The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

That logitech looks like an ample keyboard. Unfortunately it isn't ergonomic :S

 

I tried an ergonomic keyboard once. I think it's in a box on my closet shelf. I could never get the hang of those silly keyboards, and they are so damn big! LOL!!

Russ

 

Has anybody noticed that we are paying fairly steep prices for Win 7, yet it's not anywhere near a complete operating system! The XP Mode is a joke, it's so slow. Just for the heck of it, I did an encode in XP Mode, and it took more than twice as much time as it does in Win 7. It's full of glitches, with no support for simple things like no support for GIFs in the Windows Photo Viewer. The Screen saver doesn't work, nor will it at least shut down the monitor after you set the time period. I hear people like Sam, talking about BSODs, a couple of times a day. Personally I have only had one, and that was when I tried to reinstall Win 7 without wiping the drive, so at least it has been stable.

Micro$oft has a lot of nerve charging such high prices, knowing there are so many bugs in the OS. I guess that makes us unpaid Beta Testers! LOL!!

Russ

 

me gonna stick with windows XP then for my new build! windows8 around the corner?

 

I'll stick with 7. Sleep mode works perfectly, Screensavers work. XP mode? Never found a need for it.

I think I'll update my Bios though. I'm having problems getting my 965 to drop it's voltage/frequency dynamically. I do have one of the earlier bios releases.

 

Windows 8 is going to be another Cluster F job, given it's short development time, even worse than Win 7. Win 7 almost get's to be comical, as you never know what will stop working next. Still, without all the Bling, 7 isn't that difficult. My windows 7 desktop pretty much looks just like it's XP-Pro counterpart. Much easier to use than it was with Win 7 Home Basic, and far more stable!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Russ, if you run XP with VMware and try to encode in the virtual environment it will run slow too, that is just the nature of the beast. That was true years ago with MAC's and Amiga's with their sidecar OS's. Anytime you have to translate from one OS to another utilizing the same hardware you are going to take a big hit. Only when you have an embedded OS on a addon card will you perform better but still will not be as fast as the native OS.

I don't like MS but I think you are off base here.

The screen saver works on 7 real nice but the hard drive has to be setup proper in the power saver mode you are operating in. This is where MS has screwed up, you have two modes of operation but you also have to go into the Advanced Power settings to properly setup your power scheme. Very confusing it is but the themes and screen saver are excellent I think and work as I would expect them too.

Sorry,
Stevo

 

XP Mode is slow because it's virtualised - that's just how virtualisation works, and no third party alternative will fix that issue.

When? I haven't had any BSODs in Win7 for quite some time. Win7 is no more prone to them than XP is.

 

my W7 machine only has 1 power setting, Maximum POWAA!!!

hell i already burn holes in the ozone layer With my Ozonator(1976 El Camino) why go all hippie tree huger with my electronics.

 

NP! So it's a stand alone running in a virtual computer environment? OK, I stand corrected!

I know very little about this. All my computing knowledge is in Multi-CPU high speed installations, where it's the faster the better. Full body scans take a huge amount of computing power.

Sorry for the goof,
Russ

 

Not true Win7 is more prone to BSOD's than XP, I've had plenty due to driver issues or the System Reserve partition getting corrupted. Then you go though possibly hours of 7 trying to fix the problem only to find it can't.

Sorry but XP is more stable!

Stevo

Russ,

You can provide more memory and/or cores for the virtual environment to use which will increase your performance in the VM, but you will always be slower unfortunately.

Best Regards,
Stevo

 

bad luck maybe? i haven't had a BSOD in about 2 years of operation, and the only time i have BSODed was when i was setting up my OC.

 

No not bad luck, I'm not the only person and I know plenty of others plus you can find them on the net too that are complaining of similar issues. On my ten+ machines just at home not all have problems but some do and it is numerous reasons but the fact is that Windows 7 structure corrupts much easier than XP and doesn't recover as easily or as often.

