System won't run MS Flight Sim X - Customer wants it fixed

[14049752]

Not sure where to put this, so general chat it is.

Short story, customer today brings in a brand new, mid-high end system. Windows 7 x64, loads of ram, i7, relatively high end graphics card. He's been working with it on his own, trying "everything" to get Microsoft Flight Simulator X to run, but it crashes every time, and immediately.

Looking up any information about FSX, it seems to be very very very buggy and lots of people have problems with it. All of the fixes through various sites have been tried by the customer...I tried some reasonable fixes today...nothing works.

The computer passes all hardware diagnostics, has all updated software.... There is NOTHING wrong with the machine at all.


So, my question... Is it completely reasonable for me to send this guy away? He was told that we cannot, and will not, support a specific software program...we didn't build the computer, nor did I do anything with it other than trying some of the fixes. I hate not coming up with some proposed fix, but I really don't see an option

 

[Paul Rodgers]

What fixes have you attempted?

 

[14049752]

I've tried driver updates (graphics and sound), deleting a certain system file (i forget the name), changing install path, and installing DX9 runtimes.

I thought about suggesting he try to use Vista, instead of Win 7....some people have mentioned that worked for them. But then again, other people say it didn't work..so..whatever

 

[NYJimbo]

How much money can you possibly charge this guy so he can run one game?

Tell him you tried everything you can find on the web and cant get to work, tell him its possible you might never be able to get it to work and more time on it will just cost him more money, charge him the diag fee and send him on his way.

 

[14049752]

How much money can you possibly charge this guy so he can run one game?

Tell him you tried everything you can find on the web and cant get to work, tell him its possible you might never be able to get it to work and more time on it will just cost him more money, charge him the diag fee and send him on his way.

That's exactly my thinking....I just wanted to hear it from someone else, I guess.

 

[Paul Rodgers]

XP Mode?

Re-install?

 

[14049752]

He already reinstalled..formatted, reloaded..etc. It's Win 7 HP, so it can't use XP mode.
Like I said, he did "everything" listed online to get this to work. I honestly don't know what magic he expects me to perform.


I'm going to tell him to pick it up in the morning.

 

[NYJimbo]

That's exactly my thinking....I just wanted to hear it from someone else, I guess.

I get these all the time. I know as techs we think that we should be able to fix it if we put enough time into it AND we don't want to turn away someone because it makes us look like we are not skilled enough to fix it.

Even if you get it to work you can be sure he will come right back to you if ANYTHING else goes wrong with the game or if the game doesn't perform smoothly or something new happens not related to the game and he thinks its related to your work. With all of his "tweaking" he might have made the system unstable and the machine could actually be worse now than if a real seasoned tech worked on it first.

The worst are the gamers with the monster 100 pound towers that have big water cooling systems, $500 video cards, 1200 watt power supplies, etc and they want you to figure out why some game drops frames or hangs. I wont even touch a water cooled tower and tell them that (very politely) when they walk in the door.

 

[Paul Rodgers]

He already reinstalled..formatted, reloaded..etc. It's Win 7 HP, so it can't use XP mode.
Like I said, he did "everything" listed online to get this to work. I honestly don't know what magic he expects me to perform.


I'm going to tell him to pick it up in the morning.

Have you tried weird IT voodoo like standing on one foot and chanting?

 

[JustInspired]

XP mode will be pretty useless in regards to 3D graphics.

I'd suggest a dual boot system with XP or possibly even Vista along with the existing OS.
You might have to do some jiggery pokery with the boot loader etc or perhaps even separate drives with a switch or third party boot manager.

 

[layoric]

Backup, fresh Windows install then install game. Might be out of scope of charges though. I've done flight sim for a guy before and had to call support on his behalf. It was years ago for that so don't remember what the fix was. A call to them should have probably been done early on.

 

[mr m]

The worst are the gamers with the monster 100 pound towers that have big water cooling systems, $500 video cards, 1200 watt power supplies, etc and they want you to figure out why some game drops frames or hangs. I wont even touch a water cooled tower and tell them that (very politely) when they walk in the door.

Great advice. I just had one of these BSOD demons on my bench. Lifting it up didn't help my bad back.

I told them that I would put the mobo and memory back to factory specs and I replaced a noisy cooling fan in a 1300 watt ps. This thing was over-clocked in a million places. I was confused by all the options!

It is up to them if they want to over-clock again. I suggested they change one variable at a time, log the changes and monitor it before making any other tweaks. You can't win this battle. Especially since most gamers build their own rigs and screw around with everything.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

No reason to downgrade the OS to Vista or XP. Windows 7 is fully supported for FS X.

Probably a home grown cloner gaming rig huh? Here's where the fun starts with those....tons of people think they can go slap together any old components without researching compatibility of all the components. You end up with some "motherboard of the month" club mixed bag of parts.

