The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I think your right that dual channel would still work but only use ~2G from each stick, but unless your using XP x64 it would be a waste for sure.

I know Fred was stuck on XP but I thought you had upgraded to Seven, my mistake sorry!

Steve

 

One of my die-hard XP user friends upgraded to Win7 last month or so. Exactly as I expected, he doesn't regret the change at all, and doesn't really understand the fuss he made. For the tech-savvy, the switch should really hold no fear at all.

 

I agree even though there is a culture shock at first as things have moved from XP to Vista7's structure and there are a couple things that are still like/work better in XP over Seven, but not enough to keep me from using Seven.

If you’re planning on kicking off in the next year then I might say stay with XP, otherwise I would suggest Seven all the way. My dad is still kicking and is scared to upgrade, he would like it after swearing a little bit but once he got use to it he would say the same as your friend did. My mom is also still pumping blood and she made the move way back and just loves it. It seems to be a big step for some.

 

Stevo,

I have a couple of reasons I don't like 7, and fear is not one of them. And yes, as it happens I am planning on kicking off in the not to distant future, barring some sudden change in my health or a miracle. I look at it this way, I'm on year 10 of a 5 to 7 year plan, so I shouldn't be here now, to begin with. I'm cool with it!

BTW, that memory was not something I chose. I don't need 8 GB, and I certainly wouldn't be buying any Cas9 memory. In fact, I just ordered the gigabyte 990xa ud3 AM3+ motherboard, with the SB950 Southbridge. I'm very much looking forward to it! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128510 and the memory, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231276 I went with my original choice. I've had some experience with this memory and I like it's speed with an AMD Phenom II x2 3.2GHz chip in it. Especially after I unlocked the two extra cores! Quite quick, even as a Dual Core. It should rock with my 6 core in it!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

No offense but most likely don't want to deal with the change which is the reason most are reluctant to do so. I can't say I like change a lot of the time and I truly don't believe change is always good, it's not, like big business would want you to think. For OS's Vista was like that what a bloat program, poorly put together, resource hog, and wouldn't run most of the software out there, even new software at the time. And Windows 8 looks like it could be another nightmare too, we will see.

Like I said Seven definitely has some issues but there is nothing that should be a show stopper, keeping one from upgrading, even when it comes to software programs. The only thing that could hold you up from switching is if you have hardware that you can't get drivers for and you HAVE to use. I've only seen this in POS systems, cash registers basically, where a firm doesn't want to buy new hardware/software and there isn't any advantage to upgrade until their hardware starts to fail.

I too don't typically go with CAS9 on two gig sticks but as you get larger memory you start to get away from CAS7 even for performance memory. The RAM you went with is what I'm using in one of my many PC's and it's good, NOT great!, however I like it and would buy it again.

I'm glad you've beaten the 7 year plan and hope you beat the 20 year plan for that matter. I have a friend that was on the 3 year max plan and they are going into 12 years now, luckily doctors aren't always correct in these circumstances.

That should be a very nice system, make sure you put Windows 7 Ultimate on it so that you can really enjoy the feel & power! The devil made me add that sorry Russ… LOL

Best Regards,
Stevo

 

For all the similarities, there are differences from XP to 7. And I did the Beta testing I had to tweak/force my printer to work. Interesting experience. I wouldn't mind playing with windows 8 on another machine. But if it was designed with touchscreen and tablet users in mind, I don't think i'm gonna like it. At least not with my current hardware.
I could totally see myself using 8Gb of Ram or more. That will be one of the things I'll be upgrading as well. Several of my programs can make use of 4Gb pretty easily. And I hate it when my hard drive has to be used like memory. It slows down big time!

Russ, you can't keep a good dog down! I plan to live forever myself... LOL! A doctor doesn't dictate my lifespan. My health and activity however does I see lazy people with health problems all the time. Humans are meant to be more active. I guarantee laziness is causing so many health issues today...

 

I really don't want a touch screen for my everyday PC can you imagine all of the smudges on your screen when working in Photoshop or other programs like that, yuk. I need to DL the latest Eight beta and see if there is a way to customize it so that it would boot into the normal style Desktop, I do like their new normal Desktop UI underneath the initial Startup tablet screen.

That is one place 7 excels is the RAM capabilities and I told you one of my 250GB drives was starting to fail, slowly, well just after I figured that out Seven posted a note asking me if I wanted to backup that drive as it was starting to fail and they didn't want me to lose any data saved on it. Of course I already would have lost some stuff but for a novice this is a nice feature even if it hogs some of your resources.

Like you Kev I need a lot of RAM as well as extra cores since I run VMWare and sometimes have multiple OS's running on one PC. Someday I may setup multiple virtual servers, which I turned a friend onto and he loves them.

 

Stevo,

I'll bet the farm that your friend didn't survive for 22 minutes, on CPR and an Ambu bag though! I had immediate short term memory problems, but it got better until recently. Sometimes my train of thought just vanishes in mid sentence!

I have 7 Ultimate on my laptop. It now brings up that repair thing that never works. It always says that it can't fix the problem. Until they get rid of that problem, I won't be using 7!

Russ

 

I lose my train of thought all the time. Just one of those things I live with :S

We reap what we sow...

I'm still highly intelligent though One day, I'll prove it to myself.

 

Well my friend had a tough go, very tough, but I don't think this was contest or I didn't mean it to be. I'm glad you are doing as well as you are and that's all that matters of course.

