FSX-SE A Little Help Here...

[gpbarth]

Been away for a long time. Old Win 7 machine took a big dump and I lost everything. EVERYTHING! Now I'm getting a brand new top-end machine running Win 10, and I'll be re-installing FSX SE, ORBX, most of the A2A and PMDG inventory, and everything else...weather, FSUIPC, TrackIR, EZDok, etc., etc.

Question is, how do I set up Win 10 to run FSX SE clean and proper? Do I worry about DX10? Is there a list of things to change in the OS like there was in 7? The new machine will run FSX and DCS World exclusively - no personal data, no e-mail, no browsers, no nothing. Just 4 TBytes of drives and 32 Gb of fast RAM and a NVidia card with lots of RAM, too. Someone out there must have a list of preps for this. Any input will be appreciated. I can't wait to get back I the air.

[hs118]

FSX-SE runs great on Windows 10! I would recommend you install Steam (and associated FSX-SE) in its own folder outside of "Program Files".

One of the best things about FSX-SE is that it is FSX recompiled with modern software tools and needs much much less "configuration" of the operating system and associated system programs. 

I will close my comment and cede the floor to others with specific advice.(think you will like what you end up with.)

 

[gpbarth]

Thanks, Henry. I have 2 2Tb hard drives that will hold the sim stuff. Nothing will go into the Programs Files folder. And everything will have admin rights, just to make sure. I was running FSX SE on my old machine, with all of the DX10 tricks in use, and wondered if that's really worth it anymore. I'm just concerned with making FSX run as smoothly as possible, and as I said, there will be nothing on this machine but sim stuff.

I may eventually go over to Prepar3d, but right now, I have a lot of money invested in the FSX aircraft, and I don't want to re-purchase all of it for P3D. Plus spend $200 for P3D, too. I do like that it's now 64-bit, and my new machine will have 32 Gb of fast RAM.

Anywho, I'll be armed and ready when the new machine arrives. It's been a long time without flying, and I cant wait to get back!

[vortex681]

15 hours ago, gpbarth said:

I was running FSX SE on my old machine, with all of the DX10 tricks in use, and wondered if that's really worth it anymore.

Definitely. With DX10, the GPU does a little more of the work previously done only by the CPU. More importantly, though, you'll only get cockpit shadows with DX10. If you use Steve's scenery fixer for DX10 you can add his cloud shadows add-on (if you don't already have it) which improves the realism even more.

One big piece of advice I'd add is to avoid all of the popular tweaks to FSX that "make it run faster" - my experience, with modern hardware, is that they generally don't and many can often make things worse. I now have no tweaks to my config file and it's running better than it ever has.

[gpbarth]

I've got Steve's DX10 fixer. Think I've got most of my bases covered. Also the NVidia tweaking tool.  Guess I'll wait till I have everything installed and see what happens. Thanks for the input.

[W2DR]

Which CPU is in the new machine? FSX performance is based almost solely on CPU speed. Most of the "other stuff" really isn't all that critical.........Doug