Wow today has been a day of accomplishment. My wife (whom I love very much) has found my install disk for Real Flight Basic, w00t. I now have it installed on my aging lappy which handled it just nicely, I knew it would. I also managed to fix the original power supply for it so now I can overclock the cpu with the push of a button. MSI made the cpu overclokable with a push button not me so its set from the factory. I am now setting up a few other programs on the lappy that will hopefully help me with making better blender 3d renders. By the time I get done today I should be able to run nVidia's cuda toolkit which will allow me to unlock the power of this video card (GTX 285m).
I also now have VLC setup in conjunction with audacity for desktop recording with audio. It will take a little work in the edit stage but I think it will be minimal, just a matter of lining up the audio with the video.