Was this for our own good? (Part III) - a.k.a. "Fault Tolerant Heap??? I don't want your Fault Tolerant Heap..."

I've been doing some work on the AIRAC database loader for our upcoming FSLabs A320 addon... mainly to make it load faster. Well, that's an excuse - the real reason was, I read an article about the new Concurrency features that Visual Studio 2010 provides and I was really curious if using the Concurrency library would make things faster by parallelizing some specific pieces of my code - and guess what! It does!

The example code I chose was the AIRAC database file that contains the NAV FIX points - all 183 thousand of them, which were previously being loaded serially through the file - I thought, wouldn't that be a good example for parallelism?

I changed the code to allow for Concurrency - and had a simple heap corruption error... that I couldn't find at first (don't worry, I've found it since). Three test runs later, the debug version of my test application started running VERY slowly... and I mean VERY slowly... (about 100 times slower per 5000 fixes read in), making things quite undebuggable... ("but I hadn't changed anything, I swear!") and that was one of those moments when I started staring at the screen, not quite knowing "WTF" (I saw somewhere an explanation of this from a father to his child... Sir, it does NOT mean "Welcome To Facebook" - but I digress...)

Then an epiphany occurred. One of those light bulb moments, when you look at the debugger output window and notice an extra line there that wasn't there before...

 "Fault tolerant heap shim applied to current process. This is usually due to previous crashes."

A bit of Googl Microsoft Bing-ing later, and I could find the reason: Windows 7, in all its Microsoft spirit ("Don't worry, we'll fix it for ya!"), decided that my heap was getting corrupted too often by this irresponsible and stupid application executable and needed some more totalitarian help... ("Sir, nothing to see here, move along"), so it added the (debug) executable to its internal list of "applications which don't behave".

Long story short, when FTH (Fault Tolerant Heap) services are active for a specific application, it starts CRAWLING instead of running properly because each heap activity (which, for 183 thousand entries means 183 thousand of them) would be monitored and followed...

The solution was simple enough: Kill the specific FTH registry entry for that app, restart - all is well again.

The registry key where all this 'magic' exists is

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\FTH\State

if you find ANYTHING in there, other than the (Default) key, please be aware that that specific app will behave very poorly, because "Big Brother" is watching it.

Wouldn't the solution be simpler if instead of making our apps silently crawl, Microsoft would simply pop a message up saying "Your app sucks. Fix it, or else"?

FlightProSim (or ProFlightSim or ProFlightSimulator) - a scam?

For days now, I've been subjected to unwanted advertisement when I log onto my Facebook account, by a newly formed (?) company out of Australia claiming to have developed "The Most Realistic Flight Simulator Ever Created For Desktop Computers".

Now, I've kept in touch with almost all the PC flight simulator development teams globally for the past ten years or so and it came as somewhat of a surprise to see an unknown entity suddenly appear with such bold claims - I admit, it felt quite embarrassing to me.

It didn't take long, however, to understand what sort of "deal" these people are offering - misleading at best, outright shameful and quite annoying for the majority of simmer friends globally who have contacted me to ask if I have any "inside scoop" on this "new simulator", only to discover the truth at the end.

You see, this is nothing else but a quiet rebranding of the GPL'ed (thus forever free) and well-known Flight Gear simulator that has been in development for many years now by a team of volunteers who do not charge (or receive) a single penny for their efforts.

Read the entire scoop here.

To you, Mr "Dan Freeman- 13 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, Sydney, NSW, Australia" (that's the owner of that "ProFlightSim" web site at the time of this blog post writing), all I have to say is: Shame, Shame, Shame!

When to gripe to your Virtual Private Server ISP...

As some of you might know, apart from running Flight Sim Labs, Ltd., I have also been wearing the co-administrator hat for FSDeveloper.com for a couple years now...

Not so long ago, the FSDeveloper admins (Arno, Nick, Jon and myself) selected to move FSDeveloper.com to a new server ISP facility, as demand had grown substantially over the years and the older one was showing signs of old age. For reasons of familiarity, we decided the new server would be a Windows-based solution, running on a Virtual Private Server (so costs could remain very low, as we have no real income to support this volunteer-based effort).

This worked exceptionally well since the switch, allowing us to provide better service to our "customers" (Flight Simulator developers) with some nice new facilities, etc.

