My mate Eddie gave me a copy of IL2 in 2001, which I tried to play on the wife's laptop at very low settings. I flew the MiG 3 v FW189 mission about 350times before it twigged how to use airspeed to gain height. Shot the bugger down eventually though.
I used a really cheap joystick by saitek which folded up for convenience into a tube, and which had the throttle control on top of the stick.
Then I got Forgotten Battles and subsequently 1946, and finally got an internet connection at home (didn't feel the need before!), tried the online play at Ubi.com, which ran at about 3 fps.
I'd managed to scrounge a really bad IBM Pentium 4 workstation PC from work and upgraded it with some more RAM and a ATI 3850 512mb card (AGP). Didn't even know I'd need a new power supply, so just ran it as it was.
(I've still got the card, in it's original box, in pristine condition, if anyone wants it?!)
The play at Ubi.com led me to Hyperlobby in a very steep learning curve about conf.ini files and the alteration thereof.
Then I actually bought a pc of my very own from Dell, and then realised it wasn't good enough, and replaced the Nvidia GT220 with a ATI 5770. Then I realised that wasn't good enough either and bought a power supply and a GTX570.
This game has cost me a bloody fortune. I sometimes wish Eddie had never given me the damned game in the first place (not really!).
Sorry for boring you all!