Posted on 09/02/2007 12:44:29 PM PDT by hc87
Oh, boy, now come the pros! Yee-haw!!! LOL
XP is better but going forward, new games will be Vista only. Gamers might as well resign themselves to Vista and getting a Direct X 10 video card. And Vista is slow so you’ll want a Core 2 Duo processor and at least 2 GB of Ram.
Since you called in the troops, may I be the first to say...
Vista only comes in one flavor. Rotten! /hardhat on
Remember the most important thing...... username=dfwddr
1) May I ask why you are swearing off Apple or Linux? If I *had* to choose between XP and vist I would go with XP, Vista needs an SP or two befreo the kins are worked out.
2) Depends on wht youre going to do with it, if were not talking processor intensive thins you might better invlest in a mid line dual core and get a better video card or more memory. I still have P3 systems that work fine for me but im up to a few gig of memory.
3) Again its gets to the usage, I usually do well with ne lage drive but I also have a low end nas device at home for backup storage
4) I dont use anythig but on baord graphics cards so I cant really tell you what to use here but I get by fine for civ with lower end cards..
5) Unless you have a major! sweet pipe coming into your house any old network card will do.
6) definatly go flat panel if youre going to want to use a KVM staty away from DVI otherwise DVI is the way to go (youll need your graphics card to match)
7) Ive had alot of luck with teh HP photosmart all in one C5800. Its a usb or network printer which is nice becuase if your kid and you are going to have systems on your network you can print and scan over the network to your machine.
8) How much are we talking about transferring?
Really? I put 36120/papasmurf on all of the “You’ve Just Won $1,000,000 Contest” emails I send out.
Did I do bad?
That’s OK, as long as you use dfwddr on the “I need to transfer 5,000,000,000 to your account from Nigeria” emails.
They get a better response ratio.
Why am I swearing off Apple/Unix?
20 years of living with DOS/Windows, XP at work, a ton of legacy Windows games and not enough time to learn a new OS.
I’ll be moving about 40 GB of data.
One of the reasons why I used to like Microsoft so much was, they protected my investment in software and hardware. They did this by ensuring backwards compatability, as much as possible.
With XP, that tradition was kicked aside, and with Vista, it’s completly forgotten. If something does work, still, it’s only a coincidence.
This last year, I have been weening myself off of Bill Gates and Co., and in the coming months I will have my Linux server up.
Between Wine abd VirtualBox, I won’t be using a windows product, at all.
I already don’t miss it. :)
Hey did you hear? According to w3counter.com all versions of Linux combined finally tied Windows 98 at 1.34%! I know you’re excited, even though Linux didn’t actually rise at all, but since Windows 98 fell 0.02% it finally put them in a tie.
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.pnp
What do you want to do with it and how much do you want to spend?
I see several mention a network card above. Pretty much every motherboard I've seen in recent times has built in Ethernet, usually 100 Mbits. You don't need a separate network card. It's built in.
For processor, I'd recommend an Intel Core Duo. My favorite PC has a 6600 (2.4 GHz), but that shifts over time. I am a bit of cheap skate, but do enjoy fast computers, so I look for the "knee in the curve", being the point that getting a little more performance starts to cost alot more dollars.
Two cores is probably enough for most desktop work, as it allows one to have one compute intensive application going, and still be able to get quick response from secondary apps such as ones email, instant messenger or calendar, while running some background apps such as malware and trojan detectors.. Most Windows apps won't make much use of multiple cores, so it is mostly just the usage pattern of the one primary user that determines the benefit of multiple cores. Specifically coded computationally intensive applications that have more inherent parallelism can gain much more from higher core counts, but that's not common in typical desktop usage. Two cores are -much- nicer for desktop usage than one; they feel quicker because background and secondary apps don't intrude on the main app (or game.)
Big Civ III games like alot of memory. I'd go with two GBytes.
I haven't looked at video cards laterly not being a gamer myself, but I'd think that insisting on dual PCI-E slots for SLI is overkill for most users, other than gamers pushing the hottest graphics intensive games. I'd be content with a single PCI-E graphics card slot (16 channel PCI-E), plus perhaps some smaller channel count PCI-E slots.
There is a surprising performance gain from higher speed disks such as the Western Digital Raptor. And there are some good gains to be had from using more than one disk spindle, so that your disk head is not spending its life seeking from the C: drive to the D: drive (if you have apps on a different Windows drive). I'd consider various combinations of drives, such as C: on a Raptor and a RAID'd pair of bigger slower drives for your multimedia files that eat alot of space but are less frequently accessed. Then do disk-to-disk backups of the C: drive to another partition on the big slow pair.
The Belkin Transfer Cable looks to be a Windows Vista thing. Agreeing with the warnings of others above to stay away from Vista, that implies this cable doesn't help you any. To transfer stuff from an old PC's disks to a new PC, I usually just move the disks into the new PC as secondary disks, and copy over stuff as I find the need for it.
The monitor size, between 19" and 22" is a personal tradeoff of money versus perference, in my view. If you like having two full text windows (a common practice for programmers such as myself) then the higher resolution such as 1600x1200 that comes on some of the wider 20" inch screens is worth the price difference. Typical Windows apps and games only want one big window on the screen at a time, and for those, a 19" is fine.
I wouldn't try to use a Windows box as a network hub. Rather, I'd buy a separate router (aka home firewall) and connect all your PC's to that.
I've stopped using cheap color ink jet printers and switched to black and white lasers (easy for me to do, as I don't need color printing.) The Lexmark E342n in front of me cost a little more, but is holding up much better than the cheap printers. It's plugged into the router using Ethernet, and appears as a network printer to all my Windows, Mac OS X and Linux boxes.
Ill take any numbers from a site that says apple is only at three and three quarters with a very large grain of salt.
That combines with the news that Dell has not only started selling Linux desktops (Ubuntu) but growing their desktop line compounded with HP (Red Hat) growing their desktop line as a sign that Linux is doing just fine in the market place. Will it ever be a dominate force? probably not but it will maintain a healthy enough market share to keep the community interested in development.
Even if the site was completely to be trusted than the Linux market share has grown by seven percent over its may numbers (1.25 to 1.34).
There's a terrific (if long) comparison of CPUs at http://www.tomshardware.com .
Mark
Gaming, Internet, Word Processing, Music, Photos. Will eventually get into digital video I think.
Thanks.
I guess the answer is get the fastest chip you can afford with the biggest hard drive and max out RAM.
I'm a Mac fan since my experience with PC machines has been they are a virus magnet. I've heard, however, that Vista goes a long way in solving that problem for MSFT.
Macs are supurb for music/photos/digital. Gaming, of course, is problamatic and they don't come bundled with a office suite (although the free NeoOffice works very well with my MacBook Pro. It doesn't work so well on my 5-year-old G4).
But if you are going with the PC, I guess I'd get Vista. I can't say what flavor specificially but I would definitely rule out the cheapies.
Have any games been released for Vista that you want? If everything you play is in XP and cost is not the prime concern,you might want to consider a Mac.
You can stick your head back in the sand if you want, but other well known web counters such as w3schools show Linux use actually declining, not just stalled like this one did.
Ahh so one web counter can disagree with the other and they can both be right. At least you admit youre cherry picking youre numbers..
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5&qpcustom=Linux
I’m sure this won’t stop you from your mission of pushing Linux on everyone, including those clearly not interested, though will it. But you go right ahead, the constant pushing of the product despite its obvious shortcomings compared to what folks are already using and comfortable with is actually one of the main reasons why so many are turned off by it.
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