A Canadian Flyer

Amazon currently has the SteelBook edition available at over 50% off! It was a great deal that I couldn't resist passing along as I have been waiting for any discount. As a bit of background, I live in Canada, but I am fortunate to have a brother who resides in Seattle. He was kind enough to order the SteelBook edition for me, and once the package arrived, he emailed me the code. This edition includes both Xbox and PC codes, so you get the best of both worlds. I just thought I would share this great offer with you all, in case anyone else is waiting to jump into 2024. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DH5FX3ST?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1

I purchased a Logitech F710 and funny enough it came with no drivers but some profiler software, etc. I was shocked to find this as I couldn't use it, again, in LCC or calibrate from Windows. A little search led me to some Xbox 360 drivers for Windows 7, 64 bit, and voila, all is good now (the F710 looks like a cross between a XBox controller and a PS3 controller). My advice would be to search for a XBox 360 windows drivers and see if that does that trick for you. Andreas

Just an update on my end...I've purchased a wireless game controller and found a suitable windows driver that allows it to function perfectly in Windows and LCC. Thankfully I can now uninstall the software I was running to make the PS3 controller work for me. BTW, I thought you guys were on holiday...how come you spend so much time responding to user requests for help during this time ? Andreas

I had the same problem on my systems (Windows 7 64 bit); upon plugging the PS3 controller in a driver was loaded. The windows game controller control panel shows the PS3 controller and the buttons are detected but no axis movements are. The only solution I found was to install the following PS3 driver: http://www.motioninjoy.com/download. It's far from ideal as I need to run the program each time I want to use the controller and "enable" the driver in order for the axis to work. That being said it works great with Opus/FSX and this could be one of my favorite additions to this tremendous piece of software! I'd love to hear if there is an alternative to getting this to work without motion joy. Otherwise I may just buy a generic USB game controller designed for windows. Andreas

Thanks so much! Seems so easy once someone shows you the location Never thought the menu would contain options not available in the option tree list. Thanks again!

As I am having the same issue you described in your initial post, and perhaps for the benefit of anyone else in the future that might have this issue, do you mind letting us know what setting you changed with nVidia Surround to make this work? I've searched and tried many combinations with no success :( Thanks, Andreas

If only they had put the X-Plane version of Air Hauler on sale :( I have the FSX version but find I'm spending more and more time in X-Plane! Andreas

I've researched this issue (thru these forums, internet search, etc) to death and am at my wit's end trying to resolve this...I've recently purchased VoxATC and am waiting for it to arrive in the mail (decided on the box version as I understand you receive additional voice packs) so thought I should make sure my PC is ready on the voice recognition front. I have used Windows 7 speech recognition before as my secondary computer (laptop) contains many FSX utilities as well as the Feelthere Tower simulation which I use with Windows 7 speech.. On my main FSX PC I use a headset microphone and am able to configure the microphone and "train" the speech engine using my voice. The problem lies when I try to "Start Speech Recognition", i.e. launch the speech recognition panel. The %windir%\Speech\Common\sapisvr.exe program is run (can see it in task manager) but then closes approx 10 seconds later. No events are logged in the event and no error is displayed. Some of the things I've tried to resolve this issue include: 1. Updated the audio driver 2. Setting locale to something other than United States, reboot, setting back to United States, reboot 3. Adding a call to cftmon.exe at windows startup (a fix that worked from some) 4. Did a system restore to a checkpoint a few months prior. As I've never tried speech until now I can't be certain as to when it "broke" so this is a bit of a crap shoot that didn't work. 5. Removed my Sound Blaster X-fi sound card and reverted to onboard audio 6. Tried an inline windows update that failed to complete as it was frozen at 42% for 6 hours, this is an issue people have when trying to update/fix their windows installation. 7. Installed Office 2010 to see if any of the speech "hooks" would magically fix the problem. 8. Ensured the OS is fully patched with "windows update" As speech is baked into the OS I have yet to find a downloadable program that will allow me to re-install speech and re-installing the entire OS to fix this issue would be a 2-3 day affair I'm not eager to perform. Any help/tips/suggestions would very much be appreciated!!! Andreas _______________________________________ ASUS P5Q Pro Turbo * E8600 3.33 o/c 4.0 ghz * EVGA GTX 275 * OCZ Reaper DDR2 4GB * Corsair 750W ATX * Lian-LI Case * Windows 7 64bit

Thanks for the feedback everyone. With Word Not Allowed's excellent review it confirmed my hunch that this was the company to go with for a quality yoke. I've read it before and I couldn't agree more; we can spend so much on this hobby yet the flight controls we use are often overlooked in our upgrades.Thanks again, Andreas.