However, for the past couple months now, we've been getting reports by our users complaining that the server was not too stable - some times they'd be able to log on, other times they'd get connection timeouts or "reset by host" errors. While this was happening, our Domain Name Server also had some issues, so we attributed the problems to faulty name to IP resolutions.

Well- today the problem returned - and returned to stay. Nobody could connect to the web site or the forums, no matter what their location was, their browser, or their ISP. At the same time, however, the administrators could log on to the server via Remote Desktop, so it didn't look to be a network connectivity issue...

Digging into our server showed that while IIS 6.0 was running perfectly well, there were absolutely no user connections honored - instead, a bunch of "Connection_Refused" errors would appear every minute or so in the HTTPERR logs.

Some aggressive googling later, we identified the culprit:

Our ISP has selected Virtuozzo for their Virtual Private Server hosting solutions and our FSDeveloper.com server is one of many VEs running on the same 32-bit physical machine.

While total free RAM on the physical machine is not as important, the case is not so with memory that cannot be "paged out" to disk (such as memory used by critical processes and drivers that need to stay in place all the time). 

The problem was isolated to IIS6.0 and non-paged memory pool shortage issues. IIS will refuse any new connections if it detects that non-paged memory pool usage has increased enough to leave less than 20Mb available on the physical machine (hence the many "Connection_Refused" errors in the HTTPERR logs).

We verified this was the problem by using a workaround - adding a "EnableAggressiveMemoryUsage" registry entry which temporarily fixed the problem, signaling that IIS should not refuse connections until free memory falls below 8MB of non-paged memory pool.

While we're elated that we can now serve our loyal FSDeveloper followers once again, we are a bit frustrated that the REAL solution will have to come from the ISP:

a) limit the number of VEs on the same machine so non-paged memory pool usage is reduced,

or

b) move our virtual server instance to a different machine with less VEs

Solution c) is also a possibility: Selecting a dedicated server to host FSDeveloper.com - however, the expense for this would be about five times larger than the existing solution, so it cannot happen at this time...

Let's see what our friendly ISP has to say about this problem. I'll keep everyone posted when I hear back!

FSX Performance tip

I see this question asked over and over again in forums: "What can I do to increase my FSX performance"? More often than not, the question is answered in ways that I'd describe as... entertaining, but far from true.


Here's a small tip that will fix your FSX performance, almost doubling your FPS, if you are unlucky enough not to have been aware of the consequences:

If you run FSX in Windowed Mode and have the FSX window maximized, sometimes the Windows Start button will overlap your FSX window. If your machine is powerful enough, you'll tend to be annoyed by the seemingly low FPS, but performance will be enough for you to simply be puzzled.


Resize the FSX window to allow the Start button NOT to overlap (or simply hide the taskbar) and you'll find that performance will increase - sometimes even double.


Same holds true for ANY external window that overlaps the FSX display - don't let any of those small popups come in view, as your FPS will drop to almost half (the technical reasons are outside the scope of my note here).


Let me know if you had this issue and if my advice above fixed it!

More info about Microsoft Flight

Microsoft posted some more information on Flight, together with another teaser video.

Find it here.

Microsoft Flight

The cat is out of the bag, it seems... (well - sort of).

Watch the announcement video here and then talk about it here...

Reawarded!

Seems that Microsoft thought that I did good last year again, so they reawarded me as MVP.

My sincere thanks goes to Alessandro and the other people responsible for this (you know who you are!) - I hope I can keep doing what I've been doing to deserve this!

PLEASE don't do this...

I am going to address this blog entry to my fellow Flight Simulation Addon product developers. Some are more experienced than others, we all have a common goal, though: To produce quality addons which will make our simulation audience happy.

Fellow developers, PLEASE don't alter other people's (or companies') registry entries or paths. I know you think you're doing the world a service, but in fact, you're causing (inadvertently, I know it) severe support pains and aren't even aware of it.

Altering a registry key value, ESPECIALLY one that is meant to be controlled BY THE USER, goes against all programming principles we've all learned while programming under Windows. And when that registry key happens to be the setup path where Flight Simulator is installed, you're adding pain and suffering above and beyond your intended goal.

So... please... for the sake of sanity (because where I've been, I am sure you will one time have to be as well). Don't do it. (or, at the very least, alert the user that you will be doing it... or... don't do it. Don't. Don't. Hope I was clear).

Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside...

I don't generally reproduce other people's material as a way to attract readers to my blog, however I have to make an exception here to re-post a note from our Flight Sim Labs forums, as I feel it most accurately represents why I gave up working at Wall Street to start my own flight simulation addon development software house...

I know Dan won't mind me pointing to his very eloquently put comments here.

Thank you Dan, for expressing EXACTLY why we at the "Labs" keep doing what we're doing...

Can you set DEP to "AlwaysOff" on your Dell laptop?

It seems that many people cannot - and unfortunately, this post does not talk about a solution, but rather as a heads-up, or a possible point of focus, for people who might have a solution to offer.

But what is the problem?

Well, as far as I understand it (disclaimer: I do *not* own a Dell laptop), Dell laptops come with a version of preinstalled Windows Vista or Windows 7 on them which has some funky partition mapping on the drive, as well as some disabled features.

For various reasons, there comes a time when users will want to turn the Data Execution Prevention feature off, by opening a Command Prompt Window and entering "bcdedit /set nx AlwaysOff". (This helps run applications that were developed before Vista was available which otherwise trip the DEP flags and crash on the user - some of them being Microsoft's own Flight Simulator series, FS2004 and FSX).

The command can be successfully executed (with administrator rights or elevated privileges), but when the user reboots (sometimes MUCH later on), they are faced with an error 0x7b and a Blue Screen of death (BSOD).

So far, the ONLY reports we have are coming from users with Dell laptops who have NOT scrapped the Dell-provided Windows installations.


The obvious workaround is for these users to FORMAT their drives and install a clean NEW version of Windows (preferably, Windows 7 x64 now), that does NOT come from the Dell-provided disks.


All attempts at contacting Dell about this problem have been met with no success for the moment.

So... do YOU have a solution for this problem? If so, and you are STILL running your Dell laptop with the original, Dell-installed Windows and you were able to turn DEP AlwaysOff, I'm prepared to offer you a free Concorde-X license as a thank-you for sharing that information with me :).

How to cleanly install your NVidia drivers

I get this question time and again. I usually suggest DriverCleaner, a utility that's very helpful in ensuring that there are no annoying remains of possible old drivers left in your system. However, I'll admit that's only half the story. For the best experience and the fullest solution, I recommend reading this article, which describes step-by-step what you need to do to get rid of all issues, once and for all (well, until you have to redo it, I guess).

Note: The article was written with Vista in mind, but it certainly applies to Windows 7 in the same way.

The 'disappearing textures' fix for FSX

A lot of bandwidth has been spent already by FSX users on a problem they are experiencing with complex add-ons, such as the Concorde-X, the LDS 767 and other similar products, whereby aircraft and scenery textures disappear after awhile, leaving them transparent, or worse, crashing the system, requiring a restart. This gets very frustrating, especially if it happens at the end of a long flight, right before landing your simulated aircraft.

Thanks to the dedication and hard work of a distinguished member of the FSX Community, Jesus Altuve, who I want to publicly acknowledge and thank via my blog, it seems that a fix for this problem (which has existed for the past four years, since FSX has been released) is now possible. Jesus has found some new fsx.cfg settings that are undocumented, but help alleviate this issue for everyone that has tried them so far.

It was, however, noted that not every member of our community is equally versed in making changes in their computer, especially when these changes involve digging deep into the internals of Windows folders, some of which are even hidden, and applying edits to files that are normally best left alone by the ordinary FSX user.

As such, I took some time to develop and provide an automated utility that will take care of the edits for you, allowing different levels of control to the various items that are there for editing.

Version 1.0 of the automated FSX Texture Fix utilty is already released in the FSLabs web site forum downloads section. I'd welcome some feedback if you use this utility, as the news on how these edits work is constantly coming and more discoveries are coming out as time passes.

Once more - please allow me to express our gratitude and thanks to Jesus Altuve for his dedication and hard work!

Without further ado, you can download the utility here.

So it's out...

The Concorde-X has been out for quite a couple weeks now and the responses have been overwhelming! So far, apart from a few small issues that all new product releases carry, our customers have been cheering this release, saying that it's one of the best products out there for Flight Simulator X!

