For some time I've been having a problem with my sim minimising to desktop from full screen. Causing no end of angst!

In trying to trace it down I was able to delete  2 or 3 spurious programmes that did nothing other than to waste computer time. The problem still persisted however. The one common thing that I noticed was that it always minimised at a set time past the hour. I went through everything looking at .ini files etc and found nothing conclusive. Then I realised that the solution could be quite simple. I'd forgotten about "Scheduled Tasks". So I went into All programmes - Accessories - System tools - scheduled Tasks and there in front of my eyes were two tasks that were timed exactly for when the sim minimised. Great! So I "rescheduled" these tasks and the problem has not re-occurred.

 

And what were they? you may ask. If you have a newish Epson printer it tries to logon and find updates to your software (be aware if you do update you will not be able to use cheaper inks). There were two programmes both causing the sim to crash. So now you can add Epson to the list of possible causes in the future.

 

 

Thanks for the contribution. More proof there are a lot of reasons for a crash. A lot of external programs set themselves to be started up every time you start up your computer. They do this to run things in the background but these programs. Unfortunately for us, while trying out FSX or some other sim, this program decides it wants to do one of the chores it was set up to do, like maybe going on the web and looking for updates and running a schedule. These startup programs really are not needed and you can set them up to do things manually AFTER you have quit fsx. In my system configuration (search: msconfig), I disable everything under the Start Up tab. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I seem to have fewer CTD's.

 

Best regards,

Before this problem a CTD was extremely rare and usually a one-off resolved by a re-boot