EtherealN

For the same reason they called Windows 7 "7" instead of Windows Vista SP-whatever. ;) A brand name got a bad rap, so they rename the update and everyone thinks it's awesome. :D Only case I can think of where this didn't happen was XP SP3, where the XP platform had a good enough name in the consumer sphere that they had the opposite motivation.

I'm all for it. It's 8.2 rebranded, which is a pretty good thing actually. Win 8.1 is already quite nice with just a few minor annoyances in the UI that are easily outweighed by the rest of the OS.

If I recall correctly, most of those layoffs are from what used to be Nokia Handheld, which they purchased as a vehicle for Windows on Mobile. (And which was bleeding money very very fast at the time due to having been disastrously slow to properly join the smartphone race.) Windows 8 is a very good OS. The first release unfortunately hid that behind a pretty bad UI implementation. 8.1 solved the worst bits. 8.2 (which is apparently now called Windows 10 O.o) solves the rest, as far as I've been able to see.

The question has been answered, and before this goes further on the political train, I'm closing it. Mastermariner, if you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me via PM and I'll try to clear out any ambiguities for you.

So your suggestion to test for system overheat is to switch from something that EVIDENTLY taxes everything to tMAX specification, for something that leads to less thermal output. SuperPI does not "bring load on your laptop really to max". It loads the compute cores. Even within the CPU there are more things to worry about. That's not how it works. GPU thermal output and the heat dissipation thereof is a BIG deal here, most especially since we are talking about a laptop. When it heats up, there's less temperature delta available in the internal airstream to cool the CPU. So, your proposed test to check for thermal performance might come back saying it's AOK, but it won't have said anything about thermal performance in games. Because you eliminated one of the big thermal spenders present in that slim little chassis. All you will have proven is that it can run CPU-only tasks. Topping this all off, why test synthetic when you can test realworld? His issue is in DCS World, he has DCS World, why would he want to omit GPU from testing and then configure a synthetic CPU test to try to emulate DCS's workload when... he could just run that frequency logger in the background while playing DCS! ;)

Yup, that is definitely a case of overheating. Max allowed temp for that CPU is 105 degrees C, so it does look like it was trying really hard to avoid reaching that temp. What you can do about it depends a bit. If you've used it for a bit you could try doublechecking that it's not full of dust inside. You could also "stress" it for a bit and check if it is getting really warm on the underside of the chassis. If that is the case, you might be able to improve things by purchasing one of those USB-powered cooling stands and have the laptop standing on that one while playing. They're usually not that expensive (just make sure to get one that is big enough), something between 20 and 50 euro. Though there's no guarantee that they'll fully fix the problem either, though. Also, in the case of that option, make sure to see whether the laptop has "feet", so that the chassis would actually have a little bit of space for air to flow through. If it would end up completely flush against the fan tray it wouldn't help at all, but as long as you have feet I'd definitely recommend those cooling pad/fan assembly thingies as a first things to try since they are so cheap.

You do realize that Windows 9 (previously known as 8.2) is an actual desktop OS, right? Full (and customizable) start menu, boots into desktop, etc etc. 8.0 was annoying. 8.1 solved the worst bits. 8.2 (now called 9) solves the rest and gives us a proper desktop OS with all the under-the-hood improvements we liked in 8.

Most of the money will end up in Pound Sterling and Roubles anyhow, I suspect. Regarding Steam, whatever currency it uses in your territory is the currency that will be used to sell DCS products through Steam there. The only obstacle would be if a given product simply doesn't get released in a specific territory, but I'd be surprised if Leatherneck want to avoid your region.

Across pretty much all industrialized nations, the portion of cost that goes to salary has remained the same since then. So be careful in judging how well those things balance out: in spite of all this automation, companies still pay about the same portion in revenue to their workers as they did before. (Basically, if people didn't have better wages now, you might have a point. But a worker today is paid a lot better than a worker in the 40's, both nominally and in real terms. ;) ) Basically, making a proper comparison on price is nigh on impossible. Besides also potentially weighing in the program's portion of the economy*, there's also the issue of checking which materials would be cheaper then than now; for example copper etc. It's such a laborious exercise that it's really not worth it, so the closest we get (IMO) is to compare numbers and adjust for inflation. * This is an important thing to consider in a lot of ways. I recall reading that the record in the US was for the same person to control ("own" as far as stock etc goes) about one 300th of the net wealth of the USA. Think it was Rockefeller. However, today, Bill Gates is definitely WAY richer than Rockefeller ever was, but his "share" of the economy is microscopic compared to that. The analogy in airplanes is that the P-51 (or MiG 21 etc) might become a "better deal" if the economy shrunk enough that the total amount of affordable F-35's simply became too small. (Compare with how Sweden and many other countries would rather have X Gripens/Upgraded 21's/etc than half or third that amount of "heavy" fighters.) Though, in a way, I suspect I just took this thread way more seriously than it was meant to be taken. :D

May I ask why? MiG-21bis will be released on Steam in a few days. There the currency used will be whatever is the Steam standard in your country.

