A Little help from the experts please, Can upgrade my AMD 2400XP to a 3000XP and my MSI GeForce 3 Ti200 64 MB to a Geforce 4 Ultra Ti4800 128MB for approximately $373.00 US. Looking for performance increase in FS2004/2002. Seems to me this is the best

Not being an AMD guy, I cannot comment directly about these specific processors, but I generally don't consider an upgrade unless I can AT LEAST double my throughput. The XP2400 runs at 2Ghz, right. Does the XP3000 double that? If not, the increase might not be enough to pay the cost of the upgrade in satisfaction. As to the jump from 64MB video ram to 128MB, I went from 32 to 128 and was stunned at the difference so I would assume the doubling for you would be worth it.Looking at your specs, I see that your 30GB hard drive is slaved behind your 40GB. I am curious why you don't have it as the master on controller1 (Currently, the 40GB is master on controller0, right?). Then you could slave the optical media drives behind each of the hard drives. This will give better (faster) access to the second hard drive. Also, if your 30GB drive is 7.2k rpm like your 40GB, you could move your page file to it after making it master on controller1 and that would speed you up some.