Took an old machine and upgraded it for $208.00Changed to: (From TigerDirect)Motherboard - Asus A7V8X-X 61.99 (Old was Gigabyte)Processor - AMD Athlon 3000+ 129.97 (After rebate)CPU Fan - Speeze (3000+ Rated) 15.99 (A Must Do !!!) Used Existing Parts Which Included:512 MB PC 2700 - 333 DDR MemoryNvidia TI Geforce 4400/128The results were dramatic. Frame rates easily in the 20's with important sliders maxed. Smooth and fun, even on landing.My first self-installed motherboard. Nothing to it. Even rebooted WindowsXP without reinstall.Going from an 1800+, this was a major league improvement.Bob (Lecanto, Fl)

You'll probably see even more of a gain if you reformat and clean install Windows after swaping out a mobo like that - there's probably still old drivers and registry entries from the old mobo resources hanging around...

No real surprise there, fs9 loves CPU power. I'd also second the idea of doing a clean install. Most of the time, what you just did won't work. Doing a clean install gets you off to a fresh start with no lurking dangers and it also gives you a chance to optimize your HD formatting if you haven't already done so:C: OS onlyD: fs9 and related files onlyE: ProgramsF: DataTonyDigital-Flight

Thanks for the advice. Actually I crashed Windows about two weeks ago (for reasons unknown), and had just done a fresh install.My reference to WindowsXP booting to a new (different) motherboard without any hitches came as quite a surprise. It just did a few "New Hardware Found's", a self-re-registration, and ran without a hiccup.My only change in the BIOS was to go in there and "up" the processor speed setting to where it should be, and it even told me to do that by automatically booting to the exact BIOS entry to change (and it put the curser on it for me) on the first restart. It even had instructions. (They've come a long way )I use a program called StartUp Organizer v2.4 to cut off programs that I don't want to boot on startup. So far the sim's running great without cutting off a thing.Bob (Lecanto, Fl)