Greetings fellow aircraft and simulation enthusiasts.I'm new here, and relatively new to modern simming. My first experience with Flight Simulator was many years ago, on my grandfather's PC; MSFS 3.0 or 4.0. I distinctly remember that flying in MSFS was the very first cause of me ever staying awake past 4:00AM.Prior to that, I have always loved aircraft. As a younger child, I would always badger my parents into taking me to the local airport (KMRY) to watch the planes take off and land. Any time we'd drive anywhere near it, I'd beg to go. That airport has a nice observation deck, right over the arrivals area and next to the gates, and also looking at just about the right spot on the runway where most of the jets would rotate. Back then you didn't need a ticket to get inside.Today, I'm 32, a former IT geek turned marketer, trying to get the most out of FSX. I bought it for myself over the holidays, along with a basic joystick with rudder control. I expect by the end of this year I'll have built a whole new multi-monitor system with a yoke, pedals, and all the bells and whistles. My current system gets about 3 FPS if I push all the sliders to the right, heheh. Also will likely get some of the nicer payware aircraft and scenery.I found this forum this week while searching about hardware performance in FSX, and appreciate everything I've read so far.

Welcome to the forums, and indeed to the best flight sim website there is.Whilst you await an upgrade to get more FPS out of FSX, you might want to seek out a copy of FS2004 (aka FS9), since both FS9 and FSX have their merits, but FS9 runs a lot better on less capable PCs. There's still plenty of life in that earlier version of FS and in fact there are one or two aircraft available for it which aren't quite so readily available for FSX, for example, the relatively new payware iFly Boeing 737 NG is the best currently available sim version of the 737. There is a version of that coming for FSX, but it isn't released yet, so at the moment that's one example of where FS9 has the advantage in spite of its age.Al