Finally grabbed a copy at the local gamestop today to give the retail version a go.System: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 2.16ghz emachines at Wal-mart $499.1 gb ram.6600 GT 128 mb.K-mart fan cooling with side of computer off.First flight was from my home airport 40N Chester County suburbs of PA. Non modified config 12-15fps locked at 15 with sparse autogen.Had High global, 60 complexity, 38m, 2m texture, 2.xlow water. Normal scenery, sparse autogen, advanced animations and sunflare checked. 60 mile clouds with maximum 3d and traffic settings at aircraft: 10,10, Traffic: 35, 30, 30.Real weather downloaded mostly cloudy static.Exited and changed the fsx.cfg with the pc-12 autogen modifiers.trees set at 1000, bldgs at 2000. Frames locked and steady at 17.Fluid flight despite the low frames, flew up rt 30 towards Philly. The car traffic on rt 30 was the most immersive I've felt in a sim. The flight dynamics felt right, the head latency is a nice touch.Flying past King of prussia and down the schuykill it began to feel the strain with Philly coming into view, and what a view. The houses and the textures seemed to overlay the area just as it does in the real world. Frames dropped to between 9 and 12 nearing Center City and KPHL and things slowed down to the point of either lowering settings or leaving the city.I expected this and even though it was still flyable, a high end machine will be needed to do East coast city flying. Oddly enough it looked better (more clear) than my FS9 with UT and FSmesh which runs about the same in the city though it as not as bearable. Not a knock on FS9 but just my system is crap.Next stop was Trinidad Colorado. Sail plane time. 1 hour of my life spent in bliss floating through the air with smooth as silk flying watching the wings flex and listening to the wind and that damnable horn. How to turn it off anyone? By the way same settings locked at 17 fps. Again, smooth as silk.I then gave a mission a go, the first one with the approach to the alaskan airport over the mountains with the cruise ships in your path at sunset. Talk about a beautiful experience, smooth frames at 17 and I nearly wrecked looking at the scenery. Now, keep in mind I love to GA/Bush fly not the heavies. If I were a heavy user with my system I'd handle that with FS9 if I had the disk space, unfortunately I had to remove the whole shibang to get FSX on there so no going back.One thing of note is that I was testing other settings and alt-tabbed out while scenery was loading. Not a good thing. Frame rates dropped to 5-6 and stutters. Even a another scenery reload brought it back to 10-12 over pueblo colorado. After exiting the sim and reloading to pueblo it was back up to 17 smooth as silk, so something went askew there.My overall assesment is that FS9 is an awesome simulator, FSX is even better despite its warts. If you are a GA flyer you can rejoice as not only is much of the low level flying dazzling in some areas like Alaska and other scenic areas but the flight models of the Maule and Cessna feel very convincing. Atmospherics add so much to the sim and the moving cars and boats just put the icing on the cake.Heavy flyers may want to hold off until hardware catches up. I'm not saying it's impossible, some tweaks may allow for the high medium to high end computers to fly maxed out in the cities but for the rest of us poor schleps mulling around the low end who have tweaked FS9 to death I can finally be happy with a sim that runs smooth at a measley 15-17 fps.So I finally see both sides, the heavy guys are upset but your time will come. The ga folks are happy for the most part, and they should be. What we have here is a sim that will last 3 or more years, an improved flightsim base that should grow with time. If you don't buy it now, you owe yourself to try it out when the hardware is right. Flaws exist, but if you can get past them, you will be rewarded with a great simming experience. If you can't, then enjoy whichever sim makes you happy. Me, I'm now happy with FSX. Now where are those thermals......Ian.

Just a small point, if you want to know 'where are those thermals?' as you say, it's probably not a good idea to turn off the audio on the variometer, since you were asking how to do that :-)