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If you click the "Buy to own" on ANY of the 3 versions ( Standard, Deluxe or Premium ), they all include the "Digital Ownership" thing. This means you can KEEP the game even if you cancel the Game Pass subscription. Note that, it's also possible to buy the Premium UPGRADE and the Premium Deluxe UPGRADE from the MS Marketplace. However, if you buy these upgrades without having bought the Standard Flight Simulator ( so you got it for "free" with the Game Pass ), you are missing the Digital Ownership, since the *upgrades* don't come with that, only the 3 "full" versions do. And I can see how easy might be to confuse the "discount" on these ( because you are a Game pass member ) with the "discount" of the upgrade price, they might be similar, but one comes with a Digital Ownership, the other don't. This means, if you never bought the Standard version, and bought any of the two DLCs as upgrades, if you cancel Game pass, you'll have to buy the Standard Version you never bought. If you are in this situation, it would be best buying it NOW, before your Game Pass expires, since you can get it with a 20% discount.

You mean a different video card ? Not the best time to get one. If I were you, I would keep the video card and wait for better prices and possibly another generation ( RTX 4000s, AMD 7000s, etc. ), and get a different headset, like the Oculus Quest 2, which has a better resolution than the Rift S you sold, although not as high as the Reverb G2, which will likely be too much for your video card.

Don't want to spoil your expectations but, with the Reverb G2, even an RTX 3090 ( I have both... ) is not able to run in Ultra, but mostly a combination of Mid/High settings. It depends a lot on the location, though.

It's a known bug in P3D V5: when two applications use the standard Simconnect menu, it's possible one or the other might show the wrong menu. There's nothing any of the involved app can do to fix this, we assume (hope) this bug will be fixed in the next update from LM.

No. as I already said in my previous post, the new e-commerce platform DOES support Windows 7 so no, that is not the problem. The problem is likely something else you need to upgrade, that is required ONLY because we simply had to recompile the software with updated system libraries, which is not something that usually cause problems to users using an OS which still can't receive those updates. Not "all add-on" but, maybe, the ones you have. Do have something from PMDG, for example ? Checking their forum, it seems it's not possible to reactivate FS9 products, not even in Windows 10: https://forum.pmdg.com/forum/main-forum/pmdg-legacy-products/49518-md-11-gone-and-now-out-the-money-too https://forum.pmdg.com/forum/main-forum/pmdg-legacy-products/48420-deadline As I've said already, those sceneries required the Addon Manager for way more things that "just" licensing. For example, the Addon Manager handled Docking systems with airplane recognition, which also worked for AI planes too, and the scenery objects themselves were custom made to expect that so, more than removing the e-commerce ( which is not the problem ), we would have to remove these instead, which is basically impossible today, considering the FS9 SDK cannot even be installed anymore ( it required Gmax ). We would also have to remove the freely available download and write a completely web interface to let download the scenery only to licensed users, because our whole distribution system was based on the assumption the scenery had a Trial ( again, handled by the Addon Manager ), so we never had to "protect" the download itself. So no, the solution is very simple: update to Windows 10. Which you will do anyway, sooner or later.

Yet. You can't be sure this will last forever. We haven't taken any action to make the software incompatible with that OS, it's a result of that OS being considered legacy since 2015, and completely out of support since 2020. In fact, it's NOT e-commerce platform we chose that is not compatible with Windows 7. Checking their website it shows Windows 7 IS SUPPORTED! https://soraco.co/quick-license-manager/quick-license-manager-features/ So the real issue it's likely something else, like the OS libraries that gets updated regularly on a *supported* OS, like the .NET runtimes, the VC++ runtimes, etc. These are more likely the real cause of the issues in Windows 7 not our "action" to choose a certain e-commerce platform but, instead, your action to decide to stay with an unsupported OS, which makes more difficult to get hold of all these normal OS updates.

The problem is, the work we had to do ( recompile the software with updated tools ) to let users to continue to use their products in the currently supported OS is precisely the thing that is preventing it to continue to work in the old OS and, again, the REAL cause of this is because your OS is now completely out of support from Microsoft, which has a cascading effect over the various components we need to create the software. This, and the additional issue caused by Esellerate that closed. If this never happened, you might have got away with simply not updating the software but, since Esellerate closed, we didn't had any choice other than changing system, which required an updated software, which ( like almost every software built today ) won't work on a completely unsupported OS. But even if Esellerate was still open, it's possible they would have to update their software anyway, likely to support new security standards ( which is requirement imposed by payment providers ) that could require newer technologies that would only work on more recent OS. It already happened once, they used to support XP, but at a certain point it was dropped, so all XP users had to choose between moving away from XP or not being able to activate their products. That's only because Microsoft is in complete control of the OS, the product itself, and the activation servers. When there are multiple 3rd parties involved, this is not so easy. And this is normal for digital products with some kind of activation system, but that doesn't mean physical media is "better", because it isn't. If your software is based on physical media gets damaged, you will lose it and you will have to buy it again ( assuming you can find it, if it's out of print ), while with a digital software linked to an activation system, you don't have that risk, but on the other hand you must be sure you'll be able to access the activation server, which might require an updated OS, like any other server/website that you can't access anymore or you won't be able to access anymore in the future with Windows 7 once browser support will fade away.