I was browsing the net today and stumbled upon a wonderful podcast (and a video too!) from our good friends at FSBreak.net, which describes in detail what they think of our product!

Thanks guys, it means a lot to us that you feel this way!

Flight Sim Labs previews new Concorde-X in an amazing video!

Those of you who might not have caught this news so far, please take a look:



 

Some nifty additions to blog

I wasn't too happy with my blog stats counter before, so I decided to replace it with Google Analytics (it's invisible to readers and allows me to see cool information on where my readers come from - I already filtered out my dad's IP address, because it tended to skew the numbers :)).

Adding Google Analytics involved making a small change to my blog template, to add a tiny bit of JavaScript at the bottom. While doing that, I noticed that Google has added a bunch of "gadgets" which can be dragged and dropped into the template - a couple of them were cool enough for me to add.

As a result, now you can "subscribe to" my blog using various methods and also become a "Blog Follower" - cool stuff! Good job, Google!

Artisteer - how wonderful - and EASY - it is to design web sites now!

As a current Microsoft MVP, I sometimes receive offers to test and endorse various products, as their developers believe my word carries a bit more respect than usual in our community (are they crazy? :-)).

Generally speaking, most of the products are descent and relatively bug-free, but they don't fit my short-list of "stuff I *really* recommend".

I'd like to devote a paragraph, though, to a product that really stood out from the competition, and that's Artisteer.

As I mention in my previous article below, Flight Sim Labs just unveiled the new web site design we were working on for quite some time. We had been using DotNetNuke since the "start of time", but we weren't 100% satisfied, as it was slower than expected and had some issues with finding plugins that would fit the needs of our company. As such, we turned our sights onto Wordpress, a Content Management System that is lightweight but very powerful at the same time, giving our developers and management a lot more bang for the buck (well, it had to: It's free :-)).

Rather than designing things from scratch, though, our graphics designer / guru, Margarita Fiotaki decided to take advantage of the offer for an Artisteer license, as it was promising to ease the transition into a Wordpress skin / template theme that would match the look&feel design requirements of the company.

And boy, did it help!

As such, I am very happy to promote Artisteer as a quality product which really has the capacity to dramatically transform the ease of use of creating websites based around WordPress and other CMS packages. Well done folks!

Flight Sim Labs unveiled a new Web Site look and new Forums!

It's been a year since Flight Sim Labs was formulated by a team of individuals who have a common goal: To produce the best quality add-ons for Flight Simulator that they can!

Since then, FSLabs released a few specialized products for their customers, mostly focusing around interfaces and drivers for specialized hardware, such as the Engravity CDU, the CPFlight MCP product family and the GoFlight instruments.

Fslabs developers also very close to wrapping up development of the Concorde-X flagship add-on product for Flight Simulator X, an aircraft that's been anticipated by thousands of simmers globally. The Concorde-X has already been receiving very favorable reviews by those who've had the pleasure of previewing it in various simulation shows around the world so the team is sure it will set new standards on how to enjoy simming beyond the speed of sound!

That's not all the team has been busy with, though! In the meantime, the crew has been developing a new web site and forum system behind the scenes and they're all too happy to announce that it's going live very soon! Some new content was added too, but the primary goal was to enhance functionality so the audience can browse more easily and enjoy some of the most recent advancements in "Web 2.0" technology.

I am proud to be leading this team of experts and I am sure the Concorde-X release will be enjoyed by a lot of people globally! But that's not all that's coming from FSLabs...

The next product is already in development... it's smaller, but not less recognized, has two engines, flies at lower than the speed of sound, but has carried a LOT more passengers over the years...

Can you guess what it is? :)

The Concorde-X *live* at the Lelystad FS-Weekend Show

At 7th & 8th November 2009 this big Flight Simulation Event will be held in the Aviodrome at Lelystad Airport. All aspects of flight simulation will be shown to big crowds traditionally attending! You'll find all kinds of participants such as FSclubs, flightdecks, real motion stands, sales of parts and software and many demonstrations and you will have full access to the exhibition of the museum.

Flight Sim Labs will be there, demonstrating the Concorde-X, on two PCs, for the first time LIVE for our audience. The latest alpha version of the aircraft addon will be available in all its glory for you to play and experiment, under our guidance and supervision as we are still putting the finishing touches together.

