repaint questions

I am a FS2004 user. I am new to the whole repaint idea. I downloaded the 747-400 passenger jet repaint kit from ProjectOpenSky and spent hours on my first repaint, only to see it fail to show up in FS! Well, I looked at the readme file and discovered that the paint kit was compatible with FS2002 ONLY. I then downloaded a second tutorial which suggested that FS2004 users download the 747-400 FDE update from ProjectOpenSky before starting work on the repaint.

My questions are...

1 - What's an FDE Update?

2 - How do I install the FDE update once I've downloaded it?

3 - Will the FDE update make the repaint kit mentioned above compatible with FS2004? Will my plane show up in FS after all my work?

4 - How do I proceed from there?

The FDE update will be a zip file which has Aircraft.cfg and Air. file included which enables the model to 'fly' correctly within the sim. Once unzipped these should be placed within the POSKY B747-400 file in your FS9/Aircraft directory. It will make the model compatible with FS2004 but not necessary your texture. As long as you follow the instructions in the tutorial correctly you should not have a problem.

Hi. I was wondering if you could give me any advice on what to do in my
situation here. See I have created my new textures for a B752 in Photoshop
and they are saved as .bmp files, and I have also modified the
aircraft.cfg file, but my textures just won't show up in flight sim.
The names all drop and all of that good stuff but the aircraft that shows up are some random older texture I downloaded a long time ago. I followed the 3 step tutorial from projectopensky.com, which is where I got my aircraft from. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

Did you use DXTBMP.exe to convert the PSD bmp files?
Without seeing your aircraft.cfg file - can't really advise you.