01: Introduction

On behalf of the captain and the crew we would like to welcome you on board this flight through Microsoft's flight simulator while not at home.

Running FSX on a laptop or Tablet PC requires some out of the box thinking, accepting that not everything will work like it does on your big and heavy desktop PC at home and it requires some time to get most out of your system. 

I am running FSX steam edition on my Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with 2Ghz i5 CPU, 8GB ram and 256GB SSD. The graphics are on board the CPU. Far from ideal one would say to run a flight simulator. Yet I managed to achieved very satisfying results with frame rates in the thirties while not having all the sliders in the sim to their bare minimum. In this series I will show you what I did to get FSX running on a low spec system that you can take with you everywhere you go. 

Everyone with a decent flight simulator like Lockheed Martins Prepar3D knows that a lot of the performance comes from the CPU. Many of us have taken the time to push their systems to it's limit by investing a lot of time in stable over-clocks. Great performance with beautyfull eye candy where you see reflections of the lightbeams of the position lights flickering on the main instrument panel or masses of autogen trees near your aircraft ore volumetric clouds are just a few of todays features. 

 Less then a year ago I swapped my Macbook air for the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. The reason behind that decision was based on the much more clearer display and the ability to have a laptop that could also be used as a tablet, while still benenfitting from a full OS. In the same time FSX was released on Steam and I bought a license for five euro just to have a backup of my boxed version. Little later I switched however to Prepar3d 2.5 and FSX was dead to me.

 The timetable changed in the railways and I had a shift with a long four hour wait between trains so I brought my Surface Pro 3 with me for some entertainment. As the station canteen has a strong wifi signal I was surfing the internet when I spotted an add of steam and thought "wait a minute". I did a speed test on the network and the 10GB file was downloaded in less then 20 minutes. Secondly I downloaded the QualityWings 757 as it is a rather easy jet to fly for performance testing. I was able to get 14 frames a second from this 2Ghz CPU with on-board graphics. I immediately opened fsx.cfg but was surprised to find that all known basic tweaks were already implemented. The performance had to be obtained from lowering the settings in the sim itself. I moved all the sliders to their most minimum position and tried again. This time my frames went in the low 20's but the sim looked like a bread knife and was horrible to look at. I did a few test flights that evening and came to the conclusion that the Majestic Dash 8 with a high detail 3D flightdeck was a long shot and too intense for the Surface Pro 3 let alone the PMDG 737.

 However the QW 757 in 3D cockpit did rather well, only being it just 14 to 20 frames a second. The following day the big FSX "under the hood" tweaking changed everything I expected from the sim on this TABLET PC in a positive way.