Milviz

[WarHorse47]

Chris, I'm understanding that you have favorable experience with FSX Booster. Do you have a particular version you recommend??

--WH

[Chris Trott]

FSX Booster 2013 is the one I have. I had the original, but upgrade to 2013 was free so obviously I took the offer.

I would, however, suggest Xtreme FSX PC from the same developer. It was released well after FSX Booster and combines several utilities that I run externally all the time for various other things so I didn't need the whole thing when FS Booster 2013 cam out (although looking at their newest version, I may upgrade because it incorporates a few things I don't cover already).

[WarHorse47]

Hmmm.... I've got some more research to conduct.

According to their website, Xtreme FSX PC costs less than FSX Booster 2013. Only FSX Booster 2013 supports Win8, so that looks like the ticket.

--WH

[DaveB]

I'm intrigued by this FSX Booster program.. it seems too good to be true This said, the majority of user reviews are positive (I think only one was negative) so there must be something in it

I've not seen an OOM 'per se' since I went to Win7 Ultimate but my current FSX install is dogged with ai_player.dll errors after shutdown. It doesn't happen all the time but it does happen a hell of a lot. Trawling the net, there are various causes of this error.. some of them more likely than others but the most 'understandable' I've read is that one of the first things to 'let go' when memory gets short is AI and I have to admit I've seen this in practise.. south coast of England.. 3 ship formation.. sometimes only 2 ships visible.
The other day, I got an error I've not seen before.. ntdll.dll. Again, there are numerous explanations of what can cause this.. one I understood was that there is just too much going on. At the time, I was running ASNext and FSCommander (I guess I can add Accu-Feel to that as it's an external program and wasn't turned off). The weather depiction was 'busy' if I can put it that way and this may have been enough to push it over the edge.

If FSX Booster can cut down or even eliminate ai_player.dll errors.. it'll be worth the $12 but I am a little sceptical.

ATB
DaveB

[DaveG]

I used to get quite a few ai_player.dll crashes. After much searching, I think I pin-pointed down to flight plans that included non-existant airports. More specifically, I had quite a few MAIW flightplans installed (FSX converted) which used dummy airports as waypoints in the flight plans. After de-compiling the plans, it turned out there were several that were missing, so I downloaded all the missing ones I could find and deleted the flight plans for ones I couldn't. Haven't had an ai_player.dll crash since.

[DaveB]

Hmm.. thanks for that Dave The vast majority of my traffic files are for ships though I do have a few for aircraft too. Not entirely sure where to begin but it's something to look into

ATB
Dave

[Chris Trott]

I'll say this, FSX Booster isn't some voodoo magic. From what I can tell through use is that it does 2 things -

1) it re-writes your FSX.cfg to implement several well known (and some lesser known but documented in several forums) tweaks that help give better performance and resolution without increasing RAM usage
2) it allows you to tweak some of the settings to your style of flying aren't easily done without knowing how to do it in the FSX.cfg manually (which can be problematic even to advanced users) so that your performance is optimized to VFR or IFR flying or a mix of both
3) it has an active memory manager that ensures that stuff gets scrubbed out of RAM that doesn't always (the dreaded FSX memory leak)

I think for $12 it's more than reasonable for what it does.

[DaveB]

Thanks Chris

I've been holding off but I'm getting to a point where it's so little money (in the grand scale of things) if it doesn't work (for me).. it won't ruin my day I looked at the other one you've mentioned (the Extreme version) and reports on that are not so favourable so I'll hang off on that for a while.

Back to FSX Booster.. can it handle external programs.. for example ASA/ASE/ASN??

ATB
DaveB

[Chris Trott]

Everything it does is limited to FSX itself. Nothing it changes will affect the running of external programs like ASN, FSRealTime, REX, etc.

[DaveB]

Okey doh Chris.. I'll give it a go

ATB
DaveB