Windows 7 64bit Home Premium edition and Trainz 2012

[CaptEngland]

Hi all.

At long last my new P.C. should be delivered tomorrow.

As I have seen a couple of people having problems with running programs under Windows 7 (and not only Trainz series), is there any tips that people have that I need to follow in setting up Windows 7 or Trainz 2012.

On the old P.C. I have Vista 32bit Home Premium edition so know about `Run as Admin` issues.

Thanks in advance.
CaptEngland

 

[lewisner]

In the first few days after installing W7 you will recieve a huge number of Updates including usually a pack of 87.Windows usually tries but fails to install these and I found the way round it is install them manually by going into Windows Update , deselecting them all then installing them in batches of 15.Obviously you have to restart after every batch which is a pain but it works!
There's one update called Windows Silverlight which I installed but found that TRS2009 froze and would not open. When I uninstalled Silverlight Trainz worked OK again, so you might want to give that a miss.

 

[clam1952]

Probably better to install outside of Program Files, I haven't used program files other than for Microsoft programs since Win95..........

Disabling Windows search and indexing on the Trainz folder should help as well.

 

[fran1]

Install any trainz version in it's own partition if possible and as Clam mentioned well away from the OS. Has worked for me for years and seems to reduce/stop conflicts.

 

[CaptEngland]

Thanks guys (and girls) for the advice so far.

Trainz 2012 will be on one of the hard drives (2X 2TB drives) as Windows 7 OS is to be set up on the SSD drive (60 Gig). Hopefully I should not have any performance issues as this is the spec (I should of put this first!)

1 GB EV3A GTX 560ti Max Graphic Edition Graphic card,
LG, 10x Blu-ray Writer, 16x DVD±R,
Coolermaster CM 690 II Advanced Dom Case,
60GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD, 2.5" SATA 6GB,
2 x 2TB Western Digital WD20EARX Hard Drives,
Corsair H100 Hydro Series Extreme Performance CPU Cooler,
16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance LP, DDR3, 1600Mhz,
Intel Core i7 2600K, 3.4Ghz Quad Core, 8Mb Cache, Hyperthreading,
Asus P8Z68-V Pro - Intel Z68 Chipset,
Intel i7 professionally overclocked to @4.7Ghz!

All the above from Scan.co.uk

Plus next months pay day adding an 27" Monitor just to show off! :hehe:

What else does a (nearly) 40 yr old get for himself as a Birthday present?

Regards.
CaptEngland

 

[lewisner]

That sounds like a pretty beastly system. The only thing I would question is having 2 x 2TB HDD's rather than one x 1TB and a larger SSD. I have a 240GB SSD with OS and everything else on the one drive and it runs sweetly. The HDD is really just backup and personally I don't have enough junk to fill up 2TB!
I'm thinking about doubling my RAM to 16GB but don't know whether I would see any realtime benefit from it. I can get the extra 8GB for £74 free delivery.

 

[whitepass]

You only need over 4 GB for true 64 bit programs so unless you edit video you will never use it.

 

[JCitron]

That sounds like a pretty beastly system. The only thing I would question is having 2 x 2TB HDD's rather than one x 1TB and a larger SSD. I have a 240GB SSD with OS and everything else on the one drive and it runs sweetly. The HDD is really just backup and personally I don't have enough junk to fill up 2TB!
I'm thinking about doubling my RAM to 16GB but don't know whether I would see any realtime benefit from it. I can get the extra 8GB for £74 free delivery.

You'll also run into other issues too with the 16GB of RAM. There are many motherboards that support that much and more, but getting the DIMMs to behave nicely together is another issue. For some reason there are timing problems, either with the motherboard, or with the DIMMS themselves. I suppose if you want to use that much memory, you need to special order very expensive ECC memory,which has parity error correction and is always better quality than the off-the-shelf cheap stuff the rest of us get, and use a high-end workstation-class system board. The problem is I can't justify a system like that for my personal use.

I actually have 5-TB of total disk space. These are all standard hard drives running discretely and not in a RAID. Trainz has its own hard 2TB hard drive without any other swap files or system access to it other than necessary. The system has its own 1TB, and I have a backup 2TB where I make local internal backups of my Trainz install and anything else that matters. I then backup the data from the backup drive on a set schedule.

With Trainz on its own hard drive, away from Windows swap files and system logging, the program runs pretty nicely. I set this up way before SSDs have become reasonably priced. Perhaps some day I'll upgrade, but I'm waiting for the price to come down more and the reliability to go up more than it is now.

John

 

[lewisner]

"I actually have 5-TB of total disk space. These are all standard hard drives running discretely and not in a RAID. Trainz has its own hard 2TB hard drive without any other swap files or system access to it other than necessary. The system has its own 1TB, and I have a backup 2TB where I make local internal backups of my Trainz install and anything else that matters. I then backup the data from the backup drive on a set schedule."

But help me out here, off the top of my head W7, Trainz and all my other software currently occupies about half of my 240GB SSD. I can understand the rationale behind having lots of storage space if you want to store huge amounts of video's but as one PC magazine put it "You can convert all your VHS tapes and cassettes/vinyl to store on your PC or you can face the fact that in the vast majority of cases you'll never watch them or listen to them again".
So why give Trainz it's own 1TB drive unless you intend to model the entire system of the USA or Europe when most of the HDD will essentially be wasted space? It's like a single person living in a 5 bedroom council house.
It's also 5 times more power and 5 times the chance of a faulty drive plus 5 times more wiring.

