensive and thus a better platform for simming on.

And so the single worst thing MS did with Flight is to deliberately mislead the community about what Flight was going to be. Thereby sending a message to any other parties that might have been thinking about creating a replacement for FSX. Nobody would want to compete with an MS produced FSXI and right until late last year, most people didn't know that Flight will be nothing like FSXI should have been.

I think Alan mixes up two vital parts. Policies, terms of service, EULAs and laws. Only the last part is set up by governments and therefore is enforceable by design. All others may include law enforceable parts, but are not by design 'to obey' documents, regardless how important the wording might sound. That enforceable character only gets checked when that document enters a lawsuit.The FSX horror scenario Alan tries to establish (for whatever reason) is a purely fictional one in the first place. Lets not forget that. And, of course, you, having bought a valid license for a product and having fulfilled your part of the contract with the payment, have a right to receive a working product.There is no 'pull the plug' right at a company. That's for support and service packs, which of course can end. But they have to make sure that their activation system allows people to enable their software. If they can't, they have a legal problem as they don't fulfil the contract. Sure, if nobody complains in the means of suing them, nothing will happen.So where's that misconception coming from? Any nice source to read about the enforceable character of those generic click-wrap or shrink-wrap licenses e.g. FSX uses? As said, you may read them, but they are not by design enforceable or of any legal relevance.What Avsim does is enforcing their policy. If that one reads 'no mentioning of bad words allowed', that's ok, but it has nothing to do with actual law in place.I think I've pointed out somewhere else that the legal relevant part always is the one about if you own a license to run that software or not, not how you've actually activated it. Payment received and accepted means that you do.

Actually none of us "owns" our copies of FSX. What we purchased at the store is a LICENSE to use FSX. Terms of the use of that license is contained in the EULA. All parts of the EULA are enforceable in a court of law in any country in which FSX is sold legally. As such, Microsoft can prevent anyone from using their copy of FSX simply by revoking the EULA. Similarly if you don't agree to all parts of the EULA, you are not allowed to use FSX. Microsoft owns FSX and retains all the rights to it which includes the right to say who can and cannot use it. Microsoft, under the laws of all countries in which it sells FSX, has the right to stop selling or providing access to FSX and that is enforceable in a court of law.But let's take this doomsday scenario to its ultimate conclusion. You wake up tomorrow and your copy of FSX no longer works. You see a notice that all FSX EULAs have been revoked, use of FSX is prohibited. Well what would we do? Probably 90% would go find the FSX crack and use the sim like nothing happened. Now, let's say that Microsoft finds out that you are still using FSX with a crack and they sue you, they would win. Why? EULA. You either agree to the EULA or you don't. You agreed not to crack FSX whether you feel you got enough use out of it or not is irrelevant. But this is a purely hyperthetical scenario. Microsoft won't stop you from using FSX. Heck, if you can run FS4 no one is stopping you from using it and that is over 20 years old. It probably costs Micrsoft pennies a day to run the activation database server and they are still selling FSX in stores. So sleep well that your copy of FSX will probably outlive you!!!

I've had few problems with Vista, I have it on my laptop. Can't say the same for Windows 7 64 bit, which is continually problematic for me, for example, I regularly have it refuse to play sounds and it's a pain in the &@($* to sort that issue out, in fact I have resorted to doing a factory reset of my PC on more than one occasion to solve the problem. One look on youtube at a search for 'Win 7 sound problem' will reveal that the problem is widespread enough for people to have even made tutorial videos about how to solve the problem. Never had Vista pull that one on me and never had to reinstall it, and that been the case for several years of using it.Al

- Vista... you're kidding right? ...... even fully patched out, Vista was a hog for me, and Win 7 is hugely less resource intensive and thus a better platform for simming on.

