Dear fellow flight sim enthusiasts, I have alot of five or so year old flight sims that I'm having trouble running on my Compaq Presario 5441. The toughest of the sims' requirements are as follows: Pentium 300MHz processor (I have an AMD K6-II at 475 MHz.), 96MB RAM (I have 312MB RAM.), 515MB of free disk space (I have 6.28GB of free disk space.), an 8X CD ROM drive (I have a 56X CD ROM drive.), a 3D accelerated graphics card with 8MB VRAM (I have an ATI Radeon 7200 card with 32MB VRAM.), a 16 bit DirectX compatible sound card (I don't know what kind of sound card I have.), and controllers (I have a Flightstick Pro and some Pro Peddals.). As you can see, I appear to have more than adequate hardware. Still, my flight sims, if I can get them to run at all, crawl to the point of making them useless. I would appreciate ANY input. If worse comes to worse, I'll simply put my flight simming days on hold till I buy a more powerful system. Happy flying! -earthbound misfit

Well, Eb, I'm going to be blunt :-eek. I would never even consider trying to run any 'recent' (within past two years) simulation on a system that is ~7 years old. Flight Simulator 95 maybe, but 2002 will be nothing but a frustration, unless you go into the Settings page and take everything down to the bare minimum.Honestly, your last sentence, where 'worse has come to worse':-) sums it up. I just upgraded to a system with an AMD Athlon XP 2400, 512mb DDR, and a Gainward Geforce 4600, and I've never been happier. I worked on the side from my full time job and worked out hardware in trade, not to mention I just got the video card yesterday as my early Xmas present. (My wife has it way too easy, considering I do my own shopping!:-lol)Upgrades happen about once every 2-3 years for me. My Dell P300 is sitting here in my room doing nothing at the moment, as the OC'd Celeron 550mhz has now moved up as my 'work' system and the Asus (with the XP2400) is my FS/gaming box. The wife-n-kids got the 1.3ghz Athlon I had been using and are quite happy with it, especially my son, who likes a good shoot-em-up as well as the next teenager.Consider the upgrade path, but expect to spend $800 (USD) or more to be able to fly without too much hesitation/stutter.