CoffeeFiend

That's what I thought, but wasn't certain enough to say for sure. As long as the HD is detected and the bootloader works I guess... (I hardly use linux at all, no use for it really) But with one drive, why not just keep the 300w until it dies (then buy a newer one). It's not like it can't really handle a single drive (and the old socket 7 system surely doesn't use much power). A 250w PSU would already be overkill (just look at Zxian's specs and power usage on a newer system) Edit: Looks like Zxian was faster than me on that one... Subcodec: Best thing you can do is move hard drives away. Spin up current is like 2 amps per HD, so for 7 HDs, that's like 14 amps, on top of everything your system uses (including fast CPU and video card) Just the HDs' 12v bus usage at spin up already takes that old PSU to the very limit of what the 12v bus can take (theorically). From using a standard PSU calculator and your specs (chose 1 optical drive, a sound blaster, and an extra PCI card), setting 20 to 25% for capacitor aging, and with any surge compensation at all, you quickly reach 500w. Give yourself some margin for expansion or anything (not running all full load either), and you're quickly over that. Regardless of all this, all these drives put quite a load on any PSU when they spin up. With all these HDs, dual PSUs would be a very good thing (but I can't see that fit in any HTPC case), hence the idea to move HDs away (and just stream media over network like I do)

Actually, there's some BIOS patches available to get up to 137GB (128GiB). Like here. Might be useful if one wants to use some older 60/80/120GB drives at some point, but it's still of limited utility - and still no LBA48 (not very surprising, I mean, this is a socket 7 board! Haven't had one for like 10 years). Hopefully the PCI card works, otherwise, one might still buy a 80GB drive for 53$ or such (better than nothing, and quite cheap) I'd consider buying a larger drive and putting it inside another box anyways (if the sole intent is file sharing, or using virtualization if you wanted a linux box, which I doubt since it's got to be a very old/slow CPU), and save even more electricity.

MSI MS-5187 motherboard? Too old to have ATA133 or 48 bit LBA in any way. Sounds like a good use for that PCI card!

NewEgg has the Seagate 7200.10 (perpendicular recording) 250GB/16MB cache drives for $80 plus shipping...just so you know We're talking CDN $ here, and very cheap shipping from (and to) Canada (like 8$ overnight, I can order around 11pm and have it at my doorsteps across Canada by 8am!) 80$ USD (93$CDN) is actually more expensive than what gamehead200 linked to (same drives), which are available locally (no shipping). Personally, the smallest I'd buy is a 320GB (109$CDN or 93$USD), but even then the last batch I bought were 400GB ones (don't want to pay much per GB, but don't want to fill the ports with too many small HDs). With newegg, we'd have to pay super expensive international shipping, customs clearance (pretty annoying to deal with) and all that, and RMA shipping (should anything happen) is international shipping too... I prefer to support local business (especially when they're cheaper!)

It's not a matter of wattage when idle or seeking. It's a matter of current @ spin up (just like for any electrical motor being used for any purpose, start current is always the problem). When you get so many drives on a single PSU, you eventually want staggered spin up, or dual PSUs (or at least a decently powerful one - especially the 12v bus). Check how much the 12v bus can handle (and if it's an older PSU, then don't count on it being as good as the specs say, due to capacitor aging and such, and no-name PSUs aren't usually too good either) Just don't be surprised when it gives up when rebooting one day (especially if you try with 8 drives). But personally, I'd ditch any drives so small. All they do is waste electricity IMO (usually pretty slow too, and not always very reliable). Anything under 200GB has long been re-purposed as a backup device, or "large floppy" of some sort (smallest being 60GB). You may not realize how much power (hence money) it's wasting (perhaps you're not the one paying the electricity bill? yet?) 100w worth of drives (should be in that ball park for 8 drives), 24h/day, 365 days/year, @ 0.10$/KWh (a pretty reasonable rate) and ~15% tax on top, costs ~100$ a year in electricity -- for what amounts to 18$ worth of storage in the first place (~60GB total * ~0.30$/GB) When you think of it, you could throw all these HDs straight to the garbage (perhaps the best place for 'em to be -- or perhaps recycling), and buy a newer/better/more reliable/faster/bigger HD for essentially nothing. The savings in electricity (going with a single drive) would pay for it, e.g. a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB ATA100 7200RPM 8MB 8.5MS 5Yr Warranty is 80$ (everyday's price, rebates/specials can make a even better deal) - nearly 3x the space. And all kinds of bonuses, like less heat in the case, less noise (especially if there's any temp sensitive fans in there), not needing such a large case, more space left for expansion, etc. And won't kill the PSU with spin up current (one less future expense) In short, I see no reason to keep the old drives in the first place.

