Hi All,I'd like to have the option for speeding up the flight. Due to my job I've only limited time.Letting your computer run over night is just a waste of energy and more important: It will break sooner. :-(I like the way how one can fly the PMDG 737 now :-). I usually fly manually to CRZ level up and from CRZ level down. Fortunately one can speed up to 4x without any problems and even 16x works quite well if you monitor it and slow down to 4x at waypoints.I don't want to do long hauls in 1x. Watching the ocean passing by for 9 hours is just a waste of time IMHO.Alex

Computers have very few moving parts, which makes them very reliable. It also makes their greatest enemy temperature change. Copper and other metals even though not moving get fatiqued from being heated and cooled. Eventually something goes POP!Therefore leaving it on, should actually increase it's life. Believe it or not. The harddisk of course has moving parts, but they are generally designed to last. Fans are cheap and as long as you have build in redundancy in the cooling system, you should get away with one failing, even the main CPU fan, should trigger the thermal safety.If you find this hard to believe, ask yourself these questions. When does a standard filament light bulb blow? When was the last time one blew while it was on? I personally don't think I have seen one that have blown while on, I've seen many blow at the point I switch it on.When do TVs, monitors etc. blow? When you switch them on.In a few seconds from when it's switched on the temperature at the core of the chips on the mobo or CPU can rise from ~15C to ~50C. Metal, expands, chips don't like that. If they don't expand evenly, then fatique occurs. Switch you PC on and off every 20 minutes for a while and it will pop something quite soon.I have a standard PC here that has been switched on 24/7 for the last 3 years and it still (touch wood) running smoothly.

Hi Paul,actually you're right, but since my graphics card broke a week ago (exactly one month after the end of the warranty period) I do not feel too good about this.Also consider that there are electrolytic capacitors in the computer that break quite often. And these capacitors age, when the PC is running and they age even more when it is warm.That your 3 year old standard PC is still running probably just means that computers were much better a few years ago :-)I also have some these old irons at home, which run forever. But the 400$ graphics card lasted just about a year.Maybe I'm just too picky about this :-)Alex

The workhorse server is actually running Linux, which helps. No disk thrashing, massive memory wastage etc to strain the HW.The system that has been running 3 years did have a mobo change, but not due to a fault. Just a hand me down, from my old desktop, which had been using the board for 2 years already.I did have 4 SCSI drives in it that I got out of a skip, but they were pulled after one came off it's bearings at 10,000rpm and woke me up in the middle of the night with the racket. Needless to say the disk was dead, along with all my Terragen pics and movies + source files and models :'( (Here's wishing that FS scenery will get to look as pretty as Terragen output).