Is it a good motherboard with a good chipset?
Is the selected video card known to work well with this motherboard? Or have issues?
Is the RAM specifically selected to be approved/compatible to work with this motherboard? Or did someone just order up "any old PC3 XXXXXX RAM" and stick it in there? Voltage requirements for this RAM?
Power Supply...is it an approved one for the video card? Lots of people just grab for some high wattage power supply and pair it with a high end video card that might be very picky with good minimum # of volts at the rail.
Good version of BIOS for the motherboard.
HDD?

I'd lean towards the power supply/ vid card/ram.

 

[bertie40]

I was thinking along the lines of the graphics cards.

Is it nvidea or AMD ?

AMD, although (allegedly) technically superior, have long been prone to bugs, and most games have specific patches, in the forums, to handle these graphic card bugs.

That's why I'm an nvidea man.

Also, have you tried compatability mode ?

 

[KompuKare]

I was going to jump to the conclusion that Flight Sim X is not properly 64-bit compatible but a quick search sort of dismissed that.

I was thinking along the lines of the graphics cards.

Is it nvidea or AMD ?

AMD, although (allegedly) technically superior, have long been prone to bugs, and most games have specific patches, in the forums, to handle these graphic card bugs.

That's why I'm an nvidea man.

Also, have you tried compatability mode ?

I'm the opposite: can't stand nvidia because I of all the defective hardware they sold without offering any compensation to their (non-US) customers. But even ignoring that, nvidia are also very aggressive in just about everything they do with dirty marketing and stuff. While sometimes there are some advantages to an aggressive company, I generally stay clear of them. Plus, the CEO is another one of those egomaniacs.

 

[NYJimbo]

I told them that I would put the mobo and memory back to factory specs and I replaced a noisy cooling fan in a 1300 watt ps. This thing was over-clocked in a million places. I was confused by all the options!

This is probably the biggest problem with these people. They start OC'ing the machine and tweaking the hell out of it and then it starts to fail, so you bring it back down to earth and they are happy its working but not happy with performance.

I did this to a tower a few months ago and even though I explained what we did to get the machine stable he then came back saying it felt "sluggish" compared to what it was before he brought it in. I reminded him of all the tweaks and OC he did that made it unstable and he finally got it but then was still unhappy because "it did work fast at one time". He was like "But it did work when I OC'd and tweaked, so why cant we make that work ?" I told him if he wants to go back to crashing he can tweak and OC all he wants, but my work was done.

 

[KompuKare]

I think a lot of gaming OC'ers also don't realise that components can easily degrade over time. Especially if they don't really know what they are doing and just blindly follow forum posts and pump crazy voltages through their components. There are people who know what they are doing and can get away with this (and know enough to back their settings down as soon as some problem occurs) but plenty of people don't really have a clue and think that spending lot of money for fancy parts, watercooling and so on guarantees them to some crazy overclocked monster.

It should be obvious that just because some managed to 'run' (that is post a CPUz proof) their i5/i7 K processor at 5GHz while pumping 1.5V through, this is not generally a good idea. But on the hardware forums you always get people asking about some strange problem they're having and they don't take kindly to others telling that until they put their system back to stock nobody can help them.

 

[14049752]

Backup, fresh Windows install then install game. Might be out of scope of charges though. I've done flight sim for a guy before and had to call support on his behalf. It was years ago for that so don't remember what the fix was. A call to them should have probably been done early on.

He did backup/reload several times. It was a 100% clean install of Windows when I looked at it, nothing else installed.

No reason to downgrade the OS to Vista or XP. Windows 7 is fully supported for FS X.

No reason, except that some people said that it worked for them when Win 7 would not. Literally every other piece of software runs flawlessly on this machine.
The machine checked out hardware wise in every way. It was a good system, built properly, with bios and driver updates. Hardware diagnostics were ran on the system as well.

I was thinking along the lines of the graphics cards.

Is it nvidea or AMD ?

Yes, an nvidia card was also tried. And yes, I tried compatibility mode as well, even though that shouldn't be necessary.




I realize that as computer techs you guys want to solve this....but....if you look into it, there are countless "fixes".

The bottom line is I can't support software like this. Like Jimbo said, even if I get it seemingly working now, it might have problems later on that he'd expect me to be able to fix. FSX is listed on numerous sites as being "buggy" and "unstable". This was really just a case of knowing when to turn someone away and I shouldn't have needed confirmation of my opinion.

 

[ahiser]

I have encountered issues with FSX before with my gaming build. I would disable hardware such as the sound card as that has caused crashes of FSX for me before. Also make sure the game is fully patched.

I do agree with just charging the diagnostic and moving on. You can spend days/weeks on fixing gaming issues. There are too many possible conflicts from hardware and software with custom computers.

 

[Krynn72]

Just last week I turned away a gamer having frame rate problems in League of Legends. Game developers have a hell of a time testing their game on all sorts of hardware configurations, and some setups inevitably will be the perfect storm of hardware to not work. I just chalk it up to "The developers need to patch it for this sort of configuration, but who knows when that will be, if ever. Unfortunately, its not something I could resolve myself."

Hopefully with Steam Machines gamers will finally start having good hardware that's preconfigured and tested for by developers. Until then, the current scene is too much of a cluster**** to deal with.