Good evening all, I am building a new system consisting of an Asus A7N8X Deluxe mobo,A pair of kingston 512 DDR PC 2700 Ram,Athlon 3000 cpu and Radion 9700 or maybe 9800 when it comes on the market. What would be the best OS? Also I was thinking of dual Maxtor 7200 hard drives with the OS on one , And MSFS 2002 and accessories on the other. I already have the MOBO and the RAM so I am locked into those components. Any advice would be great! Thank's from Jim

As the OS, go for XP unless you play old games regularly.(FS2002 works flawless in XP)

Would you elaborate on what games XP may not like (old games) ?Thanks,Ron

Thankyou georgi55,From doing more research, It looks like XP is the ticket. Can anyone comment on the cost efectivenes of using dual hard drives to boost FS performance? As this system will only have FS on it.

You won't get any performance gain from the second drive. It doesn't matter where the OS, swapfile, or FS2002 are located - the performance is going to be the same in any case. But the advantage of the second drive as a backup device is worth far more than the price of the drive. It's really nice to be able to copy all that "critical stuff" (like my 9 GB of MSFS downloads) onto the second drive and know that a drive failure isn't going to screw the pooch.Trip

I like Windows 2000, no activation hassles

Most of games work but there are few games which won't.The games I tested and didn't work are small titles though,and tend to be poorly designed so in most cases you should be fine.

Go with XP Pro if you can. I noticed a huge difference between 2000 and XP with respect to stability and performance, especially with the DDR ram. You might want to get a mid-priced sound card instead of using the onboard sound to free up the CPU load. I had some stutters when I used the onboard sound on the mobo, but they vanished when I reinstalled my SB Audigy MP3 card.I'd also suggest scheduling a daily defrag on the system if you use FS everyday. I use Norton Systemworks 2003 and schedule the Speed Disk option to run daily. I disable my antivirus program while I'm running FS2K2.Hope this helps!-VisionAMD XP 2400+ CPU (OC'd to 2800+ specs)1 Gb DDR333 Crucial RAMASUS A7V8X MoboPNY Verto GeForce4 Ti 4400(2) 40Gb 7200 RPM Maxtor HDDSB Audigy Sound CardAntec Case w/4 Cooling Fans

Actually you may actually see a small performance increase w a dual drive setup by setting up your swap file on a different drive than the one the OS is located on. As far as drives go for about the same money you could purchase a JB drive from Western Digital for a real performance boost over the Maxtors.Bobby