I prepped for SP1 by doing the repair option from the FSX disks.The update to SP1 went well and quite quickly although I still had to defrag my FSX partition. FSX fired up fine and I went for a test fly. However, frame rates showed no improvement and if anything were slightly worse than pre SP1. An investigation showed that I had fallen for a dummies trap.The FSX repair had re-installed the original traffic.bgl file and I still had my own TDBB generated traffic file in world scenery. So I had a lot of AI traffic going on in FSX.Removing either one of these traffic files allowed the real performance gains of SP1 to shine through. Forewarned is forearmed. The repair option worked well and when I started FSX I was looking at my Real Air SM260 just where I left it ready to fly.John :-)

I got caught in this one too. I had MYTrafficX in there and when I came back up I thought I was in the FSX aviary. :-bang :-lol Gary

My experience with the repair option of RTM is that it obviously leaves some modified files as they are. In my case the tweaked thermal_descriptions.xml was not reset to the original which resulted in the SP1 installer failing to update this file (which it should have done according to Phil's blog).So I took the hard way, backed up the config files, rewards and so on, completely reinstalled the RTM and immediately afterwards installed SP1.And voila - there is a new, much improved version of thermal_descriptions.xml (grat job, ACES - that's now what it should have been from the beginning).So if you applied a lot of tweaks better do a clean reinstall!

That is very interesting and I suppose everyone's installation would be different so it is not possible to generalise on possible miscues.Now I am worried. A complete re-install sounded rather daunting. Looks like I might have to bite the bullet and re-install to be sure but I would back up my current working installation first.Thanks for the info.

>And voila - there is a new, much improved version of>thermal_descriptions.xmlWhat is the last modified date on your thermal_descriptions.xml. I have 3/14/2007 on mine after SP1 install?Thanks,Gary

Hi Gary, My old thermal description file has a mod date of 15 March 2007 and my re-install date is the same. Size is also the same so it looks like it hasn't changed. I have just re-installed FSX but now I am having difficulty re-installing purchased aircraft. I knew a complete re-install would have warts on it. I might yet recall my backups an continue with my repair option ugrade version.John.

>Hi Gary,> My old thermal description file has a mod date of 15 March>2007 and my re-install date is the same.John - If your date on the thermal description is the same as mine in March 2007 then it must be the new updated one. The original date should be before Oct 17, 2006. The March 2007 date would be the date that the SP1 team modified it. I am pretty sure I am right on this. What I am getting at is that you should not have to reinstall everything if the patch seems to have taken. I am standing pat for now as I don't want to mess around with the re-licensing bull that addons go through. I only have aircraft but thats enough. I am pretty sure the patch took. Not having a dual core to check it by I am watching things in my single core and there does seem to be greater smoothness overall. My only real gripe is like everyone else almost, minute stutters do to large frame jumps. This behaves just like before. It will be chugging along reasonable well and then the frames go to pot for just a minute or so.Unfortunately that is a bummer if it happens on takeoff or approach. }( Gary

Gary,Just to finish the story I did a complete re-install + SP1 and tested it. I had no change in frame rate from my "repair" install. So I reloaded my "Repair" install partition as this saved me from re-installing add-ons. I then retested this "Repair" install with the default MS traffic files to check performance which was the similar to the complete re-install I had ditched. So now I am a happy camper. I would think that there are other users that may have saved some pain if they had chosen to go the "Repair" route which Phil had said should work OK.:-)John