I've had the fixing problem thing too and you are right MS is horrible at trying to fix their own problems and it actually got worst in Vista7 due to their added complexity.

The problem I have on my HDD going bad would have worked as they actually can make a backup image of that drive pretty well. So in this case it would be a good thing.

Actually shaffaaf would disagree with that "nOOb".... LOL I'm sorry I couldn't resist the temptation, I'm bad. :O

Stevo

 

Stevo,

No, I didn't mean it that way, like a contest, but few people live through something like I experienced. I was just lucky enough to be in a national park that had cell phone repeaters. I was in the middle of nowhere where the nearest paved road was 8 miles away. I hate Helicopters, but I was glad to see the Life Flite get there. They got me jump started and stabilized, and then transported me about 150-160 miles to Reno. I remember very little about the whole trip. I was sort of in and out of it, mostly out!

Russ

 

You were damn lucky for sure to be that distance and still pulling through thankfully.

I actually love copters and have a carbon fiber large scale RC that I fly. When I was in jet engine testing I was one of the experts in shaft cell engines as well as gas turbine. With shaft cell testing I got to work with helicopter engines, radials, and APU's , many of them, but never got the chance to fly in a copter. I was close to it with the Coast Guard but it didn't pan out for me unfortunately.

Best Regards,
Stevo

 

To go for the big sticks out there, 2GB DDR2 sticks at the time on CAS5 (when 1GB CAS4 was common), 2GB DDR3 sticks on CAS9 (when 1GB CAS7 was common), and 4GB DDR3 on CAS9 (when 2GB CAS7 was common), I've always taken the latency hit, but then that's partly because I run Intel systems which care more for memory speed over memory latency (at least I think this is still the case, it certainly used to be), whereas with AMDs it's the reverse.
Mr-Movies: SMART scanning has been in since Vista, and can certainly be useful, though it's not without its flaws. It runs off any trigger that causes the drive to be registered as a pre-fail, this includes having any re-allocated sectors, and any manufacturer specific failure codes, for example I had a Samsung F1 drive with a faulty S-ATA cable, and since F1s store interface CRC errors on the drive, the drive was marked as pre-fail, even though there was nothing wrong with it, and so I had to disable the SMART checker on that drive.

 

Sam,

Is there a way to turn off Smart Scanning to all drives? Is there a way to turn off all of the repair crap? That's Win7 Ultimate, BTW!

Guess what I'm going to be doing this weekend. Unbelievably my motherboard and memory came about an hour ago, 17 hours after it was ordered. That's amazing!

Gigabyte has done a fine job with the Heatsinks, finally designing some that at last, make sense. The southbridge Heatsink is enormous, a whopping 2 5/8" x 2 7/8". Air flows under it, over it, around it, and through it. Another thing I thought novel is the USBs are all fused individually. If something goes wrong with an external USB device, only the port it's using shuts down. I'm looking forward to this!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I'm sure you can disable it somewhere else, but the only method I use is if the drive comes up with a SMART error, in which case, you ignore it, and then when the box appears for the third time you get an extra option 'don't notify me again (not recommended)' - hit that, and it shuts up.

You'll have to be a bit more specific than 'repair crap' for me to give you any advice about that!

That delivery time's pretty good for the US, though IIRC newegg have a depot in california? So it's only within state. Typically, orders in the UK arrive within about 18 hours, but that's a much smaller country! My record is 11 hours, from ordering at 10pm and getting the delivery at 9am. Few sites will do that though!

 

Sam,

I'm talking about whatever it is that decides that you need a repair. I mean, why should I need a repair? The computer works perfectly with XP-Pro. The second time I had 7 on my computer it was in dual boot, done by M$'s own tutorial, and software. When 7 gave me the repair deal I just switched to XP all the time, by selecting it in the boot manager. After about two months, I didn't catch the boot manager in time and lo and behold, Win7 was working again. How can that be, unless Micro$oft was doing something to my Win7 without my knowledge. It lasted about a month and then told me that I needed to run the repair program, which so far has a .000 Batting average with me at fixing anything. I wasted a couple of hours, for it to tell me it couldn't fix the problem, like it always does. Maybe that's why my customer told me to keep it when he found out the cost of a new screen, and the parts he broke dropping on the screen end with it open. Problem with it is it will run XP, but you can only find about half of the drivers needed. I have a DVD that Will gave me with over 800,000 drivers, and I've yet to find anything that will work. This is one of those that you supposedly couldn't convert to XP. The did outlaw them and they no longer make them, but The manufacturer was required to only make future ones work. Everyone else got screwed! The only way laws get Grandfathered in is if there's some money involved that usually winds up in the politicians pockets!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I've only had a bad boot manager once in my two years of running 7. Using the fix utility worked fine for me...

 

You can on most MB's turn it off in the BIOS/CMOS setup which would be your best bet. However you can try this:

Start Menu -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Task Scheduler In Task Scheduler, expand "Task Scheduler Library" in the upper left corner. Next, expand "Microsoft", then "Windows". Select "DiskDiagnostic" from the list. You should now see two items in the top middle frame. The second item, "Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticResolver", is responsible for reporting drive errors. You can either disable it or configure it to run less frequently than every logon.

 

Weird, I have it disabled, and it still runs.

 

Sorry, bad post! Something screwed up!

Russ