Hi,
For the software it depends on what you want to use it for and what you want to get out of it. FSX has a lot more addons and a larger community following it, it also has more eye candy than X-Plane in the way of scenery, but X-Plane is certainly catching up in all respects. However the flight dynamics for helicopters is far superior in X-Plane than FSX. The way FSX is coded limits what can be done in trying to improve this. Also FSX is no longer being supported by Mircrosoft and it still has a lot of issues performance and setup wise, you will also need a powerful computer mainly a high end processor to run it with highish settings. X-Plane is constantly being updated and is always evolving and you will also need a fairly high spec system to run it. Both systems are 32bit ( X-Plane currently beta testing a 64bit system) so they won't use for the 4gb of memory.
The other one to look at is Prepar3d, this was Microsoft ESP which is the source code that FSX came from. Lockheed Martin has taken this on and is updating it and fixing all the issues that FSX has. Many of the addons that are for FSX have been re-released to work with P3D. There are various licenses that be bought to be able to run this software. Also as its a commercial bit of software it can be used in various levels of flight simulators.
As for actual controls and setups etc.. I've sent you a pm!!
Cheers
Komodo Simulations