In the days of FS5.1 when it was released on CDROM for the first time, I was an avid user of Microsoft Flight Simulator back in 1994/95. I had Flight Shop (anyone remember that for design of aircraft?) and I used the combination of two with endless addons for five years skipping FS98 completely. It worked well and was very rewarding.However when I bought a new computer in the winter of 1999, and also had FS2000 to go with it, I was very dissappointed with the results. The machine which I still use to this day, now being four years old is a Pentium III 500MHz, 256MB RAM, Matrox G400 graphics card with 32MB of RAM with Win98 second edition. This was the spec I ordered back in 1999 which was pretty good for back then and still works quite well to this day. However I was very dissappointed with how FS2000 performed. I was getting frame rates of 8 - 10 fps when flying over high density areas such as London, Paris and other photorealistic areas. I therefore lost interest in Flight Simulator due to many issues with its performance back in 2000.Therefore I am going to replace my trusty machine soon for the home and feel it is time to re-enter the world of Flight Simulation. I work in the IT industry and am more than capable of building my own system. However as there are endless combinations, I am interested in your expertise. What components would you marry together starting from scratch - starting with motherboard selection all the way through to the graphics card, so that FS2004 will work to the best of its ability with current technology? I have noticed that the software has not been written to divide processes using hyper-threading technology employed by some processors and therefore the lack of this benefit together with other issues would be appreciated when making your recommendations.

Fast cpu 3.0-3.2 p4,as much 800ddr ram as fast as you can get 2700-3200,I`m looking for 2 gigabyte sizes. A 400-800mhz Frontside buss,nvidia 5900 ultra 256 ddr,*80gb HDD SATA access Simple sound card as long as it duplexes.Case with lots of space for fans at least a 500 watt power supply. And I might suggest USB 2.0 ports on one of the front bays for easy plugin of hardware such as yoke and peddles. CD-rom any speed above 24x tis better if you can add CD-RW mainly for backup this keeps the hard drive usage area small still allows lots of fresh work area. Win XP Pro for me has been nothing but flawless. I have ran it on Intel 850gb pentium4 w 1Gig of ram and a Visiontek nvidia geforce3 for two years never has crashed,I`ve done some pretty sad things to it and it NEVER does crash. I used to use ATI they still are a good card but I`ve gotten stuck on nvidia mainlybecuse the drivers are so dang easy to install just hope the GeForce type keep on rolling out. I check price watch alot and browse lots of hardware suppliers it helps as well as builds into the excitement. Cheers Lee