Homebuilt here. Athlon XP 1800 overclocked to XP2000 speed, MSI K7N2 MB, 768 megs of Crucial DDR266 ram overclocked to 276 mHZ, ATI Radeon 9500 modded and overclocked to 9700 Pro. Only CTD I EVER got was due to a defective freeware addon, which several other people had issues with.Built one for a friend, took FOREVER to get it stable. Athlon XP 2800, Soyo Dragon Plus MB (which I did not recomend, as I dislike VIA chipsets, but she insisted because she liked the name. gah.) 512 megs of generic DDR400 ram, (wouldn't spring for the Crucial) Radeon 9800 Pro. All running at stock speeds. Ended up with crashes due to two reasons... first, kept getting a crash to desktop with the message "VPU Recover has detected and error and must restart" Eventually, ATI released a newer driver that fixed the error. She was still getting random dll errors, sometime ATC.dll, sometime G3D or G2D.dll. Clocked her RAM down to 333 mHZ (the same as the processor FSB) and the problems disappeared. Don't know if the problem was due to the generic RAM not being up to spec, or if the VIA chipset on the MB couldn't cope with running the memory bus and the CPU FSB at different speeds.Bottom line? Don't buy components just because they have a pretty name, and don't try to save 5% on the cost of memory by buying generic.Dan

I am on my 3rd homebuilt machine, and never have had a problem. I could never buy off the shelf again. If you buy good parts your chances of having problems go way down.

Homebuilt - Only way to go IMHO (especially for the money). Over a period of time you will put together what you really want and learn a lot to boot unless you already are a computer tech.Had an old TI computer as my first. Then a Gateway commercial. Started the homebuilt cycle with an AMD 100. Have made progressive upgrades over the years to a 200, 300, 700, 1.2 and now the following as listed below: I think there is another or two in there somewhere, but have lost track. Each time I have progressively handed down and configured my last one for my wife, and whatever she had for my daughter, so it is three at a time each time I upgrade.Good luck:RTHP4C800 Deluxe MotherboardPentium 4, 3.2G CPU1G PC3200/400 MemoryWinXP ProDirectX9.0cATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MBSecondary Graphics Diamond Stealth III S540 PCI 21

Home built here, no probs. Once you build your own, you will likely never buy from a Dell/HP type vendor again. Why buy what they want you to have, when you can control everything that goes in your box?Tim13

Hi,I had an Alienware 3.06 GHz machine with 1 GB of 1066 RDRAM. It ran FS just great. After about 14 months something went bad with it. The motherboard apparently went out. It didn't give any beep(s) when booting like it always had. At first I thought it might have been the video card. I put an older video card in it and when I booted the monitor still would not power up. I had put together my own systems before. So, I ordered and new motherboard, ram, cpu, and heatsink/fan. Then it was out with old and in with the new. So the only thing that is left that could really be considered as 3rd party commercial part is the Enermax 535W Power supply, the case itself, and the Hercules ATI 9700 Pro video card, and some fans (I added a couple more fans to it myself when I first got it from Alienware). It runs FS great. The only problems I've had was due to having some duplicate AFCADS that were being loaded up with FS2004. Since I have removed the duplicates, no more problems. Other than what might be considered the 'usual' due to addons. For instance I keep having a crash when I fly to Simflyers Phoenix with a certain DC-10 panel. Fly with any other plane to that airport though and no problem. Because I kept trying I did actually manage to land at that airport one time with the DC-10 panel. Go figure.I pretty much consider my system to be home built now. I couldn't ask for anything better, other than maybe one of those new incredible ATI X800 series or Nvidia 6800 series of video cards. ;-)Cheers,Jim

Homebuilt here - no problems- second one in fact.The first was K7S5A/xp2000/512MBDDRAM/Ti4200- still running but in use now by my wife after two years intensive use by me for FS2002/4 but now has ATI9000 graphics,.This one built 3 months ago runs fine --- cost a fraction of an off-the-shelf system.System is KT6V-LSR/xp3000/768MB DDRAM/Ti4200Dave

I don't know whether to call mine home built or not, my brother in law who used to build computers professionally originaly built mine, he is now semi retired but has helped me upgrade several times.{we do it in his shop and he tells me what to plug in where when I get confused, which is often} Only problems I ever had were with the unstable nature of Win98..JamesJECS648fx-a mbP4 3.2 proc1gb ram

One thing you might consider is upgrading your RAM. WinXP really needs 1GB to run FS effectively. I upgraded my 2.8GHz Dell machine (w/nVidia 128MB FX2000) from 512MB to 1.5GB and basically doubled my framerates.

home built

Exactly, Tim :)So many commercial store-bought PC's STILL don't have such basics as an AGP port, or more than two (in some cases only ONE) memory slot!!! At my place of work we sell HP/Compaq, Sony, and Gateway desktops.....even $1000 machines can be found lacking those essentials....sheesh!!Worse yet is the software garbage that the manufacturer puts on....I'm sure most of it could be classed as a form of spyware....every two minutes something pops-up wanting to go online and register this, and register that!! There's so-called suites that hog your desktop, and system resources, to 'help' you use your PC more 'productively' by tying all the image, music, office stuff together, etc, and it takes a half hour to find the cleverly hidden 'exit' button and option to STOP this junk at start-up!!They install a demo version of either Norton or Mcafee anti virus, which will NOT stop appearing, trying to get you to register and pay for the full version before this damn annoying 30-day trial expires, thereby crashing whatever you're trying to. Thank god for 'msconfig'......easy enough to use, but so many folks don't know about it or how....these store-bought machines seem to start virtually everything that's on the hard-drive at boot-up, and leave it all running in the background - and the new user wonders why their new 3.0ghz machine is slower than their old, retired 233mhz dinosaur!!!!Always build your own if you want anything more than a hand-holding, kiddie friendly, internet slug!!!! ;)

Home built since 1994, usually one a year.

Homebuilt. Works a treat :-hah

I had also read somewhere else that increasing memory would improve frame rates.I had 512MB, and with the default 737 at Tacoma, noon, Spring weather, 30% 3D clouds and several handles (not all) at maximum, I would get 25-27 fps.I doubled my memory to 1GB and I could hardly feel a change: 27-29 fps. I think something else is keeping my frame rate from improvement, but I can't figure out what.By the way, my computer is also home built and is perfectly stable.Regards,

I don't know if you classify this as homebuild, but I picked out all the parts I wanted and they put it together and config the system. The only problem I've every had was with Windows ME(It's always about ME)This system is: (On it's way in a week today, but who's counting)AMD 64 3500+ 939 ASUS A8V Deluxe with wifi GCorsair TwinX1024 3200 XL Pro 2 36gig W.D. Raptor drives in Raid256 X800 XTWindow xp homeAntec True power 550wThermaltake Premier V5000A caseAnd they are thowing in a blue glow stick thing to make it look pretty. Ps to yarvellingMeowx:)~

No problems ever with any of my 15 year history of home assembled PCs.Noel