If you wish to speak to me or the other attending members of the team, come on Saturday, when you can find us at the FSAddon booth that our own Francois Dumas is hosting - Andrew, Margarita and I will be there to answer any questions you might have!

See you there!

FSX - Best hardware combination of the day

I've decided to blog about this, as it's a question that people ask me from time to time and I keep changing my views depending on what's available at the time.

A couple clarifications first:

1) Obviously, the absolute-best hardware for FSX would be the most expensive hardware you can buy today, with the possible exception of a graphics card, as FSX is not so GPU-dependent as it is CPU-dependent.
2) We're going for bang-for-the-buck here, so I'll list my choice of what you *should* get, in order to have the best combination for the least-crazy money spent. Obviously, a 1TB solid-state disk that costs $25,000 in itself would be awesome, but it falls outside the normal-people category :-).
3) This list is already obsolete by the time you read this post. Yes, the minute I post it, it's obsolete. Such is the nature of the beast, such is the name of the game. If you want up-to-date, do your own research.

That said, here are my picks:

0) Software (yes, I know "best hardware combination", so let's get this out of the way first): Windows 7 x64. Hands down, the best OS to-date. I've been a beta tester since its early days - it's stable, drivers work for 99.95% of the stuff out there and if you like learning new things, this will reward you handsomely. Yes, there are some quirks (and a small issue with adding scenery for FSX, which has a workaround), but there have been quirks with XP too, and once you learn them, you'll coast.

With the Windows choice out of the way, let's make sure we set the stakes for what it is we're trying to define:

On the one hand, we can be looking for a "pure" FSX box, which will run Flight Simulator, possibly a couple FS-related utilities (Squawkbox) and *nothing* else. On the other, we can be looking for a power-user PC which is FSX-oriented, but will also run other software (possibly do some video conversions from DVD to AVI, etc.). Keep this in mind, while you read on...

I came into this article thinking I had a very clear view of what is "out there today" - only to be very surprised in the end. Only just a month ago did I read an article by Hilbert Hagedoorn of Guru3d.com, comparing the latest batch of processors Intel had come out with. In there, it was clear that the i7 870 was better, euro for euro, than the i7 920, which was the price-point comparison at the time.

Now, things are different: The i7 870 (Socket 1156), combined with a decent 1156 motherboard is priced at around the same price-point as the i7 950 (Socket 1366) with an X58 motherboard. As such, I'll give both the same mark, as speed-wise, they perform almost identically.

The only differences I could decipher from reading a lot about them are:

1) The 870 runs at a 95W Thermal Design Power, as compared to the 130W TDP on the 950. In the long run, this *will* affect your out-of-pocket electricity expenses. (Score 1 for the 870).

2) The 950 runs 133MHz faster than the 870, non-overclocked. (Score 1 for the 950).

3) The X58 chipset allows for a triple-DDR3 RAM slot combination, with a max 24GB of DDR3 RAM, where the X55 allows dual-DDR3 RAM slots only (max 16GB RAM). (Score 1 for the 950 again).

Are any of the above making a difference when it comes to PURE FSX performance? No, not really. Even the max RAM comparison, which could theoretically affect performance here makes little difference with FSX being a 32bit application, thus only taking advantage of up to 4GB of RAM. As such, the winner can only be judged on technicalities... and mine will be the 950, because since I am a developer, I tend to have a bunch of other apps running at the same time, and memory becomes a crucial factor in my day-to-day.

For the hard-core FS simmer reader, though, I'd bet my money on the 870, as the power consumption economies are far more important in the long run (one to two years of average expected usage before PC upgrades).

With that out of the way, let's list some more hardware picks of the day:

- Motherboard: Anything ASUS or GigaByte. For the 950, grab a triple-slot motherboard (the ASUS P6T Deluxe v2 is a good selection). For the 870, any of the high-end models will do fine - no big differences there, so whichever you find the cheapest at any given day is good.

- RAM: Here also, speed is important, but more so is budget. Grab the MOST and FASTEST memory you can afford - make sure that you pick reputable brands, if possible go with the motherboard's compatibility list as these chips will have been tested to comply with standards. Be careful to buy memory that runs at lower voltages, as power consumption (and heat dissipated) play a role here too.

