the core XP folder.  I decided to make some room on one of my SSD drives and by just dragging and droping the XP10 main folder to a new drive I picked up 80 Gigs worth of space with ease.

 

Not having XP10 linked to the registry is really an underappreciated benefit IMO. I used to loath the thought of a system build/ rebuild and if I'm not mistaken XP makes it as easy as moving your files to an External HD building or buying a new PC and then dragging it back onto your main file system.  That's pretty sweet!

 

Yeah I know you can use imaging tools like Norton Ghost etc. to basically achieve the same using other sims but I think it's great that I don't have to with XP.  :good:

X-Plane's awesomeness goes beyond this, though. Since v10, you can use Symlinks (symbolic links) to create directories outside of your X-Plane folder, that show up like short cuts (sort of) inside your X-Plane directory.  

 

I use this to, for instance, store my less-used scenery files on an external drive, and symlink them into my X-Plane main folder on the SSD drive, so that I have them if I need them, but they don't take up my SSD's precious space.  Or, for instance, you can symlink the X-Plane 9 aircraft directory, so that you can access the planes in the old version of X-Plane without having to copy them over to X-Plane 10's folder for use.

 

Symbolic link tool for Windows:  http://code.google.com/p/symlinker/

 

Symbolic link tool for Mac:  https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/41493/symlinker

Symlinking is also very useful for creating near-copies of the XPX folder, if you have the horsepower to launch 2 or even 3 instances on the same machine to fly multi-screen without the horrendous stretching at the outer edges.

One odd consequence of being able to keep moving the same simulator around from different HDs to PCs is that you can end up with a bunch of accumulated junk in your plugins folder. 

 

This recently happened to me, so just remember to keep it clean, filled with only what you need.  I got like an 8% performance boost after cleaning mine out.