Well

1080 is actually lower resolution than FSX wants to run and I have heard of people doing that and it works however you may need do a bit of settings work for it to run right... the drivers need to be set up for HDTV display

I have never done it.

Yes, Alienware is garbage especially their laptops

the only laptop on the planet which is really sufficient to run FSX well is the Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 for 4000 bucks

G1000Pilot wrote on Dec 9^th, 2008 at 12:49am:



not even close

TOTAL 0/P       460W

EFFICIENCY         70% MIN. AT FULL LOAD

that means when the unit heats up and gets hot you get 70% of 460watts

which is 1/2 the power you need to run the parts I posted and do any clocking

that PSU would not be sufficient for a AMD 3700+ on a ATI 1900XT



you need a decent 750watt PSU

you can not get this one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817703009

ok i ordered that PSU. This should be good for when i OC as well correct?

cause88 wrote on Dec 9^th, 2008 at 10:20pm:



With the partition part. If you already have a hard drive with an OS on it then you can open up your computer, plug in the second hard drive using the sata cable and the power for it, then turn your pc on, once its on and running it will boot into widows normally you will have to format the space on the hard drive (i think) using admin tools, computer management, storage tools, disk management, you always format the drives to NTFS. You assign it a drive letter and then it will be an empty hard drive with nothing on it ready to use. You can then start installing all your MSFS stuff on it .

Or you can use acronis to format the drive changing the clusters to 64K like nick suggests


Acronis will turn the NEW hard drive with nothing on it to 64K but and partition with WINDOWS installed on it will not be able to do the 64K. But with the new hard drive its ok because theres no windows on there .


If you have a hard drive used ONLY for storage (just storing files no games or programs ect.) then it is ok to partition it because this will decrease the performance but who cares? its storage. Partitioning the storage will make it easier to find everything or you could have one partition of the storage disk for windows backups and the other for storage. It just keeps everything clean. So dont partition hard drives if they have programs or an OS or games on them because it will decrease performance and it is not a prerequisite to partition storage but can keep things clean.

Hope this answers your questions.

Apparently I am making this way more complicated than it is. I have used a 2nd drive for years as a storage only drive. I was totally unaware that I could run programs out of it. I just dragged stuff back and forth between the OS drive and the storage drive. Mainly digital photos and back up stuff that I didn’t want to lose in case of an OS crash.

This is ok, many people do this.

So windows must be installed on a drive that is formatted to the smaller cluster, however it will still talk to and use the drive with the higher cluster format, so long as it is installed after the OS drive is online. I think I got it.


Yes that is correct if you edit it to this


So windows must be installed on a drive that is formatted to the smaller cluster, however it will still talk to the drive with the higher cluster format, so long as it is installed after the OS drive is online. I think I got it.


You can also move this second hard drive with no OS on it to any other computer that also has an OS and still have all the files in tact and ready to go. It is essentially the next step up from "plug and play" because instead of just plugging and playing you have to open the case first .



I have for all these years, when doing a reformat, always partitioned the drive that windows was going to go on, but I set the partition to the size of all of the available unpartitioned space that the system would allow me too. That way I had one great big partition and then kept everything in folders for easy retrieval. So I guess I should not be doing that. I should be skipping the partition phase and just installing windows on the unpartitioned space, if I understand correctly. So format the drive, but don’t partition it.

No what you were doing is correct

You have to partition it but with just ONE partition. So for example you look at My Computer you will see only C:\ drive in it (+ cd drives etc.) You need at least one partition to be able to put things on it. But in your case if you have 2 hard drives you will see C:\ drive and D:\ drive as both of the different hard drives.

If you have 2 partitions then this means that your C:\ drive and D:\ drive will both be from the same hard drive. This allows you to format your windows from C:\ and keep all of your information on D:\.

any cable will work with a SATA II drive as long as it supports the 3gb speed correct? I am going to buy one raptor and the other is a 7200speed 3.0gb from the same manufacturer.

Any recommendations Nick?

Thanks!

And sorry to bug you again about the PSU, however, It arrives tomorrow and I just wanted to verify that this will suffice even when I OC. For the 940 i7 if i were to boost it to 3.5 would you recommend a different heat sink?