Zenskas

No, all of the power comes through the PCI-e slot and does not need to be plugged into the PSU. I would actually recommend going to the HD 4650 or 9500GT as they are way more powerful! The 9500GT is almost twice as powerful as the HD 4550 and I do not know where you got the benchmarks from puntoMX as close should be within 25% and not within 50% of performance http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3420&p=5 http://www.legitreviews.com/article/801/1/ (look at these benchmarks!) http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/hd4550/ (here the 8600GTS beats the HD4550 hands down and the 9500GT is more powerful or as powerful as the 8600GTS in most cases) Go figure

Ha BOB is pretty interesting to find out about. Luckily I do not have him on my PC. No search feature, no Bob in explorer, and no balloon pop ups, no office assistant and even highlighting of newly installed programs! All removed with either nLite or a few changed settings

You got it. I love tinkering with old stuff (not really old, but past 10 years) and actually getting them to do stuff...classic games, watching videos with a quiet and low powered PC, and now making a file/game server out of parts lying around to take to LAN parties that will sit in the corner taking some load off my PC (as I usually run the game servers and have heaps of files people copy from my PC to theirs over the network). And if it was free then bonus!

Yeah you probably got one with a free RAM upgrade to 2GB and they just threw a 2GB module in then disabled the onboard RAM.

The MSI Wind U100 has a full 1GB of DDR2 667MHz onboard RAM that takes on a 24% OC with ease! You can however disable the onboard memory in the BIOS. You could try that.

Not really. the thing could run at 100c degrees and as long as it doesnt melt down, i couldnt care less what the temp is. This card has been by far the best video card I have ever owned and ive owned a LOT of video cards (my first 'accerated' card was the Voodoo 2 if that gives you an idea of how long ive been buying 3d cards) With this card Ive broken free of the new-video-card-every-6 months that ive become accustomed to. Ive played Fo3, AC, Bioshock, UT3, LEGO Batman, L4D, Portal, and others i cant even remember and my 8800 which i bought in Dec of 2007 hasnt given me any issues despite its seemingly high temperature. Haha I was only kidding, I know GPU's can take very high temps but its nice to say I have very low temps on an overclocked GPU with a 25% fan speed at idle (compared to a default 35%). But yeah the 9/8800GT is a very good, solid card thats for sure. The 9600GT is fairly similar to the 8800GT and my OCed card is almost as fast and can play any game max settings on my monitors 1440x900 resolution so I am very happy. Next card I wouldn't mind a GTS 250

Then why did you say this: Yeah anyway a new GPU would be good and clean out any dust inside your PC. My 9600GT running at 25% fan speed idles between 35-40C while OCed to be about as fast as a 8800GT! Sucks for you geek

Not sure about the first problem but if you buy a new GPU and it still happens then that eliminates one thing that is stuffing up and you will not have to change to lower resolutions too! Using a memory testing program like Memtest86+ you can see if its bad RAM. As for heat just use a program like Real Temp to see if the CPU is overheating and something like GPU-Z to see if your GPU is overheating.

Its pretty easy to see where the lag comes from He has a Q6600 CPU with 3GB RAM so thats OK. Look at the specs for his PC. Gaming on a 24inch monitor with an 8400GS??? There you go. Like I said in my first post, a new GPU is needed and if your PSU is only a cheapo low watt model then a new one of those too.

I'm not sure but remember even my GPU could take a few seconds its just that I never see a message on the screen as my monitor takes a few seconds to get a signal as it auto switches between analog and digital a few times when I turn it on.

Looks to be good, but I would never use it as a home desktop. DUST! Plus components can become damaged really easily as they are not enclosed. Oh and it does not support a whole lot of drives either. Good thing is the eight expansion slots which is great for three dual-slot video cards and would suit testers and reviewers as they never use multiple drives or need heaps of case fans.

Firstly, what is the brand and model of your laptop? How fast is the current CPU? In most cases adding more RAM is a quick and easy upgrade you can do to boost performance in laptops (and desktops for that matter). I don't think you could change the fan as just about all laptops don't have 'better' fans that can be used instead of the original as they are designed only to work with a certain laptop brand/model and cannot be replaced with fans from different laptops.

If you look here, you will see I have had good experiences with Steam. Games are really cheap and are updated automatically. If the steam client and games are fully patched then you can play offline as well. It is not all good though as because games must launch through the steam client it just puts one more thing there that might stuff up.

Yep works awesome. Fast update, and web pages seem to load a little faster (could be a placebo ). Thank you Mozilla!

You got that right puntoMX, 3GB RAM and a Q6600 is nice for a while yet. Like I said, mobo should be fine if not OCing and RAM is too. A 750W PSU could be a bit of a waste of cash (although it is cheap compared to in Australia...you would pay over $200 for that)as a 500-600W should be fine and be cheaper depending on quality but if you are thinking about a whole new build in a year or so then buying the 750W now could be a smart move as you could use it in your next PC with ease. If your current PSU is ATX then any other ATX PSU will fit. A Corsair, Antec or similar brand would be good and that 750W Corsair is pretty nice.