Seeing discussions like this make me realize one thing: how I truly hate and despise shopping for video cards! There's WAY too many series, models and model #s, different types of RAM, different clocks on everything and all. It's one big confusing mess! It sounds like higher numbers mean higher performance, but not always (like the 7300GT being faster than a 7600GS with the right type of memory, as PuntoMX said before). And even in the same series (like 7600's or 7300's), there's GS, GT, and others, and all these with various clock speeds and manufacturers, making it almost impossible to compare 2 cards directly... (Disregarding all the discussions about pipelines/shaders and whatever else) It's complicated and misleading. And I can't ever seem to find some kind of comparison point for any card I'm considering buying. Anything better than THG's charts out there? (besides google'ing for countless separate reviews) Seemingly any card I pick isn't on the list, or is clocked differently in one way or another. There's just too many 7300 and 7600 models for sale (7900's are over 200$ CDN - too much IMO), I can't seemingly find some way to compare 'em all, and the prices vary a lot from one to another. Shopping for PC parts is easy and straightforward, except for f%#@^%$*ing video cards (unless you're a gamer, read video card reviews everyday and memorize 'em all seemingly). The only thing that's seemingly making it somewhat easier is ATI not having very good offerings anymore. I was always partial to ATI cards (never had any problems with 'em, unlike nvidia's), but their prices seem higher and performance slower nowadays, like the 1650 costing more than a 7600 and being slower). It's just too d**n complicated to pick a budget card for a total non-gamer (primarily for Vista, WPF and HDTV)

Why bother anyways? Even the very best deals I could find on ebay (usually high density RAM) aren't significantly cheaper than the normal stuff at my normal online stores (especially when most of these ebay sellers overcharge on shipping - sometimes shipping costs more than the item). On 1GB DDR2 800 sticks, I could save about 20$. Is it worth it to risk having (no name) RAM that won't work or won't be compatible, might be harder to RMA (or get exchanged under warranty should anything happen), might not work in the next system (that next board might not be compatible with it - or would restrict your board selection very much) and such, just to save 20$ (which isn't that much $ considering how much the entire PC costs e.g. 20$ saved over a 1500$ PC)? The local shops (or good online stores) have a good reputation, good quality products from most major and reputable manufacturers, have good warranty (easy to RMA and will honor their warranty), are subject to BBB complaints/small claims court and all that, and have decent pricing for the most part (might be different in other some countries though)

There's no option to watch/click or anything like that...

It's a matter of preferences, one uses whatever they like (that's what makes FF so nice). Adobe is too bloody slow (that's what my reference to "eternity and a day" was referring to, the slowdobe plugin). I'm a Foxit Reader fan myself, but even then I prefer to download them half the time, and this gives me the option to chose - and it also serves as some sort of warning when opening a link to a pdf when you weren't suspecting. Again, matter of preferences, it's not like I expect everybody else to use it, but then again there's some on your list I wouldn't use either (like NoScript)

A couple extras that haven't been mentioned yet (besides Adblock, WebDev Toolbar, etc): PDF Download So it asks if you want to open/download the PDF or whatever, instead of using some plugin that takes eternity and a day to open without warning VideoDownloader To download videos off popular video sharing sites easily ForecastFox Shows weather forecast SwitchProxy Tool To manage and switch between proxies, like Tor and HTTP debugging proxies Live HTTP Headers To see HTTP headers and requests Firebug Another great web dev tool, such as the WebDev toolbar (all kinds of HTML/CSS/JS/DOM/AJAX stuff) There's the odd extension I use from time to time too (StumbleUpon, FoxyTunes, etc)

Keyboards aren't fashion statements, they're input devices. What I want is a GOOD keyboard (and if it looks nice then bonus, but it's totally optional). Couldn't care less the colors of the keys, it's not like I sit there and stare at the keyboard all day (that's what monitors are for) If they ever make a version with good buckling spring switches (likely never), I might still consider buying one...

