"The photo scenery wont get purchased until I am happy with XP. At £100 its a wallop! But the videos and screenshots look great!"
You don't need to spend £100 on photo scenery, you can create your own!
http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=59170&page=1
I find that the bing maps service to be the most reliable.
You can also use either the HD V3 mesh or the UHD V1 mesh as a base instead of using the default X-Plane mesh for photoscenery creation.
I have most of England and Wales at ZL18, but you will need a lot of disk space.
Each one degree tile comes in at about 36GBytes at ZL18 :-)
HTH,
Steven.