UnkaBobby

Yes, that's the direction I was going, trying to separate the sim environment from any other aspect of a windows install, so I'm interested - but you didn't say whether you've reason to believe all of that is letting FSX run better? How does your setup compare to just having a normal install of FSX under Win? Everyone says that FSX relies on processor power more than anything else, so I can't decide if all this machination does any real good -- I have 16gig of RAM for example, but while running a separate, stripped-down install of Windows would free up some RAM overhead, it does nothing for the processor power, and I've read that FSX can only use 4gig of RAM anyway... so I can't find any informed opinion about whether either your approach, or mine (with a stripped down user account, nothing running but a firewall) is really giving FSX any more actual *horsepower*. What do you think?

About to install FSX:SE after uninstalling beloved boxed edition. As part of trying to tweak performance out of my system, I have always installed FSX on its own SSD drive, with nothing else on it, and created a separate user account just for flying in FSX. The logic being all the overhead that installed programs add -- I only install non-FSX software under the non-FSX user account, and all FSX-related software under the FSX user account. Is there any advantage to doing this? Should I just install FSX:SE under the main Win7 Admin account I use? (My inexpensive SSD drive added just for FSX didn't seem to make any speed improvements either, did I waste my money on that)? Thanks for any thoughts! Tailgunner UB