I like 7 but it is not as stable as XP and that is based on my numerous PC's used and the numerous people I help too plus all the people I find online with again similar problems.

Just because you have had good luck certainly doesn't mean problems don't exist. Some of my PC's have never had a problem, others more than often.

 

DXR88,

I would have agreed to a lot of BSODs with the Windows 7 Home Basic I originally had installed, but so far, Win 7 Professional is much more stable than XP ever was, and I've been using XP-Pro for over 8 years. The only BSOD I have seen with Win 7 was when I tried to re-install Win 7 Pro, without wiping the drive first. 99% of my x86 programs work fine in Win 7, and I've had no driver issues at all. I liked 64 Bit XP-Pro, but drivers were always the issue. I'm just hoping that PeerGuardian2 comes out with a Win 7 64 bit version.

BTW I've found a very good viewer that plays .gif files. In fact it plays many file types that Windows Photo Viewer doesn't recognize. It's a lot like Irfanview, but much easier to use.

http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Russ,

On one of my PC's I have to perform a ChkDsk /f on the C: drive periodicly as $I030 files in the System Volume Information (hidden folder) constantly corrupts itself. The probable cause is Adobe Acrobat but the file corruption isn't always to their file caching. Funny things start happening like my connection to the internet closes for that PC and other programs won't run that run normally. After Adobe does one of their upgrades it helps if I manually open up Acrobat, if I don't then I start having issues shortly afterwards. That is only one problem in an array of issues.

Nice pick Russ on that Viewer I like the controls it has and will play with that great snag!!!

The Best,
Stevo...

 

perhaps its an issue with lower tier W7 editions then, i've got W7 Ultimate x64 and haven't had nary an issue that wasn't my own fault.

 

And I have with ALL flavors except Starter which I haven't dealt with much. It's not the version you have as much as it is their restructuring!

And it is not something I'm doing or others from my experience. If I go back to XP on the same hardware I won't have issues!!

 

I had more issues with XP than windows 7 ultimate 64-bit(SP1) :S The only bugs I've seen with 7, were my own doing. Not suggesting a problem doesn't exist. Because I'm sure under the right circumstances, even linux could become unstable. All it takes is the right set of circumstances
The windows 7 beta I would compare to XP. The beta had a few problems, which could be expected. 7 ultimate(SP1) though? I have yet to experience a serious issue.

Russ, that's really weird that reinstalling gives you hell. When I do, I've never used killdisk before the process. I just delete all partitions on the drive, and tell it to install. Not once have I had an issue. Perhaps different hard drives/equipment behave differently.

 

I got my new Acer 17.3 i5 Notebook about a week ago now and it is nice. The first thing i did was pull the hard drive out before powering it up and did a sector backup of the drive which took 10+ hours using Acronis True Image Home. It actually has a second drive bay in it with a SATA connector the only problem is the cover for the bay would have to be replaced or modified to get a second HDD in there. I will try a second drive in it without the bay cover before pursuing further modifications though, when I add (3) sticks of RAM to load it up with 16GB's. I also built a system restore disc set using Acer's restore tool and now I just need to backup a couple more things and I'll be fully set to wipe all of the Acer nonsense off and install a clean OS.

It doesn't seem much faster than my old Turion 64 X2 TL-60 HP but then I haven't played with it enough to make any serious conclusions. The new 16:9 17" screens sure are wide I think I'd prefer a 16:10 to give me a little more hight and less width, better for surfing too.

 

LOL! Gotta keep it simple stupid. Apparently, in order for C1E and/or Cool&quiet to work, I can't have the "Power plan" set for high performance. Go figure LOL! I installed "easy saver" today, from the gigabyte driver disk. My guess is it overwrote my power plan. Because it set the plan to balanced. Which told it to sleep after 30 min, and display to shut off after 10. I came home after work, and it was asleep. I was like, what! LOL! Lesson learned