Well, judging by your replies in older threads i see you've been actively reading whatever "how to" material you can get your hands on and to be honest with you, that's the first step to success.
I can't really offer much in terms of hardware and tweaking advice for two reasons:
a) i have a two year old PC that is somewhat more modern than yours and runs a different windows version, so i wouldn't know if and how much of what i've done applies to your build
b) i was among the lucky part of the community in terms of performance, after the first couple of patches it runs really smooth for me and apart from the in-game graphics options i didn't really have to tweak much
Your PC might struggle with some aspects of the sim, so if you would be interested in some upgrade advice, posting in the performance section of the forums will give you a good set of replies and cost/effectiveness analysis from our resident tech gurus.
For actually flying the sim, look at the FM/DM and the gameplay questions sections.
As for the specifics in your post...
Settings:
Don't be afraid to lower some detail if it makes the sim run better. Different settings have different impact on performance though, so mixing and matching tends to be better than setting everything to the same detail level. You might be able to set something that looks nice or helps your in-game perception a bit higher if you set something else that has a lower effect on gameplay to low and still gain a couple of frames per second in the process.
Model detail for example has the lowest amount of impact, so go ahead and keep it at maximum settings in order to enjoy those beautifully made 3d models of the aircraft. On the other hand, texture size seems to have the biggest impact because the textures use high resolutions. You can safely lower this at least to medium, maybe even lower, because the textures still look good at lowered resolutions and it will free up your video RAM for other goodies.
Another thing you can do is adjust settings in pairs to keep the game running smooth, if they have a common effect on your ability to perceive the game world in a manner that helps you get more feedback from the sim.
Such an example would be land detail and land shading. I use lower land detail settings and higher land shading settings. This means that terrain further away is blurred more, but terrain closer to me has a more pronounced "3D relief" feel to it.
For navigation i need to see the outlines of terrain at long ranges so i don't mind turning land detail down a bit. However, it helps with flying in general to have shadows because it creates a better depth perception, which makes land shading useful and not just eye-candy. This is why i decided to turn down land detail a notch and use that few spare frames per second to turn up land shading a notch.
This process might take some time for you so start from a base settings configuration and fly a mission in the quick mission builder to get an initial feel of things before you start tweaking further. This will help you get an initial frame of reference, so that when changing something in the options you can fly that same mission for a comparison. For example, i started by setting model detail to high and everything else to medium, then i would adjust one setting at a time or a pair of settings (one higher and one lower) and see how it went.
Patches:
The official patches are downloaded via Steam. As long as you have automatic updates enabled for the particular game and a new patch is available, it will start downloading automatically. The main issue for me is that we can't roll back a patch (steam only keeps the latest version) and that was a bit of a problem early on when each hotfix patch might break something on one user's PC while improving stuff on another's.
To solve this i disabled automatic updates and used the steam backup feature to keep copies of each version of the game.
I can still get patches though, once a new patch is out and i'm done backing up my previous version i just right-click on the game icon in steam library, select properties and enable automatic updates. The update will download and install and then i do the same thing, this time disabling auto-updates.
Long story short, as long as you have it set to on and the steam software is running, the sim will be patched without any intervention from you.
This is all for the official patches. However, we do get beta patches from time to time. These are the initial builds of each patch that the developers release to us for testing, anyone who wants to participate can install them and then give their assessment and feedback to the developers. Once they are happy with it (reported issues being fixed or the patch is just doing what they stated it would do) it goes "live" and becomes official, which means it's automatically downloaded by steam as per the previous paragraphs.
The beta patches don't install automatically however. What happens is that the developers will come here on the forums and post a new thread titled "(date) Beta patch (version number)", containing download links for it.
It's usually a compressed .rar archive file, so anyone who wants to install it will have to download it and then extract it into his main game folder via winrar or similar software.
The main game folder is (your hard drive and path to the steam folder)\steam\steamapps\common\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover
Extracting the patch in there will prompt you to overwrite some existing files with the updated versions (to which you click yes) and you're done.
To revert back to the latest official, non-beta version, all you have to do is right click on the game's icon in steam library, select properties and click on verify cache files. Steam will recognise there are altered files compared to the latest official version and replace them with the files matching that version.
This is also a good precautionary step to take before applying official patches: it gives you the latest stable build before patching things on top of it and minimizes the chance of having something conflict with a beta patch you might have installed or files getting corrupted.
Problems to watch out for:
There are a lot of issues still present in the sim in different categories, they've all been debated to death/well known and they are gradually being fixed with each patch.
If you want an overview of known bugs you can browse the sticky bug report thread by Insuber on the forum's front page.
For avoidance of commonly occurring confusion and explanation of how certain things work in the sim you can check out my frequently asked questions (FAQ) sticky on the front page.
In both of these stickies the main "juice" is in the initial, opening posts, so you don't have to read through all of the pages. In fact, you don't even have to read all of the initial post. For example, in the FAQ i have a very lengthy description on how to level bomb in the He-111, if all you want to do for now is get in a fighter and have some dogfights you don't need it.
What i would advise you to read in these threads is mainly the sections dealing with matters that have a direct effect on gameplay and flying your aircraft: options menus, interface customization and aircraft controls.
This will save you most of any potential frustration in getting up to speed with the sim and will have you flying and getting used to the new features in a short amount of time.
It's also a good idea to take a look at the manual, there's a lot it doesn't explain but it does a pretty good job of explaining the interface and some design choices that might seem confusing at first like turrets, overlay windows and using the mouse for camera control, clicking on cockpit switches and manipulating the overlay windows without having each aspect of controls get mixed up with the other.
You can find it in (your steam folder parent directory)\steam\steamapps\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\manual
Once you roughly know what works and what doesn't and how to configure and use your controls, you can then start worrying about flying the aircraft.
Once again there's a sticky thread on the front page for that, go ahead and download the excellent PDF checklists made for us by 2GFlea.
They give an overview of general data (atmospheric conditions, metric/imperial unit conversion scales), weapon systems (ammunition types for guns, bomb types, bomb fuse types, convergence settings and using the gunsight to judge an opponent's range), then move on to providing a set of easy to use, abbreviated yet complete checklists for most if not all of the flyable aircraft in the sim.
They are also color coded, so you can easily see which parts are normal operating checklists, which are emergency ones and which parts are omitted or handled automatically by the sim.
All this should get you started by enabling you to jump in an aircraft with a reasonable knowledge of what you're doing and the ability to know what you're doing wrong initially, which will in turn easily keep you busy learning the aircraft until the next patch comes along and further improvements are made to the sim. In the meantime, have fun learning and flying and remember to check your six
