FS9 Crashing - Need Advice

[allardjd 1,853]

Gentlemen,

 

I seek help. My tried and trusty FS9 has been exhibiting stuttering scenery for the last couple of weeks, mainly in the side window views (I don't use VC) and in the front view when turning on the ground, where the external view must pan quickly to keep up with the turning aircraft. I've also had three FS crashes lately, which is very unusual for my installation. Two of those required re-flying flights in AirHauler - this has become serious when it messes with my AirHauler.

 

No other applications seem to be affected though as often as not the new IE 8 does seem a little tender and locks up when shutting it down as often as not. That aside, FS9 seems to be the only thing affected.

 

OS is XP Pro, FS is upgraded to 9.1.

 

Am running FS Genesis terrain enhancement (world wide) and Flight1's Ultimate Terrain, both North America and Europe. All of that has been in place for some time and the problems only started recently, so those are not high on my list of suspects.

 

Full scan with McAfee reveals nothing bad lurking in the dark corners.

 

Defrag was not indicated but I did it anyway and it had no effect.

 

I have tons of free disk space and FS and all sub-apps are installed in the normal, default locations - nothing cute or fancy is going on. This is not a Wide FS installation.

 

I tried not using Radar Contact for a couple of the flights and that didn't help; I had crashes anyway.

 

I'm going to give the PC a good cleaning tonight, but it doesn't seem overly warm so I don't expect that to be the silver bullet.

 

I recall talk of bad memory sticks causing issues and would like to check that. Can I simply remove them one at a time or do they have to be done in pairs or is it PC specific?

 

I'll step though the likely causes systematically and if necessary will resort to a full re-install of FS9 and all the associated apps, but that would likely be a last resort. I have a few pieces of rather dated downloaded payware, FS Navigator in particular, in which I have a low confidence of being able to re-install with the keys, unlock codes, etc, that I currently have. Losing that would be a gut-wrencher.

 

Anyway, advice would be appreciated. Is there a reliable memory tester or is removing/swapping the sticks the only method that can be trusted?

 

Sorry for the brain dump, but I'm trying to anticipate the questions you might have for me before you have to ask them.

 

John

[mutley 4,487]

Hi John,

Bad news, where to start?

My first port of call would be the windows restore history to see what possibly has been installed recently into FS9 that may be the culprit?

If no installations or updates have taken place try updating your graphics card drivers.

The standard tool for testing memory would be memtest

[ddavid 149]

I'm a no guru - sorry! But do the crashes only happen in AH? I say this because my FSX system was more prone to crash when flying a job - know what I mean? :nea:

Cheers - Dai.

[Helaro 0]

You could go into the Event Viewer after FS crashes, and see if there are any hints there, a long shot, but maybe

But as Mutley says, anything newly installed stuff that might be acting up, or outdated drivers.

Best of luck.

[allardjd 1,853]

I may have gotten lucky. I gave it a much-needed cleaning last night and in the process, discovered an easily removable plastic duct that channels air from the face-plate into a radiatior. The face of the radiator, which is completely inacessible unless the duct is removed was solidly blocked with dust. I cleaned that and made a 200 NM AH flight and all seemed OK. It's too early to claim victory, but the indications are positive. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you...

 

I did a little reading last night after the flight and found that the CPU cooler I saw is a "Heat Pipe" system, which I not only did not know was in my PC, I was not even aware such a device existed. Anyway, that's what was there and the air channels it requires to condense the cooling medium were pretty much completely blocked, so that may have been it.

 

It remains to be seen if this was the silver bullet or not.

 

Thanks for the suggestions - it may be that I'll need them yet, but I hope not.

 

@ Dai - I don't know. I rarely ever fly outside AH any more.

 

John

[mutley 4,487]

Great news and fingers crossed John, I hope UM doesn't see this post otherwise he will give us all a lecture about regular housekeeping!

Cheers

[rob16584 42]

Hi John,

When I was having my problems a while back with the pc shutting down due to overheating, when I opened the case there was a funnel which channelled the aire towards the gfx card etc... and it too was clogged up with dust. I cleaned it up and opted not to use the funnel and have not had the problem since!

[allardjd 1,853]

Thanks, Rob. Funnel is a good description of the plastic duct I had to remove to discover the face of the radiator. It is made to be easily removed and I put it back. It's all very obvious now, but for some reason I never tumbled to the fact that it could/should be removed for cleaning.

 

Now that I know what's what in there I will not have any repeats of this. That was a 2 year accumulation of dirt. Even though I do clean the machine fairly often (though maybe not often enough, with two cats in the house), this particular area had never been cleaned. I'm a little smarter now.

 

John

[allardjd 1,853]

Chapter Two - Performance much improved since cleaning, but am still having crashes, just less frequently.

 

I've been to the Memtest site and looked at the on-line info - it may as well be in Ancient Greek. What the heck are they talking about? Bootable floppies? They're kidding, right? This PC doesn't even have a floppy, though we do have an external, USB connected 3.5" gathering dust somewhere in case it is ever needed.

 

There must be about eighteen versions for download and nothing that indicates to me what version I need or what to do. Maybe this is why you call this sub-forum HARDware. It almost looks like it would be easier to buy new memory and just swap it out.

 

HELP :smile:

 

John

[Helaro 0]

Well, even vista still keeps asking for you to insert the floppy

If finding the right version is the problem, I would say either the bootable disk one, or the memstick one.. as far as i remember, it is just burn and boot, nothing more complicated.

And have to tried something like http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php] HWmonitor to check if the high temps are gone?

[MartinW 0]

John, you've probably fixed the issue by now but...

you can test your memory by pulling out one stick [if you have two] test, and then pop that one in and pull out the other, then test

It will identify any dodgy sticks. Solved a memory issue I had when I built my simming PC.

Must apologise for not visiting recently, the fist thing I would have recommended was checking for dust.

When the CPU overheats, it throttles back, resulting in lower performance and then either locking up or crashing.

I too would recommend the event viewer.

Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer, and double click 'application' are there any error reports for when this occurred.

Interesting that cleaning has helped to a degree. have you checked your CPU temperature, graphics card temperature and motherboard temperatures and compared them to the manufacturers recommendations?

Are there any fan failures? Do you have a northbridge fan, or is it just cooled passively by the heat pipe system? Has the northbridge fan [small fan] if you have one failed. Is your graphics card fan and heat sink blocked with dust? Are all of your case fans working?

Could well be software but worth eliminating hardware.