Problems with Plan-G running on linked Windows XP and 7 computer

[Screwbottle]

Hello forum members

This is my first post on this forum. I would presume my problem advised here, if not resolved, can be forwarded to Tim. I have succesfully used Plan-G for many a year now, so this is a first for me in discovering a fault. One of my business clients, like me, enjoys virtual aviation, and asked me to help him set up two computers to be linked, one running Win7 and the main one for FSX, and an older machine running WinXP used to run Plan-G. He has a registered version of FSUIPC with WideFS / WideClient, and I can succesfully link the two computers with WideClient.

There is only an installation of FS9 on the older XP machine, and I have downloaded the appropriate versions of Plan-G for both operating systems. The XP machine runs the database update for FS9 with no issues, but because there is no installation of FSX on it, I run the database update on the Win7 machine, and copy it over to the XP machine into the Plan-G data folder, overwriting the default one there. And here is my problem, when I start Plan-G, wherever there is an airport and surrounding info related to it, it is a black square. I have tried to export the files as CSV's and import, I have updated the nVidia drivers on the XP machine and I have fulfilled the Plan-G .Net requirement, and made sure that XP has the last and latest updates available. I have tried all settings available in Plan-G and the different maps, the results remain the same. The fresh installation of Plan-G is clear on the maps, it's only when I apply the FSX database update that the black squares appear. So to date nothing fixes the black square issue, and I don't have another XP computer running FSX to see if it is a O/S database creation issue.

The XP machine is really old, a P4 2.3GHZ, with an 80GB HDD, 512MB of RAM, and a nVidia Geforce FX5200 (I can upgrade this video card to an unused nVidia Geforce GTX520). There is nothing else running on this computer except it's O/S, FS9 and Plan-G. My 39 years of IT tells me that the problem could be with this very old hardware, but I need to clear up any issues that might be coming from Plan-G in incompatiblity, or that I have exposed a bug.

I look forward to any feedback and help.

Regards

[tim arnot]

Can you post a screenshot? That sounds very bizarre. Does the FSX database work okay on the W7 machine?

The database is really only a list of lat/lon positions & info for it to draw the various markers - png images with transparency. Conceptually there's no difference between the FS9 data and FSX or even X-Plane (you can rename the database files and swap them about...), so if it can draw one data set it should have no trouble with the others. The markers that it draws are the same, no matter what dataset is in use. (but we all know computers don't read the same rule books, right...?)

[Screwbottle]

Hi Tim

Thanks for your direct reply. Yes I can post screenshots, my client is 60KM's away, and I won't be going out that way in quite a while, nothing planned ahead. But I'll try and get a Teamviewer session linked to the XP machine, take screenshots, or get the client to take some and email to me. Yes I also found it very bizarre, and the W7 computer is working fine with PG. The strange thing is it worked once with an older version of PG on this XP computer, a few weeks back when I set it all up. The next evening the client telephoned me to say that there were black squares all over his XP computer PG, I though he was having me on, but he was right.

It seemed whatever I had done to make it work that first time I cannot reproduce, and it all fell over when the computer had some time to be completely powered down, more than 24 hours. I brought his database home to my two W7 computers with no issues. Yes I see that about the database files and their contents, so I am at a loss at the moment to offer a fix. My gut feel of my many years still tells me that I need to look at this computer as the prime suspect, the video drivers and possibly the .net version/s installed on it.

It has been hammered twice by malware, which I cleaned up in the past, and the few weeks back when I started to clean out this computer and install PG onto it. I advised him that I could not support this machine, unless he got proper payware malware protection, thankfully he did (Kaspersky Internet Security 2015). I've made sure that on updating PG to the latest version I had KIS temporarily turned off, as I am fully aware of some programs being interfered with while doing an install.

And I have given this XP computer a thorough cleanup with tools such as MalwareBytes and Kaspersky, Piriform CCleaner and Defraggler, Steven Gould's Clean-Up, and Macecraft's Powertools, all of these I trust with my IT life, and having been used by myself successfully without issues, since they were first available.

Agreed with the tongue in cheek statement of computers not reading the same rule books. I have just set up 16 identical computers with FSX for a school and their SIM learning academy, and I found different issues on many of them even though everything was the same hardware wise and software wise. So yeah go figure, I suppose the base sand used to create the electronics is also not the same!!!!

I'll get some screenshots to you as soon as I can.

Regards