Hello, Since Uncle Sam has given us some money to "stimulate" the economy, I'm going to do my part as a patriotic American and try to increase my FSX performance. My signature shows my setup. While it's not the fastest ever built, it should be, and has been enough to run FSX pretty well. Somewhere along the way I've developed a case of the microstutters that I can't get rid of. I've incorporated Nick N's tweaks, and while my framerates are good, these stutters persist.Currently I have 3 hard drives in my computer. One which houses my OS, (XP). One that contains FS9 and FSX on separate partitions. The third hold music. All three are ATA drives with IDE cables, 7200 RPM. Would I gain any benefit in performance by going to a SATA drive for FS9/FSX or for the OS or both? Any help would be appreciated.

I can't comment much on ATA vs SATA as it relates to FSX.I can comment on 7200 rpm vs. 10000 rpm. If you bought a 150 gig Raptor and set it up for your sims you would notice a difference in load times compared to your 7200 rpm drives. However, the difference is not *that* great between the two (about 20% faster in my tests).You have good hardware going there already, so I'm thinking you would not be blown away by any hardware upgrade you might do. Maybe your Uncle Sam money could go toward something else (yoke and pedals?) :)RhettE8500, Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, ASUS P5E3 Premium, BFG 8800GTX 756 (nVidia 169 WHQL), 4gb DDR3 1600 Patriot Cas7 7-7-7-20 (2T), PC Power 750, WD 150gb 10000rpm Raptor, Seagate 500gb, Silverstone TJ09 case, Vista Ultimate 64

I recently went from Seagate ATA drives to Seagate SATAII drives, and was surprised at how much faster they were. FSX loads much faster and I don't have any stutters. The current prices are also very inexpensive compared to the last time I bought drives.