RE: Simulators?
Alright, I went ahead and got RealFlight G4 and a Hobbico 50" RTF electric trainer.
In terms of the PC the G3 demo runs very smoothly, so I can just turn off some of the fancier graphical effects in G4 if it bogs down the system. I have an E6600 Core 2 Duo with 2 gigs of DDR2 and a 256mb Radeon HD 2400. The Radeon HD 2400 isnt really gaming class but its decent enough for this it seems.