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| Friday, April 16 | | · | Videos Pt 6 |
| Wednesday, April 14 | | · | Crimean Air Wars Big Update |
| Tuesday, April 06 | | · | Saitek X65F Review |
| Friday, March 26 | | · | new F-15C model,Compatibility Packs, Modman7.2 |
| Thursday, March 25 | | · | Lock On FC 2.0 Englsh version released |
| Thursday, February 25 | | · | Wings of Prey Review |
| Friday, February 12 | | · | OUTERRA |
| Monday, January 11 | | · | Ricardo's Lock On HD Cockpit Mod released |
| Sunday, December 27 | | · | Our Year in Review |
| Friday, December 11 | | · | FSX L-39C v1.3 Review |
| Saturday, November 21 | | · | FSX Niihau Island |
| Friday, November 06 | | · | Videos Pt5 |
| Tuesday, November 03 | | · | Our Survey |
| Monday, October 19 | | · | Strike Fighters 2 Israel released |
| Wednesday, October 07 | | · | A2A Simulations P-47D Razorback Review |
Older Articles
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Windows 7 RC and DCS Blackshark – it works!
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Before I delve in much further, let me set the tone and tell you why I opted to be a lab rat for Microsoft.
I’m a Mac man. I am very much a ‘if it’s shiny and made by Apple I’ll buy it’ kind of man to the tune of a pair of iPods, an iPhone, a MacBook Pro and a brace of iMacs. I use these for work and only use Windoze because I have to for sims on a shared desktop PC. Yet still I had been heralding a burning desire to dual boot my MacBook Pro… Problem was a lack of hard disk space. ThomasDW suggested to just change the hard drive. How hard can it be? Not hard at all.
So after a couple of hours of frustration trying to find a shop that sells T6 Torx drivers I finally have the new disk in, only a wee 320gb but more than ample to install a few sims and still have access to all my work stuff.
So rather than pay for Vista or XP I was persuaded by the recession to try Windows 7. Turns out Microsoft had released RC1 (Release Candidate 1) earlier this month.
I can honestly say I have never installed Windows onto anything. I have however done a couple of OS X re-installs / upgrades and always found them to be smooth.
To be fair, Windows installation was a piece of cake. Apart from accidentally installing it twice…
So after installing Win7 I tried to install DCS Black Shark. I put the CD in and let it do the auto run (I am using a Russian DVD that came from qpig.ru). Installation was again easy enough bar the lack of any real instructions because there are no characters just ?????.
Within 30-minutes DCS was installed to my newly partitioned Windows 7 C:GamesBlackShark folder.
However, no launch icons like there should be. I tried just running launcher.exe from the directory but this popped up with “cannot find file Blackshark.lua”. At this point, I just knew it wasn’t going to be easy… So I tried DCS.exe. 'Error cannot find a dx9….dll'... That’s right, BS never asked me to install DirectX.
So duly downloaded DirectX and installed. Same problem, cannot find Blackshark.lua. Perhaps it’s because the Games directory is write protected… Let’s uncheck Read Only.
Nada, still not happening.
So I tried again to install , but this time I remembered to run setup.exe off of the DVD as an Administrator. In less than 10 minutes it was asking me to install DirectX and job done.
DCS is now running like an absolute dream under Windows 7. I am running a 2.2 Intel dual core MBP with a WD 320gb Scorpio, Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT 128mb graphics card with 4gb of RAM at 1440x900 on the 15” LCD screen and so far on the Instant Action it runs smooth, real smooth with textures and scenes set to high.
No Starforce issues, no nothing. Just a quick (once you remember the administrator lark!) easy install. What’s more, on the desktop PC which is only a dual core 2.0 Intel with an ATI HD3870 512mb and 2gb of RAM the MacBook Pro leaves it firmly wobbling in Vortex Ring State. But yes, the jaggies need to be sorted!
Just try it… What’s the worst that can happen ???
by Zorrin
Windows 7 RC Compatibility
Those of you wondering if it is worth giving Windows 7RC x86 (32bit) a try, I downloaded the 2+ GB ISO file and installed it without any problems. To do it you will need to create a boot disk with the ISO file - you can do that with a free app like Active ISO Burner.
As it did not recognize my RAID setup using the DVD boot disk I made, I ran the Install Setup from Windows XP Pro, 7RC downloaded a quick update and set it up on my old Vista partition in no time.
Now I have a dual boot system with XP on the C: and 7RC on D: partitions. The only problem I had was that Win 7RC did not find any IDE DVD drives after install , so I bought a new SATA DL DVD/RW so that I could start to install FSX and LO, the problem I believe is my MoBo Bios and not Windows 7RC.
So far I installed Thirdwire's Strike Fighters 2/2V, FSX and LO/LOFC - also Modman 7 and the Saitek SST/Drivers were added.
To install LO/LOFC you will need to do it as an Administrator and before starting you will need to get from Starforce dl link an update, as its LOFC driver is not compatible.
I installed LO tested it then added LOFC to my F:/Program Files/ folder and it is working as it should.
Modman 7 installs in the F:/ root by default (F:/ is my Data partition) - again without any issues.
I have the Saitek SD6 XP SST/Driver and it works in 7RC, install the Driver then SST, load the profiles and it will be OK.
All installs are faster as are the load times for all the Flight Sims . Windows 7RC also boots up faster than XP and shuts down almost instantly - it also deleted a 24GB folder in a few minutes . Although it is too early to know if FPS rates are improved, Windows RC clearly is better than XP Pro.
As always there is a caveat : Norton Systemworks 2008 and Norton Antivirus 2008 are not compatible.
Tested OK
PeerGuardian 2.0 RC1 Test 2
AVG 8.5
WinRAR 3.8
Firefox 3.x
by ThomasDWeiss
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Posted on Monday, May 18 @ 14:07:41 PDT by Zorrin
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Average Score: 4.66
Votes: 6
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