Trial time, lengthening or resettable?

[Tobus]

I have downloaded all of the Hawaiian airports (PHNL, vol1 and vol2) to try them loving the area of Hawaii to fly in.
To try them within my FSX installation, I installed the demos.
To get a good look at the new airports, I load op my Aerosoft Dimona, set up on the active runway of PHNL, immediately slew to 3000ft and glide around to get a good look.
However, after less than 2 minutes, all cars and buildings go away or leave black spots. Is this the trial time-out? Because I get the message stating that trial time has started, but not that it has finished.

I tried the other airports from vol1 and vol2, and have simular results: alle buildings gone in like 1 1/2 minutes.
Only on the last run did I get a message that trial time was over, some time after the buildings had gone. Really not a good time to check if all is nice and running well with my other scenery- and traffic addons.

Is there any way of lengthening or resetting the trial time in FSX?

[PUP4ORD]

All the trials are supposed to last 5 min's.....

[virtuali]

The Trial duration is 5 minutes.

However, this includes the time it takes to load the scenery so, if you computer is slow loading (and the first load of the day might be slower, because it's not cached in memory), this is taken away from the trial time.

To get the most of it, don't create a flight at a Trial airport. Instead, create a flight to a *nearby* airport, but not so close the is in the airport range, which is usually 10 NM.

For example, if you want to try Kona, you might start creating a flight at PHNL, once you are at PHNL, select Kona, and it should load a bit faster, allowing for more or less the whole 5 minutes.

When the Trial end, you WILL get a red message on top of the screen. It might not be exactly in sync with the disappearing, but it should be usually quite close, unless your system is *really* slow loading the scenery, in this case the buildings disappear before the trial ended message.

[Bruce Hamilton]

Is there any way of lengthening or resetting the trial time in FSX?

You'll have to exit the simulator to reset it, but you can have as many trials as you want.

[Tobus]

Ok, I understand, but find it strange.

My first load is about 2 minutes, slightly more than 1 after that.
That still doesn't account for barely 2 minutes of trial time.
I also dislike the hoops I have to jump through to get everything installed and running with my virusscanner.

I'll look into it further, but not sure of buying still, thanks for the replies.

[virtuali]

My first load is about 2 minutes, slightly more than 1 after that.
That still doesn't account for barely 2 minutes of trial time.

Yes, it does, 2 minutes for loading + 2 minutes of trial = 4 minutes. The Trial lasts 5 minutes, but if you start a Flight to a Trial-enabled airport, the counter starts as soon as you select the airport NOT when you press the "Start Flight" button so, even the time you take to select the weather, the airplane, the time/date will count.

That's why I suggested to start to a nearby airport which is outside to the Trial area so, no counter will start, and if you move from this nearby airport to the trial one after you are already there and your airplane, weather, date/time are already being chosen, the load should be very fast.

I also dislike the hoops I have to jump through to get everything installed and running with my virusscanner.

That's because your antivirus is flawed and is mistakenly thinking our modules are thread, wrongly labeling as false positive. Not all antivirus do that, the free Microsoft Security Essentials, which we use, doesn't do that for example, and is not the only one. Only some of them require to do this, and improving reliability against false positive should be something the antivirus developer should do.

Unfortunately, they seems to do exactly the opposite and, for marketing reasons (being able to brag about their ability to discover more virus than the competition), they end up making the system unusable, because they flag as threats lots of legit programs too because, instead of relying on a database of files that are *proven* to be dangerous, they rely on heuristic methods, which are very unreliable.

I have my MS Security Essentials A/V configured to exclude my whole FSX folder, and never seen a false positive message, nor I had to ever turn it off, nor I had to ever change its configuration after doing that initially.