Computer Question(s)

[David Naughton 938770]

Good day Everyone,

 

I have acouple of questions about the operation of a computer. Here's the deal:

 

I have a computer. The hard drive of C: is 38.28GB in size.I also use a Nvidia 7600 GS video card and a sound blaster audio card. On it I have FS9 and acouple of simracing programs. All is well and I have no performance complaints, good FPS.

I bought and installed FSX, when all was said and done, I only had 4% disc space left. not good.Uninstalled it and did a defrag.

 

So, I took a 112GB hard drive from my older and no longer running computer, moved the tiny tab in the back of it to make it a slave drive.Plugged it in restatred Windows XP it reconized it and accepted it and I now have 2 internal hard drives.There are some old folders on it, no big deal.It is now my F: drive.With lots of space.

 

I get the brainstorm to install FSX on F: drive. It wants to install on C:, but I re-route it to F;, and into the old "program folder", it goes smoothly and even puts a shortcut to my desktop, FSX runs, but the FPS is only around 10-12. I go to the F:/ program folder and see that a Microsoft "games folder" was not created, nor was a FSX folder created, all the files are everywhere.

 

Now for the questions.Why didnt the folders get created and installed in a normal manner? Is there something I should have done (like formatting) the hard drive?

Is it possible to have windows XP operating on each drive? Was I wrong in [Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming that this whole idea would work?

 

How would a computer saavy person go about getting this scheme to work?

 

Thanks in advance, be well.

[Agaguk Jarin]

That's weird... I installed 2 hard drives and didn't get that problem... But for the performance hit, it's normal... it's fsx...

[Sven Groot 1044304]

My only guess is that you might've made a typo specifying the folder to install FSX in. I have FSX installed on my E: partition, it definitely shouldn't be a problem.

 

As for the performance, make sure you have FSX SP1 and SP2 installed, they help a lot. Then fiddle with the sliders until you get an acceptable performance level for your PC.

 

Reformatting the drive (make sure you use NTFS) might not be a bad idea, it might have some permissions set that belong to the old PC. That still shouldn't cause the problem you're seeing, though.

[Joseph Jaster 932528]

I guess its time to crawl out of my hole and actually post again...

 

David;

 

I think I know where you went wrong. I too have FS9 and FSX installed on a secondary harddrive (I'm currently running 3)

 

It sounds like you installed FSX into the Program Files folder itself and not a subfolder:

F:/Program Files instead of F:/Program Files/FSX or another subfolder.

 

You can fix this by uninstalling FSX, then deleting any leftover files or folders in Program Files, then re-installing into F:/Program Files/FSX (or whatever subfolder you prefer) The best way to do this is instead of typing in the destination folder during installation, simply change the drive letter, i.e C:/... to F:/... without touching the rest of the path. This way hasn't failed me yet, though I tend to install programs into folders other than the default.

 

For your second question, yes, XP can handle many harddrives, really its only limited by how many your motherboard can handle. If I didn't have my single optical drive (DVD/CD/BD) i could have 8 hard drives.

 

As Sven has suggested, install SP1 and SP2 for FSX as these will greatly improve performance, especially if you have a dual or quad core processor. And a re-format in NTFS, althogh it will take awhile, will wipe teh harddrive clean so make sure you get anything off of it that you want to save first, i made that mistake once before... the dialog afterwards wasn't too pretty

[David Naughton 938770]

Thank you kindly gentlemen. I am reformatting as we speak and will try again.

 

I gotta say, the visuals in FSX are pretty impressive. A good friend that I frequently fly with, who just got into the sim,started out with FSX and as we fly along ,would tell me what he's seeing on the ground and I was getting kinda jealous.

 

But, I have acouple hundred bucks in add-ons for FS9, and really didnt wanna walk away from it, I still use the add-ons and enjoy them.

 

The brief look that I got in FSX, well, lets say, FS9 will probably be used less and less.

 

Simming can be an expensive hobby.

 

Thanks again,