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.

Hello lovely people, hope you're all well as can be expected and enjoying, er...dogging...er, as usual. Anyway, I thought I'd tell you about this; https://store.steampowered.com/app/993090/Lossless_Scaling/ Now I don't actually use this myself at the moment. I'm still very much enamoured by MSFS2020 and all that limp-wristed civil aviation stuff. However, I do use frame generation, it's a selectable graphics option within the sim. This basically doubles my frame rates and it's just....astonishing. I still use my potato computer with it's ancient CPU and a not-so-state-of-the-art RTX2070 graphics card. https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/adventures-in-msfs2020-with-my-thirteen-year-old-cpu/629757 Now to use frame generation in MSFS you need an Nvidia 40 series card. As you can see, I don't have one of these so I use a mod that fools MSFS into thinking I do have one. I normally consider all this sort of stuff as a pitch by a snake-oil salesman and ignore it but this works really, really well. You really do go from thirty frames per second to sixty. So; the link to Steam that I've posted above about lossless scaling is another way of doubling frames. it has certain limits such as only working in windowed mode but it's very much worth reading up about to make sure anyone who wants to use it fully understands what it does. Unlike the mod I use - this thing works with ALL graphics cards and in DX11 or 12 and Vulcan, etc. So I thought, if you're struggling with an older graphics card in the monster that is DCS and were willing to punt a few of our great British pounds, this then might be worth a try. Here's a link to it on Avsim too so you can see what the punters there are making of it.... https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/645513-a-miracle-lsfg-lossless-scaling-frame-generation/ In the meantime, here at chez Arthur all these exciting looking boxes turned up today.....

Still enjoying golf, Pringle sweaters and MSFS.

This from the man who's just bought a 4090?

My old Friend by toad.mp3 My old Friend by toad.zip

"What do you want for Christmas Dad?" "Er....how about Armageddon?" "Is that expensive?" "Twenty-eight quid" "I see...a bargain then?" "Kinda...."

Hmmm….didn’t we spend a million squillion quid on RAF Mount Pleasant back in the eighties so we wouldn’t have to worry about expensive aircraft carriers? Our defence spending since the end of the Cold War seems to run along the lines of “who’s turn is it for something expensive?” without considering what we actually can do or need to do. Not too sure if we need to sail halfway around the world to wind up the Chinese…

We simply don’t have the money for these things and this incident was a symptom of this underfunding. Quite what we need them for anyway is another question. A carrier battle group is a military, economic and societal statement. Notice that neither the Russians or the Chinese have anything approaching the scope of what the US navy can field and they never will. As for our own - absurd -defence procurement policy; at the level of spending we can commit something has to give; for the luxury of two fleet carriers that will never go to sea at the same time we have given up our capability to field an infantry division overseas and have a navy with the fewest ships since Henry VIII watched the Mary Rose sink in Portsmouth harbour. It’s absurd.

This is DCS. They’ll produce a map of Craggy Island before anything useful like the Korean peninsular or the Gulf of Tonkin. I would imagine the promo video will be the usual mix of stirring music, 3 second cut scenes of grey aeroplanes and Mrs. Doyle carrying a tea service between kersplosions.

Could it be…. No? I’ll get me coat….