230$ (+ drives) for a box that will already be full with those 2 HDs (not expandable at all), so ~400$ with drives, and a total of 250GB, or 1.60$/GB! Ouch. I buy my storage @ ~0.30$/GB. And cheapo software RAID cards under 50$ let you plug 4 extra HDs (add as many as you need). For ~400$ I'd buy four 320GB'ers, use 2 to hold data, and 2 as backups, leaving me with 640GB of usable space at the same price (0.60$/GB backed up, not bad at all). That's 2.5x the place, even keeping half the drives for backups. It'll let me use any file system I so please, RAID 'em or not, partition the way I want it, I'll have access to it in any way I please and such. Besides, I don't see much of a need for redundancy, as long as one has backups (mirroring is no substitute for backups!). I have no need for my data to stay "online" as one drive died, and rebuild the other meanwhile. I'd just replace the drive and restore the backup. And even if I didn't go the "homebrew NAS" way (or SAN), I'd likely go for WHS over a NAS. Not much more expensive (starts @ 500$ IIRC), but far nicer and much more useful IMO.

x86 hardware is extremely stable nowadays. Just look at all those BSD folks bragging about their uptimes of many months and such (on generic x86 hardware). Similarly, I hardly ever see any crashes, even on desktops (unless one has faulty hardware - which happens regardless of platform, or bad drivers). The only times we ever seem to have servers go down is because of broken hardware (had a broken PERC not too long ago) Personally, from a hardware standpoint, I'd go with the x86 setup. It's dirt cheap, very reliable, there's TONS of vendors to choose from - from major names like HP or Dell with various levels of support - to white boxes. Many CPU lines to chose from (Opterons and Xeons for "real" server stuff, cheapo P4s and such for backup servers and other simpler things), replacement/upgrade parts are easy to find (even locally). x86 hardware can run a variety of operating systems. Of course she wants to keep her job, so it's in her best interest to describe System i as vastly superior. But which hardware you'll be using likely won't make much of a difference (in terms of availability) if you're going to run new/different software on the other. It'll be mainly an issue of how good is your new app. if it's buggy, it won't be as reliable as the old system, if it's a great and stable piece of software, it could be better than the old one. The hardware an app runs onto only matters so much. Just like a car (hardware) that's believed by some to be supposedly be more reliable: it doesn't matter if the driver (software) is inexperienced and goes off the road (hey, someone had to do the bad car analogy thing!) We run x86 servers exclusively and couldn't be happier. Let's pray no IBM consultant/salesperson comes around and ruins it!

Actually, it's full of it, under "latest hardware news". Mind you "yet another mp3 player" (happens all the time) and "yet another cell phone" (nokia et al do this like everyday) is hardly what I'd call news. That 108" LCD TV is on there.

Something can save SATA2 HDs and Gigabit ethernet, but if it has a a stopwatch CPU... I've found most entry-level NAS to suck badly. Not just bad performance, but other limitations too (like what file systems can be used on the disks), and usually very limited scalability. Usually not worth the price IMO. 300$ for this thing? Any old computer (~free) running headless somewhere in a dark corner of the basement will do just fine, and usually expands quite well (plug in cheap PATA/SATA controllers as necessary, or using external USB enclosures or such). You use the file systems you want. No dinky CPUs. Runs the software you want. Cheap commodity parts (easy and cheap to fix). Upgradeable. Same old PC can be used for many tasks (like holding recordings of PVR software, running backup jobs & sync'ing, running P2P apps for large transfers, can be used as NAT/FW too, you name it!) For very little more, you'll be able to move on to using iSCSI or AoE (ATA over Ethernet) later on if you want to (or Fibre Channel if you prefer) You may also want to look into MS new offering: Windows Home Server, which does provide centralized storage (and backups) too.

