New to this place

Hello, all pilots, real and virtual ones alike, hope you all are flying high and proud! First time poster here.

Short introduction, 43 year old, have always been fascinated by flight growing up with an airbase nearby and been watching the Hueys and F-5's, 412's and F-16's and twisting my  neck when I look up to stare at the old DC-3 flying over town. Been a flight sim nutter since my early teens, starting with a Commodore 64 and Solo Flight. Anyway, real life kicked in the doors and time became precious so I haven't been a serious simmer for years and years and now with studies (digital electronics engineering), there's very little time BUT:

Thought oh what the heck and got me a Saitek X-52 Pro/pedals combo and dug out some vintage sims and that was it, the bug bit again.

My main hobby is remote controlled helicopters and planes (in that order and dreaming of that very large scale) but lately studies,  weather and wallet are effectively grounding my models so that might explain the sudden idea of getting that controller.

Also have got FSX and I am looking forward to getting some sim time again when time allows. As a student, freeware is the way to go for me but hopefully the payware add-ons will be available when I'm through studies. I am drooling over that Dodosim 206 and the Alouette II pack. One day... Until then, the Cessna is a joy to fly.

So, with that out of the way: Are there any good free add-ons for helicopters in FSX to make them more realistic? I love helis but in all honesty I don't care much for the FSX flight model for the helis and would absolutely love to see some improvements. I am aware of the HTR pack but it appears that requires a payware program to work with the sim and payware will have to wait.

Then one last thing: My X-52 Pro has this MFD and I know this is a problem older than dirt but any idea how to get it to work with FSX on a Win 8.1 laptop? The drivers are the latest and I understand those cause problems so I tried to roll back to the 6xxxx version only to find I couldn't! The 7xxxxx version was still active after uninstalling both files and reg keys and now I'm totally clueless as to what else I could try.

So then, hope to learn more about this place and you guys, not to mention learn more about virtual aviation! (So much for a short introduction, eh)

Regards,

Alou2 a.k.a Knut