Establishing a Baseline - Introduction

In the forthcoming "Baseline" posts I will outline what I have added into flightsim at this point. These posts will cover the following areas:

• Flyable (aka "User") aircraft, including panels and sound sets;
• Scenery - both freeware and payware;
• AI traffic, including aircraft and flight plans; and
  
• Utilities and other modifications.
  

There is no way I'll be able to cover my entire installation with 100% accuracy. It would have been better to begin taking notes when I began adding things into the sim, but the idea of keeping track didn't strike me until very recently. However, since I spent no time on flight sim during 2006, this is probably the best time to start keeping track, as I get things updated.

Just some background on my history with this game: I've been using Microsoft Flight Simulator since version 2 in 1984. I've used almost every version between that and FS2004 (I have no plans to upgrade to FSX yet).

I estimate that I currently spend about 1/2 my flightsim time downloading and installing AI traffic, 1/6 adding new flyable aircraft or scenery enhancements, and the remaining 1/3 actually flying.

My hardware setup is the following:

• Intel Pentium 4 CPU at 3 GHz;
• Asus P5GD1 motherboard with 1GB of dual-channel DDR RAM;
• ATI Radeon X700 PCIe graphics card with 256MB of video memory;
• 2x 80GB WD800JD Serial ATA hard drives, configured as a RAID 0 array;
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy LS, hooked up to the Inspire T5400 5.1 speakers; and
• Microsoft SideWinder Pro control stick.

There's more, but that's all that's relevant. All of this runs under Windows XP Pro SP2.