How is it nonsense or why couldn't it? If one were making a new supercomputer right now, of course it would be 64 bit, as pretty much all high-end CPUs all are (be they x64, Itanic, PPC, etc), but Blue Gene isn't exactly new (although it's still a very powerful beast). But supercomputers don't typically require 64 bit CPUs (unless you have very specific needs for your individual nodes). It's just a lot of smaller nodes working together as a whole, each node can perfectly use a 32 bit CPU, there's no problems with that. Just like for clusters or HPC in general. Blue Gene uses 32 bit PPC CPUs. If they need more power, they typically just throw more nodes at it. And of course it doesn't run windows. Windows just isn't a player in that market (HPC/clusters) at all. No news there. Unix has been the platform of choice for a very long time, but has been replaced by Linux in recent years. People seem to think that 64 bit is magically twice as good as 32 bit or something (too much hype lately). Just like they tend to compare cameras based on megapixels. It's not like the PS2's custom CPU being 128 bit makes it such as powerful chip (it basically gets slaughtered by plain old 32 bit P4s). Like most consoles (like those using Cell CPUs nowadays), they're primarily doing graphics work - not general purpose computing and such. SSE offers 128 bit registers and such too (to work with graphics stuff). Graphics (i.e. gaming consoles), general purpose computing and HPC are too different loads to even try to compare "bitness" like that (especially since some are using more specialized CPUs). 64 bit CPUs just don't have anything magical that makes 'em super powerful, twice faster or anything. It's mainly: larger address space (not useful yet for most scenarios) and more/bigger registers (the main advantage right now) making complex math easier and such. That's pretty much all you're getting out of 64 bits. Extra registers would definitely boost CPU performance a bit in HPC/cluster applications too (making each node do its calculations faster), but again, there's no reasons at all for 32 bit chips not to work.

I agree with almost everything you said - just not the "without issue" part. It's not hugely problematic (if you have the required drivers). Even though Vista (or XP x64) looks good on paper when it comes to compatibility, there are still many bugs, glitches and issues, e.g. VWD 2005 (MS' own dev tools - and one I use a great deal) that won't even install (no word about the other products, but likely same story, and also lots of little things like VS2005 being 32 bit, hence running under WOW64, can't directly debug 64 bit apps so it has to use remote debugging), glitches in games and such things. Lots of people aren't too happy about the driver signing enforcement on Vista x64 either. Again, there is no single major issue, but it all adds up. All these little bugs and glitches easily get very annoying, and take time to work around or fix. But if one has fully supported hardware, then I don't see any reason not to try it. Hopefully everything will work. x64 is definitely the way things will go in the future. It'll replace x86, no doubts about it, it's only a matter of time. All I'm saying is that it'll be far easier to do the switch in a year or two, when the 64 bit "world" will be more mature (most bugs and compatibility things worked out, more drivers available, more apps available for it, etc), and by then people will have even less older/unsupported hardware (one can plan on replacing them over the next couple years - or keep an old box/OS for it). I see it as a bit easier to stick with x86 for now (no hassles, already have drivers for everything), and do the switch later on. There's no major compelling reason to do the switch just yet anyways.

