Customer Reviews

Microsoft Flight Simulator X Acceleration Expansion

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Expansion pack won't install - says it requires FSX to be installed first. It is. I can be flying a plane in FSX, and the Expansion Pack Installer says FSX isn't installed. The support rep did say they have been getting a lot of calls from people who are having problems installing the expansion pack...
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Support Update: It's now December, and after a month of working directly with Microsoft Games Support, the problem appears to be caused by running 64 bit Vista Ultimate on an Intel Core 2 Quad processor. The base game, Flight Simulator X, does not install properly, and the expansion pack can't find it. I tried a single cpu system, running XP, and everything installs and runs fine, including the expansion pack.
When you install FSX, if the install screen says "IDS_WELCOME" and "IDS_CONTINSTALL" you've got a problem. Another symptom of a bad install is if the Add/Remove Program screen in Control Panel says "PRODUCT_NAME" instead of "Flight Simulator X". Microsoft does not appear to have a fix yet for the installer failure on 64 bit Vista. XP works fine.

Microsoft Flight Simulator X Acceleration ExpansionLet me begin by saying that I'm an FSX newbie. I have only the basic FSX installed and have had it for only around a month now. There's an old pilot's saying, "if God had wanted men to fly, He would have made them rich", and I'm a walking testament to the truth of that saying. I earned my license in 1987, but it was just too expensive a hobby for me to continue trying to fly. Having been playing with FSX for the past few weeks now, I'm thrilled to be back in the air! I thought that I had it pretty good before installing the acceleration pack. But that was before I had an F-18 at my beck and call. WOW!!! My installation of the acceleration pack went reasonably flawlessly and the improvement is fantastic. New aircraft, many new missions to fly, what a deal! Oh, and did I mention that an F-18 Hornet comes with the pack? It flys like a dream! My only complaint is that I haven't figured out how to navigate with it yet. Anyway, I couldn't be more thrilled with the acceleration pack and got my new copy for only $24 from one of the Amazon merchants.

It isn't as bad as some have indicated, but unless you are dying to get an F/A-18, P-51 or another helicopter, you would probably do best to pass on this and wait for SP2 which is free.

I'm not going to mention the missions because I wish MS had omitted missions from Flight Simulator X, altogether. They are too game-like for anyone who takes the word simulator seriously.

Acceleration does add some minimal DX10 features, but nothing to get excited about. They call it DX10 Preview because it is a very small subset of what DX10 is capable of.

I chalked up the bad reviews to bone headed users and bought this...but I apologize, I was wrong and they were right after all. It's no fun at all if it won't work.

It installed with no issues. It fired up with no issues. Then random crashes sometimes 5 minutes into it, sometimes 15 minutes into it sometimes 30 seconds into it. Get the picture? FSX is now virtually unplayable on my rather high end system (3.0 core2 quad - 4GB RAM - 8800GTS 640 - 680i mobo, etc and running just fine before this, thank you very much). I thought they were on the right track after SP1 which was great (they should have waited until this was ready for the initial release). But this? FSX Accelerator! If I was an attorney...

Oh and dx10? A joke. I defy anyone to tell the difference between 9 and 10 to the naked eye (that is if you can get it to go for 5 minutes before it crashes. It doesn't look like the "artists rendition" we were all led on by. Trust me, you will be extremely disappointed.

I hope they stop socking each others ducks at Aces and Microsoft and get to work. Tell them to do their bloody job for heavens sake and stop stealing our money. Don't by this. Wait.

***UPDATE*** ***UPDATE***

All of a sudden FSX Accelerator started working properly. I have been able to fly for the last 2 days. Unfortunately I don't know why since I have changed nothing hard or soft and Microsoft updates 11/13 were already installed.

So far I like what I see though if I did not know DX10 was functioning I wouldn't have noticed, so that's still a disappointment.

Some of the missions now have cool little intro movies and most importantly my frame rates have not been hurt though I don't exactly see any improvement there either.

So I would move this up to 3 stars now and remove my warning. If things stay stable, maybe... well, we'll see. I can't give it 5 because of the DX10 and frame rate promises. No doubt idiot marketers hype as usual. When will they learn?