That's not what's really happening here. Our products, even the oldest ones, have not stopped to work because "the next OS came". We HAVE worked to keep the software updated to support that new OS which came along so no, the release of a new OS is not the problem, the problems starts to happen if you decided to stay to use old OS for years after it went officially unsupported. Windows 7 normal support ended in January 2015, and the Extended support ended in January 2020. Not updating your OS after it went entirely unsupported is/will cause you far more problems that just not being able to use old FSDT products, your system is at high risk of being targeted by malware or hackers ( the same happened after XP went unsupported ), browser support will fade out, security certificates will expire and nobody will renew them for Windows 7, web sites will start to fail because they might require new browser support. You never owned the scenery in the first place. Software and every other copyrighted work never belongs to you, it's only licensed. This includes your Windows 7, that OS you thought was "yours" ( it never was, it was licensed to you by Microsoft ), which is the thing that is causing you problems, because Microsoft gave it a lifespan of exactly 10 years and THIS is the real cause of your issue. So yes, you basically "rented" Windows 7 for 10 years. If Microsoft never stopped supporting it, it would have kept backward compatibility with the various system libraries (.NET/VC++, etc, ) we had to use to keep it running on the newer OS, so the updated Addon Manager would probably still run in Windows 7. Using an unsupported OS has far more complex repercussions than just not getting the latest security fixes.

I'm sorry, but there's no way to make the scenery working without the Addon Manager, they used it for other features like docking systems, seasonal variations, and many others. not just for activation, and removing those features is not only unfeasible, because all these sceneries were made more than 10 years ago ( the FS9 SDK required Gmax, which is also not available anymore ), but it's not right for users that use a supported OS and, same as you, can rightfully say they bought the scenery with the features allowed by the Addon Manager.

The old versions required the Addon Manager to activate the scenery on Esellerate, but Esellerate closed in 2019 so, in order to let user to continue to use their products bought, we had to update to a different system (Soraco QLM), and integrated it with the Addon Manager, and re-uploaded all orders and activation keys there. This being an updated software, requires currently supported OS and libraries to be used. So, if you used the old version of the software which was compatible with Windows 7, you wouldn't be able to activate the scenery anymore, since there's no activation server running anymore, since Esellerate shut down all its servers in September 2019. But the new version of the software doesn't work with Windows 7. We haven't done anything specific to prevent it from working but, simply recompiling a software using the latest VC++ compiler, latest libraries, which are required to ensure the product will work on CURRENT OS, can break compatibility with outdated OS, and there's not much we can do about it.

I don't know what you did but, again, the thing is very simple: the Stand-Alone Addon Manager must be installed LAST. If still doesn't work, then I'm afraid the problem might be Windows 7, as I've said in my first reply.

Surely not. I was just referring to reinstalling anything from FSDT.

Whenever you install anything for FS9, you must always install the latest stand-alone Addon Manager for FS9 as the last thing you do, because it's the latest version, which supports the new activation system, it's only included in the Stand-Alone Addon manager for FS9: http://fsdreamteam.com/sa-addon-manager However, we cannot guarantee it will work under Windows 7, which went completely out of support in January 2020

The "quality" of FSX doesn't have anything to with the job cuts at Microsoft, which were of course caused entirely by the 2008 financial crisis, where shareholders demanded to cut some fat from Microsoft. ACES were less than 200 people out of 5000 which were laid off in January 2009. So no, nothing to do with just FSX, it was caused by the generic slowing down of PC sales because of the crisis, other studios in additions to ACES were closed, like Ensemble studios, who made Age of Empires ( a very successfull game that sold about 25 milions copes in total ) and Halo Wars.

Yes, it was one of the most successful releases ever, leading to an explosion of the 3rd party add-on market as never before, EVEN IN THAT STATE, with FS9-ers convinced developers that "jumped on FSX bandwagon", would shortly gone bankrupt because of their "wrong" decision drop FS9. Right. MSFS is way better now than FSX ever was during its first year. That was the point of my post. The "terrible" performances of FSX didn't had anything to do with the ACES demise. FSX in 2008 was doing well, post-Acceleration pack. The one and only reason for the ACES closure was the 2008 financial crisis, when MS shareholders demanding jobs being cut, so the whole PC gaming division was dismissed. Microsoft was in an entirely different place than it is now, it was Steve Ballmer's Microsoft, the same guy who laughed at the 2007 iPhone keynote, saying "it will fail, nobody will buy a 500$ phone"...