Offopic: I find this Vista bashing really strange. I used 64-bit Vista in Core 2 Duo and i7 platforms from autumn 2006 to autumn 2011 without any problems. I had over 3 year working install wihtout Windows breaking on me, compared to every year or half reinstall with XP. It is by far the second best Windows OS ever released after 7. It had no performance problems in games, as many benchmarks prove: it is on par with Windows 7 in performance. Where it lacked, was its sluggish start up because of its memory handling during boot and performance on low end computers due to same memory handling reasons. Win 7 share the same NT kernel with Vista with tweaks. Really underrated Windows OS and a bashing target mostly for those, who never had used it. For me, best things with Vista were that it was solid as a rock compared to XP and gave DX10 and DX11 compatibility.

With respect to the OP, I think you are speaking wholly from your own personal experience, without entertaining the fact that other people may have very different experiences to yours.Personally, I don't use FS9 any more. And I only use FSX at present. but;- To me, even on a like for like basis, FSX is not smoother that FS9. FSX to me, has more of a tendancy to microstutter and generally feels less smooth.- Vista... you're kidding right? ...... even fully patched out, Vista was a hog for me, and Win 7 is hugely less resource intensive and thus a better platform for simming on.

Then I'd LOVE to see your system specs. As I said, I'm running an overclocked i7 2600k (5.1Ghz). I am running an extremely high end system and that is what it takes to run FSX smoothly. Secondly, in regard to Vista have you read reviews of Vista vs Windows 7? Windows 7 is marginally faster but on the order of most games seeing at most a 5 FPS increase and only marginal memory and CPU performance increases. Are you sure that you're not confusing system specs with general poor performance.

Mike, thanks for that full quote. :mellow:I think your answer nicely sums up the present misconception on the EULA and its law enforceable character, even in the US case law. So thanks for helping out on getting behind how it gets spread. :(

A few thoughts of my own:FSX and the non-appearance of FS11:The non-existance of FS11 has been a huge boon to FSX. For the first time ever third party devs have been able to work with a single version of the sim for a long time and have not had to second guess MS and keep one eye on possible changes with a new version of the sim on the horizon. Six years has brought us Accu-Sim and the NGX. Who knows when or indeed if we would ever have had such fantastic products if FS11 had materialised on the market in 2009/2010 and all the third party devs had to start all over again.FSX ten years from now:I doubt most of us will be flying FSX in 2022. Something else will have come along to get our attention by then. It may still be around, perhaps on sites like www.gog.com who specialise in taking old games and getting them to work on modern operating systems. They've recently added two flight sims from 1995/1996 so never say never!MS Pulling the plug on FSX:Yes it could happen, but again unlikely. I would imagine if MS ever decided to switch off the online activation servers for FSX they would release some sort of offline activation tool for existing copies of FSX. People still use Windows XP and that's over ten years old now and has been superceded by TWO MS products. MS are still supporting Windows XP and are continuing to do so until 2014, at which point I'd bet you'd still be able to activate your copy online and download the existing updates.Microsoft "deliberately misleading" us about Flight:Not quite sure where this sentiment comes from. It was readily apparent right from the period shortly after the closing of Aces that whatever Flight turned out to be it would NOT be FS11. The writing was on the wall for a long time. I'd suggest anyone who believed Flight would be FS11 were either hopelessly optimistic or very naïve and were only hearing what they wanted to hear and not what was really being spoken.Other sims taking over from FSX:Over time there will be something to replace FSX as the primary sim for most of us. Exactly what it will be isn't clear yet. I'd say the recent surge in development for X-Plane and interest shown by traditionally MSFS-oriented developers probably puts that sim as the front runner - maybe not XP10 but what about XP11? GNU Test Pilot sounds very interesting but I really can't see it happening. Whatever happened to the Aerosoft sim they made such a big noise about? Lockheed have realised there's a home-user market for P3D...Something will come along sooner or later.

The thing to remember here is that everything changes... everything. Sometimes its a good thing and sometimes, not so much.As a dev who's been doing planes for quite some time, I have to say that we are now looking seriously at making sure that all of our products work in PR3D... However, there will be, one day, a cut off point at which we won't be able to support both. This happened with FSX and FS9. We did the 310R and we had to make a decision on whether or not we would do both. We didn't and haven't looked back since. Now, I know that some are still using FS9 and that's not a bad thing. But, the reality is that, things change. You either change with them or you are made redundant. (of course, you are allowed to effect and affect those changes!!!)