XTC1

Have you tried the alphas internal calibration. ? Haven't got a link to hand at the moment, but there's instructions on their website and some vids on you tube

I flew over New York last week (SU4) using the Icon plane, took a tour round the surrounding area and landed on the water close to the Statue of Liberty. I was getting a nice smooth 35 fps with very little stutter and the photogrammetry scenery looked superb. Tried the same trip today with the Icon and it looks just awful, most of the buildings are popping into view as I look around and look nowhere near as good as before. The draw distance is now hopeless (I have every setting I can set to high or ultra apart from Render at 100) and flying NW over the East river with central park in front of me I can just see a desert with no buildings rendering past the Hudson river. Last week I had buildings out to the horizon. London is just as bad, looks like a desert, anything over 2 miles away is replace by a sandy flat landscape into which scenery magically appears as you get closer. So for me SU5 = 5 more fps but totally immersion breaking scenery redrawing with lower quality textures and over exposed whiteout clouds. Are you seeing buildings out to the horizon and not popping in and out of existence when you fly over New York and London?

Sounds more like a spiking potentiometer in your controller. Also check that you have calibrated the controller, either in it's own software if available or in the windows joy.cpl app. If it it a spiking pot you might be able to clean it with some electrical connection cleaner but I'm not familiar with that controller so I don't know how easy/difficult it is to get access to the pots. Some of the more expensive controllers use hall effect devices as they are more reliable than potentiometers which are quite prone to spiking with a bad connection. If it's not spiking too high you could try adding a larger deadzone in the sensitivity settings in the sim as a workaroound. So my advice, make sure it's calibrated, if it's still a problem try cleaning the pots or maybe replacing them if you are up to a bit of soldering. Might not be cost effective though.

As I posted originally, my Invoice says available on the 17th. I just checked the Microsoft store Page and it now shows me available on the 18th at 00:00 so I'm assuming that might be midnight of the 17th? Interestingly it shows as Installed already which it clearly isn't as it would have taken up about 100GB of my hard drive space. It does have a number of files and folders related to flight sim but all of them are Zero Bytes. Just hoping that's some sort of automated preload thing and that I don't get issues with it thinking it's already installed when it isn't.

I can't answer your question directly but why do you want t a laptop if you are going to be using it Solely for MSFS 2020? Whatever you spend on a decent laptop to get good gaming performance you'll get better performance from an equivalently priced desktop PC, plus you can fairly easily upgrade a PC over a few years but that's not usually possible with a laptop.

Just got an email with an Invoice for my pre order of the Premium Deluxe version. I noticed it says available on the 17th of August, does that mean the pre ordered version is available a day early, or just that it can be downloaded at midnight on the 17th ready to run on the 18th?

That is a question I had thought of asking too. If I have real world planes switched on will the models reflect the real world planes or just be replaced by generic models of a similar type?