Odd computer freeze and crash

The entire computer black-screens while sound continues in the background, the screen appears to "turn off" before a bunch of broken video appears, blacks out, then re-appears repeatedly.

It's been quite a long time since I had this type of crash happen and I thought I was through with it. I can't remember how I fixed it. It may have been a complete re-install and then deciding to keep sceneries installed to a minimum, though that clearly isn't doing me much help (I may need to clean up).

Having said that, if the problem is the computer's lack of capabilities, I'm considering an upgrade since this computer is now 10 years old (XPS 8000 something, i7, can almost run MSFS minimum except for lack of video ram), but I'm concerned I will still run into this problem even with an advanced computer, and I'm not going to cough up a lot of money if that extra performance means I'll still be smashing my keyboard in a fit of rage :mad: !

Thoughts? Or is FS9 arguably "prone to crash" itself or any computer just due to its.... design?

My only "crashing" issues with FS9 have all been after-market (payware, shareware or freeware) related and have all been resolved (so far) by judicious removal/disabling of various features until the problem disappears, then further diagnosis on a file-by-file basis.

Maybe a corrupt texture, maybe a faulty model in a library, even some ai aircraft can cause issues when used in certain circumstances.

This all assumes that the fault is replicable. Totally random non-repeatable issues are more likely to be hardware related. I'd start by re-seating the memory modules, any extension cards then defrag the hard disk.

Good luck :)

I installed FS9 recently, a few times on a machine identical to yours and no problems whatsoever. Sometimes addons that carry solutions a bit out-of-the-box may cause similar effects (usually documented on their "readmes")

Try to find what you may have installed recently and revert those changes.

Also you could update your graphics card drivers.

Clean files in "cache" (with your favorite system optimizer) sometimes works, too.

Hope it helps!

Yes, crushes happen.

Usually caused by add-on scenery or aircraft.

If the crash always happens in certain segment of the flight (approaching airport, region or any flight path), I usually save the flight about a minute before the crash time. Then keep de-activating any potential (usually close to the crash area) scenery - one by one and keep opening this flight to see if the crash disappears (if it does, the scenery I have de-activated caused it). Sometimes the AI in the area can also cause the crash - this is more tricky to ID because of the different times the AI might be conflicting with given flight. So you might also turn the AI traffic to "0" to see if AI is the issue. If it is try to change the flight plans of add-on aircraft in the area, or ID the culprit (recently I found mine, when I used the complex Flyable aircraft as AI) Good luck

... black-screens while sound continues in the background, the screen appears to "turn off" before a bunch of broken video appears, blacks out, then re-appears repeatedly.

I have a bad feeling about what you describe, especially on a 10-year old machine. Do you play any other games and, if so, have you seen any odd behaviour inany of them? I'm thinking particularly of the following:

incorrect colours

extended vertices (corners) or even large spikes on objects

blocky, polygonal or 'crystalline' shadows where they are usually smooth

crashes to desktop

unusually slow texture loads

failure to resolve from low to hi res

artifacts like streaks or sparkles (not anti aliasing) in smooth textures?

I have FS9 running on a five year old Win 10 machine with an I5 and a plain GTX1060 with no crashes, freezes or black screens so I don't think there's a compatibility issue.

Ten years is a good life for a graphics card or even onboard graphics: it may be time to upgrade. On the other hand, if the error previously occurred in the same hardware, I may be completely off the mark.

D

In a nutshell, there are a WHOLE host of variables that can contribute to your crash, or black screen in this case. So I'm with the poster above.

Some ideas:

Lots of installed crap.

Anti-virus software.

A driver misconfiguration, a DLL, a driver crash like the GPU driver.

Video card settings.

A Sim module or add-on.

Having said that, ever read Event Viewer? Type event viewer in the search box of Windows...

Question: Do other video games do the same thing?