There seems to be a lot of hard drive problems around at the mo, commiserations fozzer and micheal.

Likewise with me......hard drive went down some while ago, at the time I thought it was possible malicious software. It wouldn't even boot in safe mode, bummer. As my machine is quite old (very old) I really couldn't be bothered sorting it out.....That's also why I haven't been around for a while.

Spec:
Asus a7n8x deluxe 2 mobo
Athlon xp 3000+
3 gig ram
Nvidia geforce 7300 gt

....anyway, I finally got around to sorting it out and I thought I'd post the progress here, as encouragment for prospective simmers who may have old rigs thinking "it's not worth it"....

The bad hd in question was a 70 gig maxtor ide thingy. I had a look through the mobo manual and noticed that it had 2 sata sockets so I purchased a 500gig western digital sata drive. ...The problems I had getting the PC to recognise it took days to sort out, it would not boot from sata. I had to go through dozens of possible bios upgrades to find one that would work.

In the end I reformatted and reinstalled the old ide hard drive and used that for the OS. I eventually found an "uber bios" but the sata drive still wouldn't work consistently, one minute it was there, next it would disappear   It turned out to be a PSU problem, this could have been the cause of the original HD prob....anyway, to cut a long story short, the sata drive now works.

I was keen to see how FSX worked from this new drive, I was hoping all the agro was worth it (I doubted it would be):

I installed FSX deluxe and ran it using the default flight, Friday Harbour, in a default DC3 (my full FSX settings available on request)......result, not bad about 25-30 fps and smooth.

Installed SP1........even better, 30-35 fps and smooth.

SP2.......worse, back down to 25-30, smoothish.

In went UTX and GTX europe + patches, no difference to the default flight obviously.

Tried Game booster 3......big improvement FPS at 25-47 and smooth.

Used the online automatic CFG tweaker and installed the external framerate limiter..........Surprise, surprise.....not much improvement.

I haven't installed UT2 yet but on previous experience it won't cause much of a hit so long as the traffic density is kept down to a reasonable level.....uiautomationcore is always a problem with UT2 for me but that's sortable.

So, all in all: FSX framerates have improved slightly with the new dedicated faster sata drive but the biggest improvement was with smoothness, very few if any stutters....The best tweak for me being Game Booster 3.

So it was worth it, my graphic settings aren't maxed out but they are reasonably high, I don't get much below 25 FPS anywhere except the busiest of places.

So for a new HD @ 70 quid and PSU @ 20 odd quid It was worth it and my old PC is good with FSX for a while yet.

Why do people complain about 25-30 FPS???
I'm happy with 6 and 20 is amazing for me!(well,I have an acer....(ew))

I have an acer,I had FS2002 on it,it ran just as bad.