DD_Arthur

FT’s robot floor sweeper

Not really. Bypassing the ‘connect to internet’ bit allowed me to complete the windows install and access this ‘armoury crate’ business. This checks for the relevant drivers and installs them. I think I needed a LAN driver for Win 11. At my level of expertise the best analogy is fumbling around a completely dark room full of furniture until you find the light switch. Good news; installed TrackIr without problems and my hotas and MSFFB2 stick were plug and play. Disabled hyperthreading, downloaded the 380 gig monster that is MSFS 2020 overnight and gave it a spin this morning whilst monitoring temps and fans and everything’s groovy. Bit more than groovy actually; freakin’ bonkers! At the moment it’s set up in the living room temporarily - which is verboten - so I’m going to have to break it down and put it where old faithful lives. After I’ve done that I’ll start on DCS. I can see another ‘shall I get a big, 4K screen or shall I get another VR headset?’ situation ahead.

Oooooohhh.....Aaaahhhhh......it works. Now I've got a vast amount of stuff to transfer/download/remember how it actually works...

Quick update; I’ve managed to bypass the online registration stuff by finding a command prompt bypass. I’m now installing ‘Armoury Crate’ and a Lan driver - hopefully. This is all completely new to me but I hearby promise that if I can get all this stuff working I will load DCS. Shouldn’t be a problem; I’ve got 3 TB of storage to play with…..🤪

Hello Colin, the router has a list of all the devices that have ever connected to it but I don’t think there’s a list of approved devices. Network cable works fine with my other pc and yes, I’ve restarted the new one several times but no joy so far.

Okay, have finished chucking it all together and it's an understated thing of beauty but.......I downloaded Win 11 Home edition onto an external USB hard drive. I bought myself a legit (and expensive!) Win 11 Home product key. I plugged in the external hard drive, a key board, mouse, monitor and connected it to my router. Took a deep breath and pressed the button. Hey! It fired up, the fans worked, the cooler pump is working as far as I can tell. Windows started loading thing and everything is fine until I get to that bit in the Windows loading screen where it says 'Connect to the internet' and nothing happens. I can see from the lights indication on the ethernet port that it's working but nada, nothing connecting. Any ideas greatly appreciated. I can check the router and it's working and connected to 'old faithful' but when I connect my new pc to it, nothing is showing on the router page and Windows loading screen is still waiting for an internet connection.... Ignore the BT hub in the background. I'm not trying to plug into that.

Have got this far; The main problem has been the lack of documentation that comes with this stuff these days - with the honourable exception of the motherboard and the distraction of running over this beach with grandma and grandchildren Spent a couple of days pondering how I was going to extract one of the SSD's from 'old faithful' and stick it in 'ere before the obvious occured to me ; just buy anuvver one and I need to get more USB ports too. Have realised the ones on the front are going to be useless for fixed items like a joystick and TrackIr....

Cor! Well done Bongo. Amazing

I must admit I'm enjoying shopping for this but I've been pretty slack about it. We've just returned from another long weekend away without children - which is a novelty in itself - however, I now have a few weeks of time on my hands so I'm ready to go....except I've got to buy a new case and actually look into the process of how to squeeze a new copy Windows11 into it all without a disc drive. I settled on this card as a) I really can't bring myself to spend four figures on a graphics card and b) the 50xx series probably won't see the light of day until the end of the year and will no doubt conflict with a)

Well it's strange you should say that as my now good friend Stephen from DPD delivered another inviting looking box from Ebuyer this morning....

Bob Hoover approves this message...

Cor!

Cheers Crash, that’s the sort of thing that will have a big influence on what and where I buy. @Colin👋. Although I haven’t got it installed at the moment I do have quite a few DCS modules….unfortunately many of them seem to be made by Razbam🥲

Ahhh…didn’t know that. A decent guarantee is part of the attraction of a new card. Might have to think hard(er) about this. At the moment I’ve got a curved 32” g-sync screen running at 1440p. I’m quite happy with it but MSFS is such a visual feast I might go for something ludicrous later on. Space is not a problem. I’m not using VR in MSFS, it just doesn’t float my boat. There’s too much scenery to look out at and civil flight decks are simply too roomy for my taste in VR….and it’s a bit under developed in MSFS in my opinion. However, for military sims I still think VR is a must. Small, cramped cockpits, formation flying, gunnery, etc. as you know, all these things are astonishing in VR. I’ve seen a couple of vids of people flying the DCS Phantom with the crystal Pimax…..😲. I’m willing to wait on developments - both hardware and new sims - though. One things for sure, I’m not strapping anymore scuba diving gear on me head. I’ve been watching Bigscreen Beyond development with some interest…. Oh yeah, none of these frame generation options work in VR.

That’s a good question. Since I’m actually buying new stuff as opposed to evil baying my hardware, I’m leaning heavily towards an RTX4070ti Super. From the price/specs it looks like the best bang for buck to go for at the moment. It’s also got the longest name of any graphics card out there so it must be good.🤩 However, at some point soon Nvidia are going to release their 50xx series cards…. My present system - old faithful - is starting to show signs of distress so I need to get something up and running in case it goes ‘phut’ and I lose a lot of stuff I wanna keep. Decisions, decisions….but at the moment the 4070 is in pole position.