Red Tails

Firstly I respect everyone's opinion, which I'm sure is based on their own experience. This is mine, I have the same CPU as Captain420 with HT enabled, and run an Affinity Mask of 80. This is because HT is good outside of FSX and I don't want to go into the bios every minute to enable/disable it. AM 80 will use physical cores 3 & 4 and ignore the virtual ones, leaving 1 & 2 free for the OS and running programs, weather etc. Extensive testing and benchmarking on my PC showed a marked improvement with HT on and AM80. For me,FSX ran smoother and faster, the case was opposite with no AM or AM 84. FSX loads faster, add-ons launch quickly whilst FSX is loading. Core temps are 47-54c, no heating problems but I do have the vast Coolermaster Cosmos and Corsair H80i. I bought FSX in 2006, and I've read so many articles, tried so many tweaks, upgraded so many times - one thing I've leanrt for sure is - what works for me may not work for you and vice versa, even with similar or identical specs. Give it a try, you've nothing to lose and possibly much to gain.

++1 Ditto, much better performance using external limiter, I have used fps limiter but prefer Nvidia Inspector

I've tried the most of the popular weather programs and recently changed to OpusFSX, its the best weather program I've used to date. Its a small 13mb download, has excellent weather synthesis, light footprint and little impact on framerates. Try the demo, you won't be disappointed.

MTX includes a dll that once installed will show up in the fsx menu (you must have fsx sdk installed). This will allow you to view traffic around you and, I believe, follow selected aircraft to its destination.