I would agree with most of what Adam says but add the folllowing :

First up don’t worry too much about Windows Vista, from what I’ve seen so far it doesn’t do anything a lot better than XP but it is prettier and has lots of bells and whistles which means it needs a higher spec machine. Any reasonable spec machine built today should be able to run Vista as and when it appears.

Flight sim has always been a very CPU hungry application and I’m sure FS X will be the same. So buy the best you can afford.

If you are going the Athlon 64bit CPU route spend the extra and buy the new x2 ‘dual core’ chip. It may well cost a little more but will be worth the investment in the long run. Bare in mind these are available in the exisiting Socket 939 type as well as the new format. This means that S939 processors are starting to become obselete so avoid them if you can. This will also affect the choice of motherboard you buy as well of course.

With regard to multiple monitors this is something I’ve dabbled with in the past. Most decent graphics cards will let you run two monitors on one PC, however I wouldn’t consider using both for the main 3d window of flightsim because of the massive performance hit, even on a high end PC doing this with FS2004 makes it pretty much unplayable. When I use two monitors I tend to use one for the main FS window and the second for the radio stack, nav instruments, GPS and so on. Because these things are only 2D the performance hit is barely noticeable.

There are two solutions to using 3 or more monitors with FS, one would be a program called ‘wideview’ (http://www.wideview.it) Wideview allows you to network several seperate PCs running flight sim and therefore synchronse the views to run one simulator with several PCs (expensive if they are all high end !)

Alternatively Matrox produce a peice of hardware called ‘TripleHead2Go’ (http://matrox.com/graphics/offhome/th2go/home.cfm) which is an external device that allows you to connect mutiple monitors to one graphics card. I’ve no idea how good it is though so somne research is needed. Yet another option would be to buy a widescreen monitor (prices are dropping a lot at the moment)

On a final note don’t forget to budget for a good set of flight controls (CH Products or Saitek seem the best value depending on whether you are a stick or yoke man !) and consider Track IR, it really is the worth every penny.

Best Wishes,

Bruce

P.S. I hope we haven’t put you off your new hobby already ! It’s not as daunting as I think I may have made it sound !