One of the problems I had in the days gone by when I was a keen real-life pilot was low frame rates when approaching dense scenic areas with plenty of "AI" traffic to manage. I decided to upgrade my PC to cope and therefore went reasonably top-end. Machine now Intel i7 gen2 CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GTX550ti video card. As Microsoft in their "sod the customer" attitude have made upgrading motherboards a BSOD generator for the existing OS (different onboard chipsets being the issue I believe) I needed to re-install my OS. I decided therefore to go from W7 32 bit to the 64 bit version.
This is how I did it.
- Found a surplus 500Gb disk and re-formatted it.
- Identified the system disk and the 3 internal non system disks.
- Disconnected said disks and connected the newly formatted disk
- Installed the system on that disk - without problem for once.
- When this booted up OK I then reconnected the previous non system disks one-by-one and re-set the drive letters if needed.
- Finally I reconnected the old system disk and copied over any folders which held necessary information for transfer. These included the Documents, Music folders etc., the Program files, Program Data (App data) and user folders, and those miscellaneous folders which seem to spawn when you're not looking :).
Now the frustrating bits...
Re-installed MS Office 2007 - told during on-line activation that maximum installs made. I phoned in, explained scenario and got a code.
Ditto above FSX
Ditto above FSX Acceleration
Kaspersky was another issue. I could not find the installation disk although as it was a 3 licence 2 year purchase I had it on my other PC. Contacted Kaspersky and the translated the licence into an activation code.
Other software re-installed without issue, and many folders such as scenery and aircraft for FSX and some 'Program data' and 'user' files simply copied over to new installations.
FSX was running with all the oldadd-ons
Now to upgrade the FSX tools... tedious but straight forward. I recommend either AFX or ADE for airport mods, SDE for scenery adds, and Aifp for flight plan construction and editing.
