FSX crashes, PC does not

[Telkwa]

Good morning!
This community has been patient & helpful (http://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?235829-New-flyer-it-takes-a-village) before.

So I'm back with a new question. And the situation is the same as described in the thread above... me in Washington State & my dad with his flyer PC in the Bay Area.

My dad wants to bone up for some flying lessons, so he's been trying to run FSX. FSX is crashing within about 15 seconds. An error message blips across the screen, but it goes away too fast for him to make sense of it.

The PC keeps running.

Given that he's there and I'm here, I'm hoping for some helpful hints. Starting out with "least geeky" would be preferred!

I'm pretty sure he hasn't bought any add-ons, such as planes or scenery.

Googling brought up several threads that mentioned pushing the graphics sliders back a notch. Would that be a place to start? Of course, if that worked, we'd be left with the question of why it'd been working til now...

[mallcott]

Event Viewer will give you the error message. Bring that to us.

[Telkwa]

Thanks, mallcot -
Let me get my father in the loop on this. It'll probly take a coupla days.

[Telkwa]

I haven't gotten the Event Viewer info yet, but he bumped the graphics sliders down and FSX stopped crashing. He also installed FSX SP1 & 2, then tried running the sliders back up again some, and it's still flying. He sez the graphics sliders were maxed out. That kind of surprised me, because I'd read lots of FlightSim posts before building his PC. The consensus seemed to be that graphics shoved all the way to the right usually doesn't work. When we got it running last year I didn't have time to figure out what the PC could handle, so I thought we'd left the settings cranked down a bit but I guess not...
My father asked why it had run OK for a year or so. I didn't have a good answer for him. I've read many times that Windows builds up crud over time and needs to be reinstalled occasionally, but he hasn't been installing/uninstalling programs, browsing all over the web, etc.

[eagleworks4u]

I found event viewer in win 7 but dont see anything pertinent to when FSX crashed just kernel power for reboot???