That's Paul Thurrott's words. Perhaps you should ask him? But then again, it explains it all in his review. More x86 stuff being available is a bad thing? Not sure I'm following you here. No! That's not the point at all. Small? Both are comparable. Better? It currently is (IMO). x64 is somewhat faster, partially because of the extra CPU registers, but a very slight advantage in speed is not a very big deal, like a different car that can go 10km/h faster isn't necessarily a better car, one has to look at the other issues. Stability? Depends on your drivers a great deal, I frankly see no advantage here (x86 code is already rock stable nowadays, again, unless one has crappy drivers or broken hardware). How it's a 2nd class citizen? Because MS making a x64 version seems like an afterthought. 32 bit Vista was only put out once most major issues were ironed out. As for the 64 bit version, there are still lots of problems from what I see (again, read Thurrott's review for some examples of what doesn't work and such). There's not enough pressure on hardware manufacturers to release 64 bit drivers (and good ones at that). Not nearly enough pressure is put on developers to make 64 bit software available (many still don't care at all!) Their own dev tools (.NET) and documentation for 64 bit were quite late (never available for 1.0/1.1), and still aren't on par with their 32 bit counterparts either, although they're slowly getting there. Perhaps it has to do with the general opinion that most people have towards 64 bit computing: there's just no need for it (on the desktop) yet. The main advantage people see is the bigger address space, but most people or apps can't really use that much RAM, and it's not cheap enough for most people to have 8GB just yet. For a lot of things, a 64 bit version would mainly use a bit more memory, and give almost no benefits -- not enough to outweigh the driver problems alone. Personally, the only thing I might miss from not going 64 bit right now is somewhat faster xvid encoding. It'll take a lot more than that for me to switch.

Then, likely you haven't tried v10. It's not like we were an isolated case, there were even a slashdot article about this, and tons of people had similar problems/experiences with it. And the problems were very real - they're all documented on symantec's own support site. I've hardly ever seen this (I could probably count it on the fingers of one hand), and we've got ~60k users (FAR more than 6k workstations!) Sounds like you're doing something wrong... Not in my experience, no. And just try it: install office 2k on win2k pro (both fully patched), and then SAV10 - our success rate in it screwing up the install is ~100% (it'll ask for the install CD). It should be VERY easy to reproduce, so yes, it surely does corrupt office!

Because 64 bit OSes aren't quite there yet (IMO) - many issues, from drivers, to non-compatible software (and general lack of 64 bit apps), apps using more RAM, and countless other little things. As Paul Thurott puts it in his Vista review: "x64 is still a second-class citizen" 64 bit is very nice in theory, but it just doesn't deliver yet. In a year or two perhaps. By then software availability and driver support will be better. And RAM will be a bit cheaper, making setups with >4GB RAM more common. Right now the only reason I see to bother is a handful of apps using the extra CPU registers (making them a bit faster), and very little more - nothing to outweigh the many disadvantages (and end up running everything thru WOW64 for no reason). But right now, I see no reason at all for me to use a 64 bit OS. Because pretty much all the new CPUs are 64 bit, and it makes no sense for one to go out of his way to ensure his CPU doesn't support it?

I guess it's a matter of different uses/priorities really. A HD for an OS will always seem tot slow (same for OSes inside VMs). RAID0 sure helps. As far as RPMs go, yes, it helps for speed, but my point was, speed is a non-issue for many scenarios. I still have a few 5400rpm HDs I'm using for backups. Besides my OS drives (a tiny portion of my storage), I have TONS of data that just sits there, just in case you'd feel like using it (sitting there doing nothing for the most part). And when you do, speed is largely irrelevant - like streaming mp3's to the family PC or mpeg4 files to XBMC. A ATA33 4200rpm drive is already overkill for that (speed wise), but there's no such thing as too much space. And I forgot to mention, not only you have to plug all these HDs, but you also have to put them somewhere. I've bought 2 monster towers just because of that (a thermaltake armor, and recently a coolermaster stacker with 3 extra 3-to-4 bay converter thingies and 2nd PSU), plus quiet cooling fans to prevent a meltdown without turning deaf. Gets expensive... I can only afford it because I'm plugging them on cheap sabrent silicon image *PCI* SATA software RAID cards (yes, plain old PCI!) With bigger drives, I could have smaller & cheaper (and lighter) cases, less fans making noise, less RAID cards, less wiring mess, less PSUs, less HDs spinning making even more noise and heat (requiring me to run 2 large ACs 24/7 during summer, costing more $), less drives for backups, less drive letters, etc. Couldn't care less if they were slower, as they're sitting 99% idle anyways. If anything (besides being bigger), I'd pick lower power usage & heat, quieter and higher reliability/quality.