If it is the PC in your sig you are talking about then the CPU is plenty fast enough for gaming. RAM looks OK but may not be as fast as brand-name stuff. Buying a new motherboard would give you better features in most cases and allow for overclocking! But when it comes down to it, it is the graphics card holding you WAY back. An 8400GS with a Q6600? That CPU is way too powerful for that graphics card to keep up with. What sort of games do you play? Out of the HD4000 series the 4770 is the best value and will play any game at max detail on a 22inch monitor, and most games on your 24inch on max detail settings. EDIT: And buying DDR2 800MHz RAM is plenty fast too. New mobo and RAM would not increase game performance as such, but would be a lot nicer like I said. Probably just upgrading your current PC sounds cheaper and more efficient than going and getting a new CPU and more expensive RAM as well.

Not USB speakers, but a USB sound card which you plug your speakers into. You can then uninstall the realtek drivers and disable onboard audio. The actual drivers are not 68MB once installed. Unless you really want fast bootup I would not recommend buying a SSD right now as if you really wanted to cut the time down then buying a new sound card, faster CPU and faster GPU could cost less than an Intel SSD!

Yeah I my P3 beast I sometimes talk about boots XP in less time than the PC in my sig thanks to small hardware drivers and a fast POST. Sure my 9600GT is an MSI N9600GT-T2D512. The other one which takes a few seconds extra at bootup is a Palit GeForce 9600GT (512MB). Hope this helps

Works great here, even faster than XP (and yes, that's to a 2003 file server, so still SMB 1.0). If your network transfer speeds are that slow, don't blame Vista, because it's probably not Vista's fault. And yes, SMB2.0 really is that much faster than 1.0, but you'd of course need a 2008 server or another Vista/Win7 client at the other end of the file copy. Yes I just read an article on tom's hardware which found out it is the computers HDDs that are the bottleneck for network transfers. Gigabit ethernet is much faster transferring data than many HDD's can keep up with (135 megabytes per second or 1000 megabits per second). Transferring data from the system RAM to another PC's RAM got speeds of up to 111 megabytes per second, much faster than most HDDs.

Man you love your miliseconds, as I saw from your 9600GSO taking a whole extra 5secs! Really 38secs to boot up win xp is pretty quick. If you want fast bootup try using an nlited OS with startup items disabled, services tweaked, fast and defragged HDD, and disable onboard features in the BIOS you don't need (IDE, floppy, serial ports, LAN ports, and place the HDD as the first boot device) If you want really fast bootup get an Intel SSD. I know my system is fairly similar and boots up in around 40secs. Nothing wrong with that. Is it really 10secs faster when you disable the audio? If you dont really need good audio you could always buy one of those cheap USB laptop sound cards which have a speaker and mic port and just plug into your USB port. I have the same integrated audio and have not issues.

Hmm my 9600GT does not slow the BIOS down at all but I have seen another 9600GT take a few seconds off boot time by displaying the video card memory amount before the BIOS logo showed up. Is 5 seconds really that bad you would buy a new card?

The only reason they aren't being hacked/exploited more than PCs is because there just aren't as many Mac users out there. Think about it. There's no point in creating a virus or worm that's only going to affect <20% of computers out there. Spot on. Thats exactly what I tell people that say Macs never get viruses. Well, in a way, they *are* right... There really aren't that many Mac viruses out there - only a handful. And the ones that do exist require that you enter your username/password to be installed. However if people did start making viruses for macs they could get them easily. Haha I used a method I can't remember exactly (involved pressing some keys at bootup then typing some stuff in the command prompt) to create a new admin account on a mac at school. Pretty funny and made them put a password over the firmware or something

Yeah a 50% retail version would be nice. Just got a few facts off www.tweakguides.com: Microsoft has announced that there is a heavily discounted price available for Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional Upgrade Editions for US residents who pre-order before 11 July 2009. The pre-order is now officially open, however some things to note: # These are upgrade editions, which means you need to own a qualifying full version of XP or Vista to install them. # Every Windows 7 retail box - except Home Basic - comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit install discs. # Vista users can do a clean install or in-place upgrade, while XP users can only do a clean install. # If you want to upgrade from a 32-bit version of XP or Vista to a 64-bit version of Windows 7, you need to choose the electronic purchase option and select the x64 download, then burn it to disc and do a clean install. Update: The offer is also open to Canadian, UK and Japanese residents via participating retailers.

Look here. Should answer most questions. I gotta say, $50US for the upgrade edition of Windows 7 Home premium if you preorder is very cheap!

The only reason they aren't being hacked/exploited more than PCs is because there just aren't as many Mac users out there. Think about it. There's no point in creating a virus or worm that's only going to affect <20% of computers out there. Spot on. Thats exactly what I tell people that say Macs never get viruses.