Something is crashing my graphics card

[Adrian West 6]

Hi.

I really hope someone can help me. I am having big problems with my current system. You may have seen in another thread that I am trying to buy a new rig for P3d v4. For now I'm running FSX Gold boxed on an 8 year old system which is showing its age. The system is a Dell using a 2.80 GHz CPU, 8 GB RAM and GeForce GTS 240 1 GB GPU. The system runs fine, albeit the fps with current add-ons are on the low side, but generally flyable. A couple of weeks ago I installed Aerosoft La Palma X and MK-Studios Tenerife Vol 1, as I am keen to start flying around the Canaries with all of the new sceneries that are being developed for these islands at last. I tried out La Palma, and that performed fine. However I had big problems with the installation of Tenerife. I finally managed to install the scenery, but within a minute of loading my aircraft at the airport FSX crashed completely. The crash was so severe that I had to restart the PC and then discovered that my GPU was no longer recognised. Windows Device Manager was showing a code 43, which indicates that Windows had switched off the display adapter because of a problem. I was unable to run FSX because the program could not see a valid GPU on the system. I was unable to reinstall the current drivers in the normal way. I posted on the MK-Studios forum and established that there doesn't appear to be a problem with their scenery. They suggested that I should remove the drivers using an application called DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) available on Guru3d.com. This I have now done (it has to be done in safe mode), and I then managed to install the drivers successfully. Windows finally recognised my GPU again and I was able to start FSX. However as soon as the flight loaded, FSX froze again and I had to perform a hard reboot of my system. The flight was with a default aircraft at Friday Harbour, so definitely nothing to do with the Tenerife scenery (which I had temporarily uninstalled anyway). When my system had restarted I discovered that my GPU had been deactivated again. So I had to remove and reinstall the drivers again. Windows has now recognised the GPU again, but I haven't tried to run FSX again until I can work out what is going wrong.

There seems to be some sort of conflict going on. Does anyone have any suggestions? I haven't tried deleting fsx.cfg and letting FSX rebuild it. Would it be worthwhile trying this? Could it be a hardware issue with my GPU rather than a software conflict? Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Adrian

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

Hi Adrian. My first suggestion would be to delete (or rename) FSX.cfg and see what happens with a restart.

[Adrian West 6]

Hi Ray. I am glad to report that deleting FSX.cfg and allowing the sim to rebuild it did the trick. Clearly something must have become corrupted in the file which then somehow crashed the sim and corrupted the drivers. Glad to get FSX back after 2 weeks thinking my PC was dying.

Adrian

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

Glad it worked Adrian. It probably had references to bad graphics settings or maybe a bad startup flight.