alhefner

I just took a quick look at it too... seems you start with a blank slate and build the entire thing? I may be way off base on that though. Gonna have to investigate further.

Yes, installing on and SSD will help some... the SSD is simply that much faster. Now, what I did to replace my SSD was to make a system image of my original using DVD disks... it took 17 of them and a long time to make. Once that was done, I installed the SDD which was larger in capacity than the original...you never want to go smaller if using a system image backup. Once the system image was on the new SSD, I booted the system and if fire right up. HOWEVER, when I looked at the computer, it was reporting that my SSD was EXACTLY the same size as my old drive and had this huge unused partition. The fix for that was to format the unused partition and then, delete the newly formatted partition. After that, I could expand the root partition to include all the space. Now, after some little bit of work, I have ONLY programs and the OS on the SSD with data, such as photos, videos, documents, and other files subject to change on a regular basis, on the mechanical HDD. An SSD will be subject to sort of wearing out too early if it undergoes a lot of rewriting or things like defrag too often. Hope this helps you decide

Saitek throttle quadrant levers have axis swing and BUTTONS... from the detente forward is the axis where the voltage will be adjusted according to where the lever is on the internal resistor that it moves (you can SEE this happening in either FSUIPC or in the FSX clibration areas)...from the detente back, is only a button that is either on or off (You can see this happen using FSUIPC Buttons and Switches page). So, knowing that, you now have the knowledge to make proper assignments using either FSUIPC or the FSX controls settings...

That! Your system may not be allowing proper installs unless you run as the administrator...

The automated system is working quite well...at least it did for me when I reinstalled FSX a couple of weeks ago.

Looks like a very good system to me. I let my SSD hold all programs since it's faster than the mechanical hard drive which holds files that are subject to be modified more often and basic data files. You should see decent frame rates mostly due to the graphics card I think. I did some basic looking around with CPU usage while using both FSX and P3D. I've got a six core AMD FX-6350 and I found that core 0 was in use 100% while the other five cores were utilized at about 10% average. It could be that the system monitor was the only thing using the other five cores! It would be nice if the developers of P3D made use of hyperthreading...now, that would be smooooooth flying!

First of all, look to see if you have a "Extract all files" option at the top of your screen showing folder content. If you do, click that and it'll ask you where you want to put the extracted files... I always leave them in the suggested location which is usually a folder in my downloads folder. Once the files are extracted, just double click the .EXE file to get things going...

WOW! Tons of good stuff here. I just flew the King Air 350 turbo and it performed great! No nagging from ATC at all. I gotta try out that $20 addon airplane Gregg mentioned one of these days too! For the next 17 months or so, I'll be spending a LOT of time on the flight sims and hopefully resisting the urge to shell out to much $$$! I'm trying to save money so I can move to my 80 acres in the wilderness and be a hermit in the spring of 2016...

When the ATC came across telling me to taxi on, I just about lost it...

Last few seconds of my flight to Tahoe...

Yeah, I just took the Bonanza from KRNO to KTVL... ATC was NOT happy! I hosed the landing too since I didn't manage to bleed off altitude in time... Got a bit of video of it being processed by youtube now.

I tried using the native B-58... Flying a direct route from KRNO (Reno) to KTVL (Tahoe), Radar Contact gave instructions of fly rwy heading to 11,000 expect 14,000. I could barely reach 8,000 before ATC was bugging me to get to my assigned altitude of 14,000. Rate of climb was about 500 feet per minute without the air speed falling into stall condition. I may have to spend the big bucks and get the addon aircraft you guys are suggesting. Now, if native P3D had controllers in my destination tower, or either radar Contact or Pro-ATC/X supported VFR flights, I could just go VFR the whole way and like it better. :huh:

I have both Pro ATC/X and Radar Contact and they work very well for IFR flights. They even put controllers in normally uncontrolled airports BUT, unless a person wants to fly by IFR rules on a VFR flight, we are left without controllers it seems at several airports that are controlled since P3D didn't provide them. Right now, I'm trying to investigate how P3D implements ATC and it looks like a very involved task. I had hoped that there was something like .cfg files for each airport but, that does not seem to be the case. I guess I'm hoping that one of the more experienced users can come with a method they have used, sort of like copying aircraft from FSX to P3D, for this. Otherwise it's into the SDK and learning yet another API and perhaps even a new programming language variation...