Purchased with idea that carrier ops would be better than FA-18, Electronic Arts, but found that aircraft is very unstable with slight control inputs particularly disconcerting on final. (Actual flying has to be more stable than this jiggling/rocking back and forth.) Also could use larger virtual cockpit fonts for AS, VSI and ALT. It could be that my Sidewinder stick does not mesh or that the Dell notebook graphics card (Radon 9000?) does not have enough throughput for the program. Also, Sidewinder "trim" buttons do not seem to work. When you do "trap" it is nice. Graphics are great. Just wish I could fix the stability problem. I have worked with the control sensitivity but that does not seem to help. May have to upgrade my equipment. Anyone with suggestions please do. Thanks. It would also be nice to have a small frame at the left of the screen so that I do not have to "pan" left to see the boat. Tom S+10 THIS PROGRAM IS A KEEPER!

Installed on Vista w/ FSX Pro. No problems installing, setting up, or running. Love the F-18 and carrier ops. It would be nice to be able to lock and fire missiles, but it's a start. It will be interesting to see what they do with the next version. I'm guessing it's either a world built out of satellite imagery, or more combat. Either way works for me.

I wish I had read these reviews before I impulsively bought this. Would have saved me the money and wasted time. Right off the bat it would not install, had to get Bombay on the phone, took 90 minutes to do what I should have figured out in the first place; delete pre-fetch, disable non-MS services, restart, etc, etc. This is (and soon will be) a $9.99 flop. Not worth it.

From reading the other reviews, I was sort of not wanting to try this but I am SO glad I did!

First (the way all PC game reviews should start), running this on a Dell Inspiron Laptop 1720 w/2.2ghz Centrino Duo, 256 mb 8600Gt, 2g RAM (yes shortly going to 4), Vista Premium.

Could not be more delighted. Of course, you have to tweak the settings to optimize to your system. Mine, I like very high detail on the plane and scenery, but med low on the clouds and traffic. This setup, I cap my frames at 35, and it rarely dips below. Sometimes in a highly congested areas it will dip to mid 20's. By the way, as I will be doing soon for a gaming rig, you must have some decent hardware to run this. However, if you see my specs, it not top of the line...well, 7 months ago it was close :)

With all the new missions, this is a cant pass up deal. Especially when you luck into very reduced price on Amazon! low twelves! yes, you read that correctly!

I was very skeptical about adding this to my FSX program. I am glad I did after rolling the dice. My FSX seems to run much smoother sfter upgrading with this. The framerates seem better then before. The F-18 though not the best cockpit runs very smooth where my freeware F-18 runs a little slower in regards to framerates. New addons for FSX that run with with acceleration definitely benefit from acccel compared to the SP2 only. A great aircraft from Shockwave A2A, the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser addon for FSX relies on the Acceration for all of its functions to work properly. A lot of flightsimmers like me still run FS9 since it runs smoother with the settings high. I do most of my commercial flying ( PMDG 737, Wilco Airbus Vol1 and Digital Aviation F100/70) on FS9. I have probably well over $1200's in addon planes, scenery and utilities including Saitek pro yoke and rudder pedals for both FSX and FS9. I love flying general aviation aircraft ( Carenado 152II and cessna 172N II) in FSX. FSX rocks in its low level scenery compared to FS9 even with great utilities like Ultimate Terrain running. Serious simmers don't touch the stock aircraft hardly ever in MS flightsims though FSX does have a few worthwhile stock aircraft. I run Windows XP SP2 on an AMD FX 60 overclocked on an Nvidia 8800 GTX GPU and 2GB of overclocked Corsiar ProXMS RAM. This is a dated system by todays standard but it runs the acceleration FSX pretty good. Issues with acceleration seem more a problem with Vista and systems running 64 bit version of XP or Vista. I had no problems with install. There is a time on initial start of FSX since it has to rebuild the scenery file. I had to reinstall the textures for Ultimate Terrain USA and UT Europe. That only took several minutes and after that I had to reset some button assignments for the Saitek yoke. After that it was smooth flying. I recommend this product and can't account for the other problems people have had with their installations.

When Msft comes out with service pack for this I am sure it will be a lot of fun.

However, do not mess up your install of Flight Simulator X with this code.

Buggy, poorly written code that does not mesh well with FSM X. Stick to the tried and true Msft Flight Simulators 2004 and X. Leave this one to the next service pack. I purchased software from store X who will not refund money without major stress. Will put up on shelf and hope for a better day tomorrow.