Why do I still use FSX?

6 hours ago, W2DR said:

Give me a break. All I said was I HAD 603. Nobody is dumb enough to try to install all that stuff at the same time. I know what works together and what doesn't. It's not all that difficult to manage.

In support of what you say, I actually have significantly more than 603 scenery add-ons installed as well as a few hundred add-on aircraft and, yes, I too have enjoyed a very nicely functioning, stable FSX for many years. It hasn’t required an excessive amount of work, patching or testing (other than the testing most of us would do when we add a new scenery). Indeed most of the issues that did arise centred around duplicate AFCAD files when adding new scenery but these are usually easy to identify and deal with. Sure, with a 32-bit application such as FSX, you have to be cautious about VAS usage particularly if you are combining a VAS intensive aircraft with VAS intensive scenery but that is easy to manage (I find the utility SIMStarter NG very useful from this viewpoint) and OOMs for me are uncommon.

Although FSX works very nicely for me now I will admit it wasn’t always that way  - my first installation of FSX soon after its release was on a PC which had been running FS9 but that simply wasn’t powerful enough to run it well so I reverted to FS9; subsequently acquiring a more powerful computer I reinstalled FSX but probably made too many tweaks and ended up with a temperamental, unstable and frustrating version of FSX; for my third and final installation of FSX I precisely followed the Avsim Configuration Guide (courtesy of the late Jim Young) and avoided all tweaks and that version of FSX has served me very well for many years now.

Like many of the others here, I have invested a lot of time and money in FSX so it seems pointless to abandon it when it is working well. My original plan was to wait until my current rig required replacement and then probably go down the P3D pathway with a new PC although I would probably also keep a slimmed down FSX, mainly because of some add-on aircraft which I want to continue to use. With the advent of MSFS, however, P3D clearly has competition and I sense MSFS may become the dominant platform. Assuming my current rig soldiers on for a little longer, I plan to let the dust settle on MSFS  however before making that decision.

Bill