In that case then a replacement graphics card is required.

You will need to check you have an expansion slot in which to fit one as some motherboards with integrated graphics dont have one. It’s likely that if you have an expansion slot it will be an older AGP slot, but there are many good AGP cards which will be an improvement over the integrated one. I’d suggest looking for an Nvidia based card (as I have more experiance of them, others will recommend ATI for the same reason !) You can pick up a 256Mb Nvidia 6800 AGP card for less than £90. There would be little point in getting a ccard with any higher specs just for IL2. Lower cost card would also make a noticeable improvement.

EDIT: I’ve just noticed some motherboards with Intel 82945G graphics have a PCI-E slot for graphics upgrades, so be sure to find out exactly what you have available befoer you spend any money.

It might be worth considering upgrading RAM at the same time if you can run to it.

Hope this helps,

Bruce

Moggy,

Based on the demo only I’d agree, however there a number of features that haven’t been seen before – at least not without additional add ons. Such as the ability to fly multiplayer ‘sharing’ the same cockpit. A multiplayer ATC element is also supposed to be included in the final version

Once again though the improved graphics mean hardware upgrades for the majority of us – but they are much improved. Take a look at the deault Beaver for example, smooth guages and much better VC than any of the default aircraft in previous versions. I’ve got mixed feeling about the new look water though. It looks great on a high end PC and the reflections are really clever however the choice for lower spec PCs is either poor performance or (very) poor looking water textures with no middle ground.

I guess only time will tell and for me that time will have to be be after I’ve upgraded my desktop PC

Bruce

FS-X is actually much improved over FS2004, however the minimum specs requireed to run the new sim are significantly increased.

stangman, FS2004 will run on your machine but it’s far from the ideal specification. You might also want to consider playing with X-Plane (http://www.x-plane.com)

Bruce

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 !

You could have been there, but you missed it…

Yes, but I saw the arrival back in Coventry 😀

Rumour has it it wont be the only four engined piston around here today…

Do bear in mind that many of us Flight Simulator 2004 users have numerous add-ons and our computers can handle everything pretty well. If it can handle that much scenery and advanced aircraft, too, handling FSX at even the most basic settings and using the default scenery shouldn’t be that much of a problem.

That’s simply not the case I’m afraid. My desktop PC runs my FS9 install really smoothly. I have a lot of add on scenery and aircraft and get fluid performance even in dense scenery with complex weather. The FS X demo chugs along very slowly on the same machine even with low settings. I’ve spent a couple of hours tweaking the settings but it is still barely playable. I wont consider using FS X on this machine until I’ve upgraded.

Bruce

What happens when you put your FS2004 disc in the PC ? Does it autorun ?

I’d suggest a reinstall over the existing install (ie on the same location) and then try and remove it. Hopefully that should remove all trace of both installs
you may need to manually remove any files relating to add ons.

As an aside it’s highly unlikley that your flight sim installed has become corrupted on its own. You should always make changes to flight sim carefully and one at a time, it is easy to get carried away and even the most experianced users can get into difficulty.

Bruce