Hello everyone.Well with the brand new arrival of FS X it seems as if we are all due for a new computer... Especially with the announced arrival of Vista and DX 10... I find it quite unnerving that with my P4 3.2 GHz, 1.5 GB of RAM and an ATI graphic card my laptop is too slow for FS X lolSo what do you all recommend? Dual Core? 4Gigs of RAM? What graphic card? Also I heard that MACS are alot fate than PCs and that it is possible to install Windows on them thus FS X what do you think? Trio and Quad cores will soon arrive as well so the Dual core will soon be obsolete...One final question about Joysticks... It seems that since the release of Microsoft's second Force Feedback Joystick back in 2000 or 2001 there are no new Force Feedback joysticks with more advanced features? I really like Force feedback, I think it brings alot more to the SIM and was just wondering if anyone knew of recent developments in the technology?Thank you bunches for the feedback and God bless!!><> William ><>

I would wait about six months to see how things shake out. Some people are saying that a 2nd core does not add much to the frame rate. The new DirectX graphic cards, dual core processors, 4GB+ RAM, Vista etc., are coming. One must wait to see how things develope. For example, there will be five versions of Vista. Which one will be best for our hobby? The price on DirectX graphic cards will initially be quite expensive. Which one will be the best for flight siming?If you wait six months, you will have the answers from the flight sim community, and the prices for all these will have dropped with the exception of Vista.Stanner

>I would wait about six months to see how things shake out.Not entirely bad advice, but it's not like another line of CPUs will materialize to give us another option--AMD and Intel have a roadmap that's clearly going to look at multi-CPU processing as the way ahead for a few years at least. Six months from now the hardware questions look to be much the same as they are now. For me, the availability of quality add-ons for FSX is what the six-month test will tell us.>Some people are saying that a 2nd core does not add much to>the frame rate.Right now, the 2nd core itself isn't much used by FSX, that's true. But the major changes in the Core 2 Duo and supporting chip architecture make the chip much faster than their single-core predecessors (including HT "virtual" dual core CPUs). Also, the 2nd core can be used to take some of the background processes and leave much less tweaking needed to free up CPU cycles for FS. Also, available memory bandwidth continues to spiral up even if raw CPU clock speed is not. And all that can be used in a new system to juice up FS9 while we wait for FS-X to mature.>>The new DirectX graphic cards, dual core processors, 4GB+ RAM,>Vista etc., are coming. One must wait to see how things>develope. The CPUs are here now. There are rumblings from the ACES guys that there may be a patch coming early in the year that takes some more advantage of the multi-core CPU. The advantages of more RAM can be assessed now...I haven't seen anything compelling to suggest RAM above 2GB helps much. Most conventional wisdom is that 4 1GB DIMMs (versus 2) usually slows down the memory subsystem.The real wild card is DirectX 10 and the new GPUs. There's potential there, but whether it gets realized is only a guess. From what I've seen in some other 3D games, the DX10/Shader 4.0 combo is extremely powerful, and even without using the added capabilities of the new shader model in FSX, the new DX10-driven GPU architecture unleashes a lot more of the massive resources built into the new hardware than DX9 can access. >For example, there will be five versions of Vista. Which one>will be best for our hobby? I think it's really going to boil down to the 32-bit or 64-bit question, and Home Basic with all its limitations versus all the others. Not too much different than the XP Home-vs-Pro and 32 bit-vs-64 bit questions today.>The price on DirectX graphic>cards will initially be quite expensive. They're here now, and yes, they're expensive. But I bought a 256MB nVidia 6800 Ultra board a few years ago that was comparable in price to the 768MB 8800GTX I just bought, and I absolutely got my $$ worth out of it, as I'm certain I will from this new rig.>Which one will be the best for flight siming?That answer will continue to change. The answer today will be different from the answer in six months which will be different in a year. You have to pick a point and go...otherwise you'll wait forever as it's always evolving.>If you wait six months, you will have the answers from the>flight sim community, and the prices for all these will have>dropped with the exception of Vista.And there'll be as many new questions as answers to the old questions. We can sit back and wait, or we can pick up our machetes and start hacking our way through the jungle ahead. One thing for sure, though...we wouldn't find ourselves anywhere different six months later if the whole community elected to sit it out...CheersBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V L-300Santiago de Chile