Michael Lockwood Posted March 29, 2005 at 02:56 PM Posted March 29, 2005 at 02:56 PM I have to be the greatest husband, after 2 months of badgering, I finally convinced my wife to let me buy FS2k4 Yeah, I buy it at 7AM this morning, get home, nervously put the CD into the Drive, install and BAM! I get a blue screen saying an important system process has been edited or ended. Ok, I'm kinda computer literate so this can't be to bad, I reboot, and try it again, BAM! Blue Screen again. Ok, I worked 3 years for AOL tech, I can handle this, I try to reboot in safe mode and install from there. Anybody wanna guess what happened? If you said blue screen, you were right. I've already ended TSR's and anything else I had running. System Specs 1.7G P4 512 DDR2 3200 40G hard drive GeForce 420 w/64M ram DirectX 9.0c It's not the BEST system, but it's well within the System Requirements. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Michael J. Lockwood You May Be A Redneck Pilot if your stall warning plays "Dixie." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart Vedin Posted March 29, 2005 at 11:28 PM Posted March 29, 2005 at 11:28 PM > an important system process has been edited or ended. I will [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ume you have XP. My guess. Either something in XP has been destroyed. Possible to reinstall XP (?) Or some needed service has been turned off in XP. > install and BAM! I don't know if you mean BAM during install or on first start FS running. In general I say Blue screen often come from videocard (3D mode), driver need to be updated. http://www.nvidia.com / Lennart Vedin / Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Lockwood Posted March 30, 2005 at 01:59 PM Author Posted March 30, 2005 at 01:59 PM Aye, Sorry, I was more than fustrated yesterday. I am running XP I worked at this constant from 7AM to 6PM, 11 hours and I think I may have a reason if not a solution. I found an obscure article concerning atapi.sys, which is the main hard disk drive driver, if I remember correctly. apparently, the SP2 version of atapi.sys is buggy and slows down the communication between windows programs and hard drives. The article refered to the event viewer and a message "the device didn't respond within the timeout period" So from what I can figure out is the FS2004 installer has a certain time frame that it wasn't to send and recieve the install info and the buggy atapi.sys is slowing things down, or gets overwhelmed and just shuts down. This is all during instalation, I haven't gotten to play the game yet. sigh, any advice on this? Michael J. Lockwood You May Be A Redneck Pilot if your stall warning plays "Dixie." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neal Glassett 843825 Posted March 30, 2005 at 08:47 PM Posted March 30, 2005 at 08:47 PM How far back is your last restore point? Neal Neal Gl[Mod - Happy Thoughts]ett UNI725 www.uniair.org Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Lockwood Posted March 31, 2005 at 02:20 PM Author Posted March 31, 2005 at 02:20 PM fairly recent, I'll try a system restore. Thanks You May Be A Redneck Pilot if your stall warning plays "Dixie." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc Sykes 852946 Posted March 31, 2005 at 04:57 PM Posted March 31, 2005 at 04:57 PM Have you played around with disabling services in XP at all (gone to the Black Viper site etc.)? There is a service called Windows Installer that, if disabled, will cause problems if you try to (surprise!) install stuff. Other services could cause similar problems. This is why it's best to have at least one hardware profile in which you haven't disabled any services, then use this profile when you're adding/removing software or doing other system maintenance. Given the error message you got, this would seem to make sense -- services run as processes. If you go into Control Panel -> Administrative Options -> Event Viewer, and check the error logs, does it provide any clues as to which process it might have been? Hope this helps. Marc Sykes Toronto ACC Trainee Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Lockwood Posted April 1, 2005 at 02:30 PM Author Posted April 1, 2005 at 02:30 PM I looked at the event viewer and from what I can deduce it's atapi causing the problems, says a device has failed to respond within the timeout period. So now I'm troubleshooting that. System restore didn't fixit. I'm going to try to defrag the hell out of this thing, see if that helps any. If I can find my windows OEM, i'm going to run sfc /scannow of course any ideas are welcome You May Be A Redneck Pilot if your stall warning plays "Dixie." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kelly Scandale 924492 Posted April 4, 2005 at 02:57 AM Posted April 4, 2005 at 02:57 AM Hi Michael, There is nothing specific on the MS webiste about the error you 're experiencing - here's a general troubleshooting page for MS Game Setup: http://support.microsoft.com/gmssetup Also you may want to try Windows Update - confirm you not only have critical updates but also the Windows updates - like direct X . Try this - at the run prompt, type DXDIAG and hit enter - see if there are any issues reported and that your version is at least 9.0B. Have you made any changes to the services.msc plug in ? - this may be the culprit or XP may be brain-damaged - a sys restore may resolve this as already mentioned. hope this helps kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Lockwood Posted April 4, 2005 at 06:38 PM Author Posted April 4, 2005 at 06:38 PM I GOT IT!!!!! thanks for all the help, it took a complete wipe and reinstall to get it in, but its in, thank god. I think my hard drive was starting to go on me, it wouldn't take a reinstall, so I had to reinstall on an older Hard drive with about half the space... Oh well, now I get to figure out why I have a very sad frame rate. to everybody who helped, thank you very very much You May Be A Redneck Pilot if your stall warning plays "Dixie." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart Vedin Posted April 4, 2005 at 06:56 PM Posted April 4, 2005 at 06:56 PM > I had to reinstall on an older Hard drive I did use an older hard drive for FS2004 (try saving my new for other purpose), I did note it did make a bad performance specific when changing view left/right etc. and I had to go back to the new harddisk. Seams there is a lot of harddrive access even when just running FS2004. Make sure Video Fast Write (usually 8x) is enabled (bios), and has take action (Might found in Control panel -> Display -> Setting -> Advanced). Remarks due to your spec: 1G RAM (DDR), 128 M video RAM, recommended. / Lennart Vedin / Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Lockwood Posted April 4, 2005 at 07:27 PM Author Posted April 4, 2005 at 07:27 PM Thanks for the recommendation Lennart. Unfortunately, I don't think i'm going to swing another 512 this year I'll do what I can, and see where it goes from there Again, many thanks to everybody's advice Michael J. Lockwood You May Be A Redneck Pilot if your stall warning plays "Dixie." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kelly Scandale 924492 Posted April 4, 2005 at 08:02 PM Posted April 4, 2005 at 08:02 PM Hi Michael, Maybe your newer hard drive is fine and the Win XP installation was sour. If you can back up your files, you may want to try an OS reload on the newer drive. If you partition your drive and have 2 OS installations, one for FS only and then one for everything else, this should get you a few extra FPS- works great for me. Check out BlackViper.com site for which XP services to disable - giving Flight Sim more CPU horsepower and memory to work with. OR if 2 OS is not a good choice for you, you can create a hardware profile (how I used to do it) that loads limited services for running FS. I can explain more if you're interested. Even people with screaming machines (3+GHZ) cannot run this sim at full - this thing really needs alot of juice. kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Lockwood Posted April 5, 2005 at 12:47 PM Author Posted April 5, 2005 at 12:47 PM Thanks! I'll take a look. I did some tweaking, updating drivers and what now and I got a steady 10FPS which is pretty smooth. It's not the 20 I hear about from others, but i'm very pleased with what I got Thanks! Michael J. Lockwood You May Be A Redneck Pilot if your stall warning plays "Dixie." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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