I'm close to biting the bullet and replacing my aging Saitek yoke with a more durable yoke by Precision Flight Controls (www.flypfc.com). As has happened too often to count I've purchased an expensive add-on only to find it go on sale a few days or weeks after.Hence my question, does anyone know if Precision Flight Controls yokes/etc ever go on sale?Thanks,Andreas

I hope my message didn't come across condescending to you, definitely not my intent. I don't think I'm in your league in terms of hard drive cleanups given the work you've done for the community (which I've benefited from many times over) and the cleanups you must certainly have to do.The problem I've had in the past with image backups is that they work wonders when you want to do a reinstall on the same hardware. However, I've never had luck trying to use that image on a brand computer with completely different parts (different video card, network card, etc). For example, in a year when I build another net new flight computer would that image no longer be useless as the hardware is completely different?In my work as a developer we use image backups all the time as our envrionments are constantly corrupted with re-installations, etc., and since we are using that image on the same hardware life is wonderful indeed :)Andreas

I have all my software backed up in triplicate :-) However, after a computer crash or rebuild when trying to install the software if those companies are "gone" the online activation would be gone with it.I speak from experience as this just happened with some non-flight sim software I purchased last year. Rebuild of my computer required re-activation but the company no longer exists so I no longer have access to my purchased software :'(

My thought exactly, not to mention if orbx/theflightsimstore.com/flight1 etc close up shop, all our online activated software will be useless!

As I have the same issue I have to think the common factor is our use of TripleHead2Go. Has anyone successfully run XPlane 10 with a TripleHead2Go?Andreas

I can confirm that my problems are resolved when I have the throttle set to 0, if I have it set to anything else the PMDG dll will crash.

Perhaps not the most useful information to everyone but in my circumstance I can recreate this issue by the following: 1. While in virtual cockpit select the popup menu with the right mouse menu, choosing an external view. 9 times out of 10 this isn't a problem but 1 out of 10 times, on average, FSX will crash to the desktop (only happens with this aircraft).2. Try to load the PMDG 737 and the perpetual crash ensues.3. Delete the PMDG dll entries in the trusted section, all is good once again. Andreas

Did you try deleting your fsx.cfg file and have it recreated next time FSX runs? If you still get a crash at least you can rule out a bloated or corrupted fsx.cfg file.

I ran across this same issue and tried various things to debug and finally overcame the issue by deleting the pmdg dll entries from the Trusted section in the fsx.config letting FSX prompt to re-add them next launch of FSX. Perhaps this 'trick' will fix your issue as well.Andreas

Thanks for the tip, I generally look for the download versions but $36 is a good price and the shipping cost to Canada isn't too bad.Thanks again!Andreas

After buying and spending many hours with the PMDG 747 in FSX (using my flight sim rig), I find I spend more time flying on my secondary computer (a laptop) running FS9. Given that the 747 is a separate product for each flight sim version I'm on the hunt for a good price on the FS9 version of the PMDG 747. The cheapest I've found so far is from PMDG directly, at $55. To be honest this isn't a great deal considering I can get the FSX version for $30 at my local drug store computer department. Has anyone seen a good deal on this product as of late?

Hey Tom, if you wouldn't mind I'd like to know when you get your activation email as at this point I've been waiting for a little over 32 hours. I followed Al's advice and PM'd Ed but haven't heard anything from him either.Maybe they sent most of their staff home for the week as they had to work the weekend trying to patch the immediate problems people had trying get the activiation menu to show up :( .Andreas

Unfortunately that isn't the case as I bought directly from Ariane and after resolving the missing activation menu I now wait for the activation "response" from Ariane. Presently at 13 hours and counting. To their defense I believe they had staff working long hours to deal with the large amount of activations that were coming in shortly after launch of the new product. As an IT professional I'm shocked that a company would require a manual process to authenticate a user and authorize the products use (why else would it take hours/days for a response); perhaps this is why their prices are so much higher than the competitors :( .I agree that their piracy protection is flawed and does little but to inconvenience their "true" customers. I've seen cracked versions for many of their products and each time I see it I simply shake my head. The only way we can continue to enjoy these wonderful add-on products is by supporting those teams that spend the countless hours working on them. As mentioned in a previous post this piracy demonstrates that Ariane's protection system simply doesn't work.

I completely understand/agree. I am anxiously awaiting the PMDG 737 as well (not to mention the 777 which I'm even more eager about) but love flying the latest Boeing offerrings so had to give the Ariane another shot.

You both win the dollar, Ariane is the company. It wasn't (and still isn't) my intent to give a company a bad name but was to simply confirm "I wasn't off my rocker" in having issue with their response. I'm glad to get the program to work but will never, ever, spend another dollar with the company. It's one thing to refuse a refund (which I would have gladly taken up with my credit card company if I could never actually use the program because of their programming faults/shortcomings) but quite another to threaten your customers with the potential of a smear campaign with resellers not allowing you to buy products from them. Quite unethical if you ask me.

I'm glad I was able to resolve the problem (thanks again Al) which surely was an issue with their add-on as a reset of a flight should not be required to activate a menu. Will definitely never spend another $ on this company given their position. I didn't get details on what affiliates they were referring to as I wasn't pushing that until a few days/weeks passed without resolution. I understood the interrogation they wanted to do would be a system scan tracking all software, drivers, versions, etc on the machine. Quite extensive and would not have allowed that to happen as whow knows what "bug" they may have in the scan that could run amock on my system (as it was a custom written app).