Well, I also want to see faster disks, but being the mechanical things they are (and the way they work), I doubt we'll see them get much faster. If anything, they'll get replaced by solid state/flash based disks instead. As far as 1TB disks go, I'm very much interested to see them. Adding disks does work right now, but if you have serious storage needs (doing AV work, having a video server, media collection, tons of DSLR RAW files and also lots of TIFF & PSD files, having lots of virtual machines, test databases and what not - and then making backups of it all!), you quickly need an awful lot of HDs. I don't need super-fast PCs myself, but I need several TBs of storage. And that requires me to have dozens of HDs (using mainly 320GB'ers right now). Dozens of HDs each creating noise and heat, which also end up requiring a lot of PATA/SATA connectors and controllers (good SATA RAID cards are ridiculously expensive!), and many PSU connectors too. Cheap 1TB models would be a godsend as far as I'm concerned. I'm already happy to see the 750GB come down in price to a much more reasonable price:capacity ratio. 1GB drives at 400$ a pop? I'd likely order a pair. Speed sure is important for an OS drive, AV work, photo editing and such, but for things like a media server (which will be streaming video @ ~1mbit) and such things it's a total non-issue. So even if speed isn't improved, I'm still all for bigger disks. Although I wouldn't consider those too news-worthy -- companies have been making bigger HDs every few months for years and years.

Yes, it is different enough that you're comparing different things. Norton AV (and NIS) makes a PC slow - that's its main problem. SAV on the other hand doesn't make it as slow (it's still quite slow, but beating NIS at this is basically impossible), but is by FAR the most unstable/crashiest AV we've EVER seen. It messed up countless MS Office installs (their "workaround" in their knowledge base thingy was esentially "reinstall"! like going around hundreds or thousands of PCs in many buildings in many sites to manually reinstall is normal?), doscan.exe eating 100% CPU for a while and then crashing (and associated errors/problems, like memory leaks in rtvscan.exe) which happenned basically on every PC we've tried it onto (existing PCs that never had problems, clean installs, you name it), etc. It was the biggest test deployment failure I've ever seen hands down. Too much stuff broken too often, requiring too much work to fix it, increasing the help desk's calls by a fair amount on its own. A real nightmare. Issues like we've never seen using any other AV product. After deploying a dozen or so patches to our test machines (patches which were aimed at fixing those same bugs, from what the release notes said), most of the issues still didn't go away. Turns out we didn't finally deploy it - too problematic/unreliable. No software company has an excuse to ship such crashy junk without any basic QA work. It should have been fairly obvious this junk is broken, and never been released before the main bugs are fixed - there's just NO excuse. This wasn't even beta testing quality. Between NAV and SAV, I just might pick NAV! (That's a bit like preferring a broken arm to a broken leg though, you still don't want either!) Yes, it'll make your PC so slow you won't be able to do anything with it, but SAV is almost as bad, and it'll also make it crash and it'll break apps and stuff - no thanks!

But you don't really want to operate a switching PSU w/o any load for extended periods of time. They make dirt cheap half-decent lab PSUs - just need to add a dummy load on the 5v.

100% agree. But it was a flawed question to start with. Asking "what OS is better" is exactly like asking "what vehicle is better", or "what tool is better". Without a specific use in mind (best desktop OS, for general use, or gaming perhaps), the results won't be too relevant. And there will always be a fair amount of exceptions (someone using their desktop for something special) and extremists (especially the "everything new is bloated" folks) as well as those running on pretty old hardware which just can't run modern OS'es too well. And the thread is too old anyways. In over 1 1/2 years, lots has changed. New OSes, new service packs, driver availability for certain OSes has changed quite a bit, x64 hardware is more common, PCs are somewhat faster than they were, etc. And since then, I'm sure lots changed their minds (like ripken204 did), and can't change their votes either. I just don't see the usefulness of it at all.