I "fly" in mountainous country out of the Reno, NV area airports. Sometimes, in order to follow ATC directions, I need a good steep rate of climb. The native propeller aircraft of P3D just can't quite get there a lot of the time. I can, of course, use the Lear 45 but, for short hops, like Reno to South Lake Tahoe, it's a bit of a beast and forget sight seeing on the way! So, if anyone knows of a good addon aircraft, or one of the ones from FSX that I can copy over, that is pretty powerful, please chime in!

Well, I'm trying out the trial versions of both FS Global Real Weather and Active Sky Next. Both play well with P3D but, FSGRW does not portray the sky as closely to what's really happening as ASN does. I also tried them out in FSX and found that ASN seems to cause FSX to freeze for a few seconds every now and then but FSGRW doesn't but that could be because with the evaluation version, you're not getting real time updates in FSGRW. Both do a pretty good job of inserting the real weather into P3D itself and both Radar Contact and Pro ATC/X pick it up from the program so, they are pretty well equal in my view in that regard. I'll give it another day of playing around before making a decision on which to buy. Both are pretty darned good at what they do though.

Only speaking from my personal experience with Microsoft operating systems since the time of Windows 3.1 way back in the mid 1990's. Any software developer is being prudent to delay recommending ANY new operating system from Microsoft for at least a year after full release. Yes, they should develop for that OS but, before putting it into their recommended OS's for proper operation of their software, they need to wait for the tens of thousands of bug reports and security flaws to be dealt with by Microsoft and the OS platform to become stable.

So,the weather from a 'weather engine' is something the simulator will actually make use of instead of just being something to determine whether or not to draw clouds in the sky. Good to know! Next week, I'll have more time to play around with things and will check out those free trials....

Check and make sure that you don't have background programs running that are taking up too much of your CPU resources. Some things, such as ANY Norton or McAfee system security programs, will hog your CPU and your hard drive time. I'm not suggesting you leave your system unprotected at all, just letting you know that some programs that run in the background can cause issues.

I'm still learning here folks so, I may not be very accurate with what I'm trying to ask. Right now, I have P3D v2, FSUIPC (full version), Pro ATC/X (m0st recent release), and Radar Contact 4. With Pro ATC/X, it can download current weather by accessing the net and seems to utilize that data very well in determining runway selections. Radar Contact doesn't seem to have the same capability and relies on the user having a method outside of it to obtain weather info... I may have missed something in the user manual though. P3D all by itself has no facility to obtain real world weather but only uses what you select in the options for thge 'type' of weather you would like to be flying in. The addon weather engines seem more dedicated to the 'depiction' of weather (the look of clouds and rain and such) quite a bit but, do these weather engines actually provide weather data to P3D to use or to the ATC addons (Pro ATC, radar Contact) to use during the session? The more I use P3D, the more questions I seem to have!

Your CPU, ram, and GPU look very adequate for the sim. You should be able to obtain alot better frame rate with those IF the hard drive is fast enough... P3D and FSX are both highly dependent on the hard disk where they reside...constant access during the entire session. With my system, very 'moderate' settings on scenery, AI traffic, etc., I get frame rates ranging from the 30's to the 50's. My system: AMD FX-6350 6 core 3.9GHZ 8GB ram MSI GeForce GTX 760 Video Card - 2GB GDDR5 500GB SSD drive for programs and OS 1TB hard drive for data storage I think that if I didn't have the SSD, I would be lucky to get frame rates of 20...

I found it.... operator error as I suspected.

I have seen others complain of something like this but haven't seen a fix for it... probably it's 'operator error' but I have the problem and need help. I find that the manual for Pro ATC/X seems to be very good at setting up options and adding aircraft, generating flight plans, and all of that but one I select a flight plan and click "Fly now", all I ever get is the welcome message and not a thing after... Is there a setting or perhaps a keyboard command I'm missing? I just bought this today so I have the most recent version and am using P3D v2. Thanks folks!

I'll be messing around with this for some time. It would be a shame to find that I spent my $$$ on something that does not fulfill my needs but that seems to be the name of the game with flight sims...buy it then try it...don't like it? oops! I have sent exactly one support request to the developer and was PROMPTLY.... ignored ....but he was very good about making sure I got my activation key quickly. The good news is that my issue had been addressed in other threads here and I got things running.

I have read the RC manual but didn't wee an answer. I know that RC runs along side P3D and uses FSUIPC to interface with P3D but does loading the flight plan into RC satisfy or replace the need to load it into P3D or do I need to load it separately into P3D as well? I have a couple of other questions too such as, is there a way to get "progressive taxi" or a "follow me" going in radar contact?

I've got the Spyder rig... it works to my satisfaction and I do use it but not as often as I should... usually after changing hardware or at the start of running a batch of pics through Photoshop.