Any PC builders out there - just did another one

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Hi John,

Thanks for the quick response.

Only way I discovered what I was missing was by trying it at work today on a spare machine with a std. monitor. Couldn't figure how to do anything at home last night and was quite disappointed. Will try again tonight.

73
 
Back again, found my problem. It's screen resolution. Now all I have to do ,is figure how to change to something readable  other than 1900x 1200. Doesn't give me many options.

Merrill
 
Merrill - have you been in settings (little wrench icon on the left in toolbar?)  Or right click on the screen?  I've never had a big problem with display settings the monitor/card couldn't handle.
 
Tom said:
John,

How about walking us  semi-techs through this process. I've never re-built a PC or built one from scratch, and the times I've been inside a tower were merely to add drives, change cables, insert cards, replace a component, and vacuum out the junk. What's the criteria for choosing the case? In addition to the motherboard and CPU, what components did you buy? Is there a handy dandy diagram simple procedure available for reference?

TIA.
Tom,

Here's a great site if you are interested in building or refurbishing your PC.  http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/
Newegg (http://www.newegg.com/Store/Computer.aspx?name=Computer-Hardware) is a good place to purchase items.  You can read reviews about the items before you purchase.

Good luck and Happy Holidays.
 
NewEgg.com is about the best I have found - their web site is very, very shopper-friendly and they have good prices and fast shipping.  I also use spartantech.com but they are not as slick as NewEgg and have no user reviews featured.  Spartan is a good place to check prices, but you need to know what you are looking for.  Sometimes Spartan will have the best price, sometimes not.

I found another place to check for parts and prices - ChiefValue.com.  Haven't ordered from them as yet, though.

BTW - I have my new system overclocked to a little over 4 Ghz (the E8500 is stock at 3.16 Ghz), but I built it to have that capability with a large cpu cooler, case with many fans, fans for the ram, motherboard that is OC-friendly, etc.  I need to run some stress tests on the memory and the system before I consider it ready for work, but it seems really stable.
 
John Canfield said:
A common complaint of Vista was the fact it is much more demanding on hardware than XP, but that is the evolution of Windows.  Vista was almost universally shunned by IT shops because it offered no productivity advantages over the very well settled-in XP and would have been very risky to implement on a large scale.  Jokes were being made in the IT community about how quickly SP1 for Vista rolled out the door.

MS finally realized they had to do a lot better - Windows 7 might fulfill the promises made for Vista.

The little Acer L100 with a dual core and 2 gb of ram was an absolute dog with Vista on it.  Linux has to be 50-75% faster.  I also loaded 64 bit Linux (CentOS) on it and I was amazed at its speed.

Please don't misunderstand - I'm no big fan of XP.  I am a big fan of Unix, Linux, BSD, etc and Mac OSX.  I use XP because I need to run Adobe products and I don't want to spend a small fortune on going all Apple. 

I am amazed you can run CS2 on Vista - good deal!

The people who complain about Vista are mainly the people who are not using Vista and are using some Linux or Macs. The people who use Vista generally love it. Microsoft only sold 100 million copies of Vista the first year making it the most successful operating system of all times. Linux, Unix and Macs won't run any of my favorite programs. They are really crippled as to the programs they can run. It's all about the software.
 
You have to be careful when you quote the Microsoft numbers of "sold" product.  Many of those "sales" were to large enterprises where Vista was preinstalled on the computers and the buyers immediately overwrote the drives with their preconfigured XP installation.  Many consumers did the same thing, installing XP over the preinstalled Vista, but MS still counts those as "sales".
 
Microsoft forced PC manufacturers to switch to Vista - they were given a drop-dead date to stop installing/shipping XP systems.  It would be interesting to look at deployment numbers if both XP and Vista were available on new machines. 

MS wound up abandoning many features planned for Vista since they couldn't get them to work properly - maybe they will finally appear in 7.  Lots of the bling-bling in Vista has been available in OSX and Linux for quite a while.
 
John Canfield said:
Microsoft forced PC manufacturers to switch to Vista - they were given a drop-dead date to stop installing/shipping XP systems.  It would be interesting to look at deployment numbers if both XP and Vista were available on new machines. 

MS wound up abandoning many features planned for Vista since they couldn't get them to work properly - maybe they will finally appear in 7.  Lots of the bling-bling in Vista has been available in OSX and Linux for quite a while.

I am sorry but Microsoft cannot force manufacturers to do anything. They are all free to install Linux instead and they choose Vista for about 100 different reasons. There are several machines still available with XP, I saw several at Walmart yesterday. They just don't sell very well. Most people don't want 20th century technology.
 
Ned said:
John, here's an idea for your next computer.

Now that's almost tacky!! << LOL >> 

Seilerbird:  No, MS can't force anything - but they can (and do) raise the box prices for out of date <??> operating systems to manufacturers who don't go with the "preferred"system.  Happened to Directron.com (vendor for most of my parts).  Most of their customers have preferred XP to Vista.

John:  You're right about what MS dropped from VISTA so they could finally get it our the door.. There's been a pre-Beta of Windows 7 out in the wild for a month or so now.  It retains much of the flavour of XP but they've tried to add on some of the Linux standby's (multiple desktops, for example - and their XP version of "DeskTop" sucks! )

Linux:  I've been a happy user of PCLinuxOS since he first released it a couple of years ago.  Small, quick and uses the update / software feature of most of the other big boys.  Mandriva (Mandrake the last time *I* looked) and SUSE (before Novell bought them<??>) were okay, but I liked the feel of LOS better. 

And yes, I too build my own.  AMD dual core (at 3.0Ghz), 4GB RAM, on an ASUS board, 1.5TB hard disk (2 IDE drives) and HughesNet (argh!!)  Not a screamer, but gets the job done. Interesting thread this, I'm not surprised to find so many builders here but am kinda surprised at the diversity.

//al
 
Ned said:
John, here's an idea for your next computer.

Ned - pretty neat!  There is a micro controller that has a very popular following and I was toying with the idea of playing with one - never did.  Can't think of the name of it now.  Several years ago I built a little CPU demonstrator from a project in Popular Electronics magazine.  Used an RCA CDP1802 microprocessor - all programming was done with eight switches and it had a two digit display.  It really didn't do anything useful, but it was fun  8)

Dragon - my last box had an Asus board and I was on the verge of getting another one.  I had really good luck with that board.  Went to Gigabyte mainly to give them a try.  So far, so good.  Mandriva with the KDE 3D desktop is really cool.
 
John Canfield said:
Dragon - my last box had an Asus board and I was on the verge of getting another one.  I had really good luck with that board.  Went to Gigabyte mainly to give them a try.  So far, so good.  Mandriva with the KDE 3D desktop is really cool.

I prefer ASUS, I've used them for my own machines for several years.  Gigabyte is not a board to put down by any stretch, I've built system with GB boards and really have no complaints.  -MicroStar (MSI) also puts out a good board but sometimes they seem to get a little weird on me.

I use the KDE 3d on my laptop (full Linux box) but Suns xVM VirtualBox on my desktop won't support the 3D. 
 
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