Lots of good information there. Nice post. Now, you and I need to convince fellow Spartans to join us.

Ouch. Sorry Phoenix.

1. It rolls your player back about a week. Some servers will start you as a fresh spawn.

2. Adds some new items.

3. Adds an entire new city on the NE coast.

4. Changes almost all the servers to real time. This makes it harder for those of us who can only play in the evening to find a daylight server.

That's the Beechcraft Bonanza F33A from Carenado.

Some screen shots of my recent flight to St. Maarten...

I keep thinking I'm done with FSX and then a few months pass and I'm back. I've not done the missions. Can you recommend one of your favorites? I'd like to give one a try.

After all the anticipation surrounding the new Prepar3d v2.0 Flight Simulator and reading all the feedback I've decided to wait until the game matures and gets some of the bugs worked out. In the mean time I uninstalled FSX and all its add ons and reformatted the drive. Last week I reinstalled FSX and the Acceleration Pack and wow what a difference! It runs extremely well with good fps and all the sliders maxed. I've since added FS Genesis terrain mesh, Ultimate Terrain X vector class, FTX Global LC, and Active Sky Next and the sim runs and looks great. If I can refrain from gunking it up with needless add ons I should be able to keep this running great. I'll post some screenshots soon but I'm really pleased with how it looks and runs.

Lambourne, i'll chime in here with what I would do, others might disagree. I would buy a 1TB standard 7200rpm internal drive from a reputable manufacturer. I've had good luck with Western Digital and trouble with Hitachi. Then I would move all your photos, music and install any new games or programs to that new drive. You need to free up enough space on your SSD (OS drive) for an effective page file. Unless you're editing HD video you don't need anything faster than 7200rpm, or a RAID, so why pay for it.

I wish you all happy holidays. I had a good time gaming with everybody this year.
Looking forward to some more adventures in the year ahead. If you're still trying to decide what to get me this year, I could use a pristine saline bag, or some of that hard to find alcohol tincture.