No, pick the one with the best cooling you can find (usually also means a fairly heavy and thick machine) that will not see it's fancy 870M thermal-throttle itself after a couple minutes of gaming, as I am almost willing to bet is what is happening here. I'd be much interested in seeing someone swap out a BGA-package CPU. You know, the ones that are vibration-soldered onto the motherboard? ;) Which "i7" did it have though? In the mobile space, saying "i7" means very little, really. The i7-3632QM is a low-power SKU, though it does offer four cores at least. My search on the GiBy P34Gv2 indicate that that one has the i7-4710HQ, which is both a performance chip AND a Haswell chip (which is an okey deal as far as thermal dissipation goes in the mobile space). The problem description really sounds like a THERMAL issue. Some component(s) are most likely getting overheated, and the computer starts to lower voltages and clock frequencies to ensure there is no meltdown or other damage, adversely affecting gameplay. Easiest way to check whether this might indeed be what is happening is to install and run HWMonitor: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html Start it, keep it in the background while running the game, and once the issue has manifested check through the list to see what kind of temperatures you're getting on the components while the machine is being "stressed". Sadly, this is a common mistake in laptop design now in the age of ultraportables and the quest for slim; the more portable you make it, the harder it'll be to ensure it can perform adequate cooling.

What I was poking fun at was that both 7 and 9 are just renamed "service packs" of the thing people hated. :P

But Windows 8.2 will be awesome. ;)

This is not about good or bad "coding". This is about what kind of computation a given game requires. "FPS" is _NOT_ just about graphics cards. Shooters and suchlike have graphics as their key workload, meaning that graphics card upgrades will almost always have the biggest effects. However, the graphics routines need to be told WHAT to draw before the graphics card(s) can do anything at all. In most games, this is no big deal, since those routines on the CPU will be fairly easy. However, in simulations you typically have a LOT of very heavy computation that needs to be done before each frame can even start to be rendered. DCS is an example of this. Before your graphics card can do anything at all about the next frame, the CPU needs to calculate everything related to where things should be in that frame - with the actual simulation bit being a huge issue. There are improvements that can be done and are being done, but the only _really_ effective one is to migrate to an inherently multithreaded engine. This is not easy, you typically want this done at the design stage before you've written a single line of code.

The Xeon X5460 is not really an upgrade as far as CPU goes. It's a shrink of the Core architecture you already had, with some gains potentially from having "spare" cores for the OS and extra caches and suchlike, but also potential drawbacks from it being a server/workstation-optimised chip. Basically, if CPU-bottlenecked on a Core2 Duo 8400, a move to Xeon X5460 would not be expected to give much (if any) improvement.

My question would be: why put "DCS" on an SSD, but then place the modules - being an integral part of your DCS experience - on a different medium? This seems to me like taking an SSD as a "boot drive" but putting all the programs you'll be using on a mechnical drive.

When using the reg file, all you need to do is download and run. (Double click.) Using regedit is simply an alternative to using the reg file. Note that some browsers might auto-rename the reg file, causing it to not work. (I've seen Internet Explorer do this.) In this case, simply right-click the file and change the ending (the stuff after the . ) back to "reg".

You don't necessarily need a registry patch to perform the fix. An alternative is to open the registry editor (regedit), then follow the tree under HKEY_CURRENT_USER to find Leatherneck, and simply right-click and "delete" on the relevant module. The registry files basically just do that for you. I checked and there should be one on the page now: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/faq/activation_wiki/ The contents of the file: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Leatherneck Simulations\DCS:MiG-21 BiS\Keys]

Ah, yeah, fair point. As Const mentioned, there is a new version coming. Hopefully it'll give you everything you desire. :)

Well, to be fair, it's not like the flight model engineers would get tapped to write website code. :P

Didn't you hear that function-over-form is the Russian way? :D I'm not sure I understand the complaint about formatting "depending" on screen size though? It's not screen size that matters, it's pixel count. (You can do the same through just windowing your browser and making it smaller. Yes, there is a lower limit where things might get strange. This is how it is. I find this to occur at roughly 1280. There might be a point that this could be adjusted to be more inclusive of the swathe of 13xx width laptops out there, though fortunately I suspect this will solve itself due to the constant proliferation of high-DPS monitors. If you are using a small (physically) monitor with a high DPS count, unfortunately the problem is very likely in Windows itself. Windows 8 is still not quite where it wants to be with font transformation for high-DPS monitors even for native applications.

Correct. The only adverse effect from not deactivating is that you don't "regain" the previously used activation. You get 10 activations to start with specifically because we know this happens. And as mentioned by the previous poster, whenever you spend the last activation, you will get it back automatically after a month.

Say this is true: Installed modules: Mod_A - belonging to DCS account Acct_A Mod_B - belonging to DCS account Acct_A Mod_C - belonging to DCS account Acct_A Mod_D - belonging to DCS account Acct_B What then happens when you start MP with Acct_A is that your simulator will try to initialize a module (Mod_D) that belongs to Acct_B while using Acct_A. My suggestion is that you should have two separate logins on the computer, and separate DCS installs, such that your install won't be trying to initialize your friend's copy of "Mod_D" (BlackShark in this case). So on your install you'll have Mod_A, Mod_B, and Mod_C installed, while on his install there is Mod_D. Then it should work. Mixing accounts on the same install will cause this issue, which is the reason for this statement on the E-shop: "All DCS modules should be purchased from one website account."

Can you please elaborate on these points: 1) You say you are running on the same PC. Are you using separate logins to windows on the machine? 2) If not, are you running on the same local install? The most likely cause for the issue is if you are running the same install, with the same registry entries (same login), causing the MP system to see conflicting serial number associations with the login being used - IE, you logging in to your account on an install that also tries to use a BlackShark install that uses his account.

One minor note though: have you ever used your Steam-purchased modules in multiplayer? The "step 2" thing can be done easily through simply clicking multiplayer and creating an account there. MP accounts are the same thing. That way, your Steam keys will become immediately associated with that account, and if later using the DCS World installer from our site it will get automatically recognized and you can get the modules installed through the game itself. It is however important to ensure that you keep all purchases on one account. However, if there are mistakes and you accidently end up with multiple accounts, the website does have measures for you to move keys to any desired account.