Hi guys,Birthday coming soon and time to upgrade game controller.I have my eye on the x 52 pro hotas.Read the usual range of user reviews, from go get it now to piece of junk. You know the story...I'd like some concrete answers from experienced x52 pro users. It's expensive so I don't want to buy something I'll regret later.Of course no game controller is perfect but I need some specific feedback.1. There's a mouse substitute on the throttle. Doess this feature actually work well? I've heard that it disables the real mouse as long as the x52 pro is plugged into the usb port.2. Is the construction sturdy so that buttons and pov's don't start falling off?3. What about the MFD and fs9 compatibility. I've read about plugins that let you control comm\nav requencies and other data with the buttons on the stick. Is this for real?Hope to hear from you soon.Eytan OrnsteinMS Windows XP Home SP3Intel Core 2 CPU 4400 at 2.0 GHZ2GB RAM DDR3GeForce 9800 GTTwin Monitors- Samsung 19" Syncmaster 931BF and Mag21"Thrustmaster HOTAS X650W power supplyFS2004PMDG 737, LevelD767, Flight1 ATR72-500Fs2Crew for the aboveAS6.5, GEPro, Flightsim Commander, Radar Contact4Ultimate Traffic, Ultimate terrain Europeand tons of sceneries

I don't have the X52, but have had the X45 for many years so can give you some ideas.The basic product consists of a multi-axis multi-button controller. I fing the button and axis set up to be very useful for airplanes, don't have any helo experience so don't know how practical it is for that. Compared to my X45, the X52 is different in that the main joystick return spring is much weaker, which I think many people like, and the handrest/pinkie switch location is adjustable up/down which I think would be an improvement over my X45, where I can't hold the pinkie switch and also easily press a button on the top of the stick.It is possible to just plug in the X52 out of the box and use it with FS, using the FS control axis and command assignment menus. The main problem is loss of some flexibility (for example, the pinkie switch will act just as a normal button, not as a "shift" modifier key. The mode switch won't do anything other than act as a standard button either.The next step is to load the Saitek driver. If you do nothing else, I think about all the driver does is set something Saitek calls "autocalibration" so you can no longer calibrate your axis inputs in windows. The driver is supposed to do that for you (I haven't had really good success with that myself).The next step up is to load the Saitek profile software, SST. When you do this it installs additional drivers which I think Saitek calls "magic keyboard and magic mouse" or something like that. Once you have SST installed, you can install profiles that you can load with your game, FS or otherwise. Each profile has quite a bit of flexibility to either send a joystick button, a keystroke, or a series of keystrokes (aka macro) all can be set if needed for one action when pressing, a different action when releasing, and you can control the duration, repeat, or delay for any action. Also the axis can be assigned to send commands based on position, and the hats can be set to send commands as well. You can simulate a mouse as well. So there is quite a bit of power available in the profiler if you use it.An alternative to loading any drivers or the SST profiler is to buy a key for fsuipc (if FS is your main or only interest) and use that instead to manage your X52. You have to dig around in the fsuipc documentation, but you can get fsuipc to do pretty much anything the SST profiler does. Also fsuipc has an advantage is that you can create profiles on an FS per-aircraft basis automatically when you select an aircraft, whereas on the SST software you would need to use a "mode" switch or even a different whole profile. Also fsuipc allows access to commands that are difficult to get just using a profile and the FS control assignments.As far as the MCD display, I wonder how many actually use that? Would be interested in any comments on that feature of the X52.Now for reliability of the X45: I have had some problems with dirty/noisy pots causing spikes. In particular the rudder rocker went bad pretty quickly. I now use rudder pedals so that doesn't bother me. But I bought this stick when it first came out and usb controllers were rare, also ran it in Win 98 back then.I still use it when I don't feel like hooking up my yoke / quads.scott s..