What a difference a year can make

This time last year I had a 700mhz Athalon with 192MB ram and a V5500 video card. Flying over Manhattan was a dismal slideshow at 6 FPS, and even then with the sliders set to moderate setings. So I entered what we'll call Richard's Selfish Phase. Whenever I had extra money (or money I'll call extra just for discussion purposes) I upgraded. A GF Ti200 increased the FPS to 10 in April. Windows XP in May did nothing for the framerate but improved the stability a great deal. In October I sold a week of vacation time to buy the VRXP mobo, Athalon XP 2000+, and 512MB memory. I was then able to max out the sliders and get 18 fps in my little flight over Manhattan. Two days ago I added a Western Digital WD800JB hard drive because FS was consuming more that 20% of my "little" 20GB drive, and with several other games, etc space was getting tight. Loading the game was faster, but didn't help much else. Now I've downloaded DX9 and am getting 22 to the limited 25 FPS, and I can say it is just as smooth at 3000ft as it is at 30,000ft.I posted this so I can count my blessings and because occasionally somone wants to know the impact of upgrading CPU, memory, OS, etc will have on their FPS.Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good FLIGHT!.