 

[CaptEngland]

The reason why I want so much spare space is this P.C. will hopefully last for 5 years (barring an graphic card update if needed) plus a lot of software gettings brought cheap when Steam has sales! (190 games that I now own!)

On top of this, I use MS FSX (plus addons), MSTS (addons, upon addons), Railworks (plus addons), Trainz (a lot of addons), Sims 2 (never ending addons), films and music. :hehe:

Seeing that memory is cheap, why not get what you can afford?

Regards.
CaptEngland

 

[mrscsi]

You only need over 4 GB for true 64 bit programs so unless you edit video you will never use it.

Do you have any idea how many 64-bit programs there actually are available today? About the only thing that I use that isn't 64-bit would be transdem And Trainz:hehe:

3 DS Max with the new exporter I don't even have to go back to the 32-bit version of 09 to export anymore. Photoshop I use 64-bit version, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 64-bit version.

The main thing I've noticed having more than 4 GB, is that I'm able to do more things at one time. For example I can run Dragon, Firefox, Trainz, 3 DS Max and Photoshop all at the same time without a hitch.

 

[mrscsi]

You'll also run into other issues too with the 16GB of RAM. There are many motherboards that support that much and more, but getting the DIMMs to behave nicely together is another issue. For some reason there are timing problems, either with the motherboard, or with the DIMMS themselves. I suppose if you want to use that much memory, you need to special order very expensive ECC memory,which has parity error correction and is always better quality than the off-the-shelf cheap stuff the rest of us get, and use a high-end workstation-class system board. The problem is I can't justify a system like that for my personal use.

I actually have 5-TB of total disk space. These are all standard hard drives running discretely and not in a RAID. Trainz has its own hard 2TB hard drive without any other swap files or system access to it other than necessary. The system has its own 1TB, and I have a backup 2TB where I make local internal backups of my Trainz install and anything else that matters. I then backup the data from the backup drive on a set schedule.

With Trainz on its own hard drive, away from Windows swap files and system logging, the program runs pretty nicely. I set this up way before SSDs have become reasonably priced. Perhaps some day I'll upgrade, but I'm waiting for the price to come down more and the reliability to go up more than it is now.

John

I don't know if that's necessarily true or not John, I ordered RAM from crucial in basically three orders, my original i7 came with four gig all singles, and I had six slots on the original Dell/Intel motherboard. So I bought 8 GB (2X4) from crucial and I was running 12, then about six months later bought two more Took out two of the singles and I was running 18. Then When I re-cased I put in a different motherboard (MSI X 58 Pro) and just went all 4 GB chips
If you keep the speed, manufacturer and core voltage the same there really doesn't seem to be a lot of problems, if you mix speeds it's always going to go to the lowest speed. I think voltage is the most critical thing if you mix voltages You are going to have RAM problems.

 

[William0d0]

I must be the odd ball here, just don't see the benefit of using expensive SSD storage to boot windows.

Windows boots and responds plenty fast on 2x 7500 rpm hard drives (raid 0). Flight Sim X runs smooth as silk also.

It's only Trainz with its enormous database of small assets being loaded on the fly that I can imagine the real benefit of using SSD.

With 8 gigs of RAM "swap file" becomes little more then 2 words with a 32 bit executable such as Trainz.

As a side note CaptEngland, that is an awesome system.:udrool: Run Trainz on a 42" monitor then really blow yourself away.

 

[peghorse]

I would go easy on the overclocking personally. I am not really sure that clocked that hard it would last 5 years? (others would know better than I).
One presumes your case and fan systems are fully customisable and the region you live in average ambient temp & humidity would have a lot to do with it also perhaps.
I adore my Thermaltake Sword M full tower case that can have 12 fans if required, even though most scoff at them these days.
Liquid cooling has never been an option for me but I hand my PC's internals down the family line every 12 months or so. With new hard drives etc.
Just my personal thoughts of course.
Congratulations! \o/ :mop:

 

[AmtrakGE123]

I know it seems like I didn't read the thread but I'm not that much of a computer geek, will Trainz 2012 run on a Windows 7 VPCL22X? I've tried Trainz 2010 but however, at one point in the game, it goes nuts as in, it won't work if I click on one of the buttons. Any help please?

 

[JCitron]

I know it seems like I didn't read the thread but I'm not that much of a computer geek, will Trainz 2012 run on a Windows 7 VPCL22X? I've tried Trainz 2010 but however, at one point in the game, it goes nuts as in, it won't work if I click on one of the buttons. Any help please?

Welcome to the forums.

This post is a bit old and probably appropriate for what you are asking.

Here are a few things that might help:

1) Don't install the program in C:\Program Files (x86)\

Instead install the program in C:\Auran\TS12 or better D:\Auran\TS12 if you have a second hard drive.

2) Run everything as Administrator.

Right click on the short-cuts and click on properties.
Click on Compatibility Tab
Check the box for Run with Administrator privledges.

3) Run Content Manager as a separate program from Trainz

Go into the C:\Auran\TS12\bin (or wherever you installed Trainz), and look for ContentManager.
Right click on that and choose send to desktop (short-cut).
Also right-click again go to properties and set this to run as administrator.

You should be good to go from there. I suggest in the future that you start a new thread as it is easier for all of us to find what you're asking.

John

 

[shaneturner12]

In addition to that, you will need to have a up-to-date version of DirectX 9.0C, as Windows 7 does not have a full up-to-date version of DirectX 9.0C by default.

Shane