- Graphics card: Flight Simulator X is CPU-bound. This means that there will be VERY little difference observed (perhaps a half-frame or so) if you go from an 8800GT 512mb card you bought awhile ago to a GTX295. Disclaimer: This is NOT true for other games which are GPU-bound, so choose depending on whether you intend to play other games at high-resolution too.

- Hard disk: You will have read in my previous blog posts that I have become a big proponent of Solid State Disk technology. This is more true than ever today, especially since I recommended Windows 7, which is the first OS tuned to work directly with SSDs, using the TRIM command (go here and here if you like further reading about this feature).
For Flight Simulator X, go with a dual SSD disk combination: One for Windows 7 (64GB should be adequate) and one for FSX (128GB for those among us who like LOTS of sceneries loaded). Pay particular attention to SSD speeds- not all disks are created equal, though lately MLC technologies have been coming closer and closer to SLCs (which remain very expensive). A good pick are the Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG2D and its smaller 64GB brother, clocking at 220MB/s read / 180MB/s write speeds, almost twice as fast than their older MLC brethren.
For movies and other data, use your older SATA regular hard disks - they're good enough for me :-).

The above are the most critical parts when building a PC especially for Flight Simulator X. Various other components (DVD recorder drive, Sound cards, etc.) are secondary and this blog post is too focused to talk more about them. I will, however, make an exception and dedicate a line to water cooling, which I've found to be much less problematic than people had described it in the past. If you check your system every six months to make sure the coolant levels are maintained (the liquid does tend to require refills every so often), the system will run better than the equivalent air-cooled one (as fans tend to collect LOTS of dust and cleaning them is far more complicated - for me, anyway - than simply refilling a cooler tank).

Well, there you have it. Please let me know if I've forgotten anything you consider crucial for your Flight Simulator PC and I will try to accommodate!

Windows 7 RTM Annoyances Part #1- Matrox TH2G

Spent the summer in Gytheion - that was both a blessing and a curse in disguise, as the summer house is about 50m from the beach, but it's also fully equipped with a beefy PC and a (slow, but steady) ADSL connection. This meant I had a 'holiday' in reach, but I could also work in the same manner as I could in our home. Guess what ended up happening.

Yes - I worked. Every day, all day. I went to the beach maybe 3 times all summer long. Meh - it's OK - after all, I don't like swimming that much (not in the sea, anyway - too much salt, sand and mess to clean up afterwards).

Why this prologue? Well- I wanted to artfully mention my beefy PC there of course :). And what best to install on a beefy PC over the summer, than the all-new RTM of Windows 7 x64. The PC had previously been running Windows 2008 Server (made to look like Vista), but boys love toys, so Win7 was installed. Without a hitch. And ran beautifully. Just like it has been running on the laptop - but that couldn't have been a comparison, so I had to know.

One note here though: The PC at Gytheion runs on a dual-monitor configuration, using both DVI outputs of a semi-recent NVidia card. Thus, it runs well, really just as expected.

The summer ended, so we returned back to Athens - our son had to go to school, etc.

My beefier PC at home patiently waited its turn. I had been running Vista x64 before, and with all the software that one tends to install over time and since Win7 showed no problems whatsoever on the other, less beefy PC, I was really itching to install here.

And I did.

And after a week, I am reinstalling.

Why?

Because no matter how much I've tried since, I simply cannot convince it that I am not SERIOUSLY myopic and entirely disabled, so I want my system fonts to look NORMAL, not HUGE. Because, you see, when Win7 was installing, it discovered that I was using a Matrox Triplehead2Go device, so it thought my monitor was really 3x1280x1024 - i.e. 3840x1024. And what does that mean? Well, it thought that it's a SUPER-wide screen resolution, which merits MEDIUM size fonts by default. Not Small, as per the normal configuration, on 1280x1024.

Guess what. It's HORRIBLE. You can't see ANYTHING. Even though I resized, told it to use Tahoma, set it to 8pt, went into the registry - nothing I could do would help.

So now I am reinstalling. This time, I've unplugged the TH2G. And now Windows7 thinks I have regular monitors. So my fonts look the right size.

Please, Redmond, next time you think you know what's best for the user - by all means, keep thinking it, but OFFER A CHOICE. Or, at least, allow that choice to be changed later...

I'll report back with more annoyances if/when I find any. Right now, I am simply reinstalling everything on the PC.