People contact me all the time with issues and Flight Simulator 9. People often complain of crashing to desktops, lockups and the like.
Here is an interesting fact. About 9 out of 10 contacts regarding these type of issues are related to add-ons from third party developers, not FS itself. Now, before you all start sending me “Nick, you Microsoft lover” emails…. yes… it is true, FS does indeed have bugs that cause CTD’s and lockups and they are working hard to fix them. You will soon see that with the update that was recently announced.
Before all you developers start sending me hate mail 😉 I do not blame you guys either… a lot of you out there are really pushing the limitations of the program and are trying things that MS did not intend. I applaud you for this. IFSD, the group I develop add-ons for, also have a bug in our scenery that causes a CTD.
Anyway, there is a point to this, that I recommend to all your FS’ers out there…
After installing Flight Simulator, do one simple task, that will one day come back to save you…. make a copy of the Flight Simulator install folder and call it something like “Flight Simulator 9 – base install”. Then, if you have the disk space, once every 3 or 4 months, make another copy of your working Flight Simulator folder.
Only today did this save me one hell of a lot of work. A quick rename of my backup and I was up and running again.
I know of people that have 40+ GB installs of FS, and of course this method is not really viable for them. They only have one option…. a backup device 🙂
Cheers,
Nick.