And somehow, I don't think it over yet. Starting in November, my 250Gb music hard drive started to give out. Fortunately I was able to do an up to date back up before it finally quit. The 160 gigs of music I had was already backed up, but it's was nice the HD let me do another. I learned the hard lesson of music redundancy twice. Once when I had 30 gigs of music 10 years ago, and again when I had 120 gigs of music, 4 years ago. But I regress. So I replaced it, no biggie. Then one of my 295s started acting wonketty two weeks later. Made a deal on eBay for some Vizuix 3d glasses that I never used in 2 years, and BLAM, a "slightly" used 295 arrives in a few days. Since I'm doing all this sh1t anyway, I reinstall W7, because my install was 2 years old -theres about. Now, Ka POWEE! My aging XFi soundcard won't install. Not the first time that has happened, but due to a memory blurred by one too many Scotches, I forgot exactly what I did last time to get it working. So, 2 weeks and 4 bottles of Scotch later, I remember. Set up my Cougar, and godddamn! The pot in the rudder is burned out. I said, "F it!" and bought a set of TM Elite on ebay. Dont like them much, so i oredred 8 new pots for my RCS. This will be the 7th time I installed pots in them. I can just barely grab the wires from my past amatuer soldering jobs. Ahhh, finally! Set my OC VGA BiOS, and.......constant crashing! Now I'm pissed. Spent all week doing this, doing that. Flashed the BIOS so much, I actually blushed. Installed this driver, that driver. Admittedly, I haven't really been gaming too much outside of strategy games, since I went from the $1.97 drivers, so I didn't know the two buck series of drivers weren't good for my system. Finally came to the conclusion that the dollar ninety seven drivers are the best. No crashing. Voyage over, right? Not so fast. Now my sound card is lost again. Where is that Scotch.........

Spoken like a true flight sim grognard. Have some more Kool Aid.