- Product activation doesn't have anything to do with the sim so, if your products are already activated, they won't require any reactivation in the new sim. Unless, of course, you also reinstall Windows, but that doesn't seem the case from your description. So, don't worry about activation.
- We now use the standard add-on.xml method in V4, but we also use it in V3 (3.4 only, not with previous versions) and regardless of the sim, we use a single shared folder to store all our sceneries, for the precise reason that you won't have wasted hd space if you have a scenery installed in multiple simulators. This will also simplify the Live Updates, since the one and only version of the scenery which is installed will be updated once, for all sims.
This means, whenever you install something using the new installers, to go into V4, there's no way to keep your old installations as they were, so you have two choices:
1) Uninstall everything from FSDT (and old Flightbeam installers too), then download the updated installers for everything, and reinstall them. This is by far the cleaner way, but it requires uninstalling everything and re download everything.
OR
2) Install something that uses the new installer (GSX, for example), and let the installer MIGRATE your already installed products to the new folder and the new add-on.xml method (not using the scenery.cfg anymore). This is QUICKER, since it only requires to download ONE installer, which will move all the rest, including Flightbeam products.
#2 it's faster, but it might not work if there are issues like errors in your scenery.cfg or other config files. #1 it's slower, but it's cleaner. You might just try doing #2 first, and see what's happens. If you find any issues, you can still do #1.
The important thing, it's just realizing that, now that we use a single shared folder for all products, the default choice of installing everything into C:\Program Files (x86)\Addon Manager, it's usually the best choice. The only reason why you might not want to accept the default, it's because you don't have enough space on C: so, choosing another drive it's perfectly fine so, you might choose D:\Addon Manager, for example, and it's ok. What you shouldn't do, instead, is trying to install INTO the sim, since one of the main benefits of the new system, is that will allow you to uninstall the whole sim, without having to reinstall the addons that use the add-on.xml method.
