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Monday, April 9, 2012

What To Think About When Setting Up Your Flight Simulator

By Peter Harris


Implementing the best flight simulator possible on your home computer can literally take hours and hours of work. It is easy to get frustrated by the multitude of additions, add-ons and software setups available with modern flight simulators. Taking the time to successfully install and setup a flight simulator will result in a highly realistic and detailed simulator that will give your hours of enjoyment and challenges. Breaking down the steps required to install a realistic simulator will make the whole process much easier to complete.

A major consideration when setting up the flight simulator is the hardware you have available to run it. The faster the computer hardware the more realistic the simulator will be. Running the simulator on it's own dedicated hard drive is also a common way of increasing the simulators performance. If you are a new pilot then learning the aircraft systems and flying techniques can be challenging. Ensure you have a good begginers guide to aviation to help you through this.

To run a simulator well you need to have reasonable high end hardware. This hardware includes a good graphics card a good cpu and enough ram. When determining your hardware requirements ensure you get the best you can afford as this will have a big impact on how well your simulator runs.

The CPU should have the highest GHz rating that you can afford, modern CPU's often have multiple cores, multiple cores generally don't help flight simulator performance too much, however, having a core run at a high speed does. So put your money towards a higher GHz rating when purchasing a CPU rather than buying one with lots of cores.

Setting up a hard drive properly is a very important factor in getting good flight simulator performance, this is unfortuantly overlooked by a lot of people. You essentially need the fasted hard drive you can afford, the fastest available are solid state drives. These are quite expensive but well worth the cost if you can afford one. It also helps to have just the flight simulator installed on the drive and nothing else, this will boost the performance considerably.

There are thousands of software add-ons available for flight simulators, the most common are scenery packages and additional aircraft. Scenery packages will give you the biggest performance hit to your machine, to reduce this performance hit use a good defragmenter and ensure that this defrag program is run every time you install additional software.

One of the most challenging things to complete is some basic aviation education. Learning to fly is difficult both in real life and on a good simulator. Each aircraft will have an array of different systems and will also handle differently. Getting a pilots guide will help ensure you are doing things correctly and also enable you to learn as quickly as possible.

Following these steps will ensure you have the best flight simulator setup you can, as well as giving you a great hobby and hours of fun.




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