After spending a day getting SP2 on my shop machine, I cleaned up all my (4) disk drives and went to install the FSX demo. My largest drive had only 2.6 GB free, and so I sweated the install (which called for 14 GB free) but in the end it only took 1.1 GB and started and ran fine. I agree about smoothness. After setting the target at 15 FPS, I have to say that's the smoothest 15 I've ever seen. FS9 with mesh, landclass, roads (with leveling) AS6 with 5 cloud layers, is not nearly this fluid. Still, I'm getting the occasional (say every 20-25 seconds) brief hang.I have a Biostar NV 6800XT w/ 512 onboard, so I thought I should be able to bump sliders up some -- not much, it turns out! Running 1152x864 with defaults everywhere except water turned up to "low 2.0", I could probably get total smoothness at a target of 10 FPS. In fact it's running in the BG and I will experiment with that now. Worth it at St. Maarten, though, as the water looks AMAZING.So, I don't think I really qualify as "low end", though I thought the readership would be interested in my very low disk space for installation.AMD Sempron 2.4+ (2.0 actual GHz)640M DDR1Asus A7N8X-V (Via 800-something chipset)4 Seagate 40G 7200 RPM IDE drives (no RAID)Biostar 6800XT 512M (I bought this thing after reading about how FSX would hammer onboard videocard memory. Traded in a GF4 Ti4200 on it, and frankly, it's not that much faster (though it is smoother) in FS9 -- however, I AM able to run AA now)NVidia WHQL drivers 85.96, TweakerizerI'm typically running all sorts of junk while running FS, the curse of running on a working machine. At any minute a customer might pop into the office and I'd better have some serious apps up! ;-)

Thanks Eric:About the most objective review I have seen:Respectfully:RTH