CoffeeFiend

It's a new architecture altogether. It's a Nehalem based CPU, not a "Core" based CPU (next gen, already a lot better by itself). Plus, they ditch the ancient FSB bus (way overdue). And it gets on-die memory controllers too, just like AMD has. And all kinds of little things (new SIMD instruction sets, on-die PCie controller, etc) Here's some numbers that may interest you: Yep, faster than the $330 Core 2 Quad Q9650 (in every single bench too). Your current P4 would be past the 100 seconds mark here...

Yes. And a very fast one at that. Like I've show before, it's only like $50 extra for a i5 over your initial setup (it's not like you need to get 8GB with it right away). With 8GB each, the price almost ties. But you get an entirely different beast with a much longer usable life. Depends on the video card you'd get. It should be fine with the 4670. You haven't said yet what you have. I'm really happy with onboard Realtek audio myself: 7.1+2 channel, 192/24, with toslink and spdifs out (I'm actually using both) -- it's already overkill for me

The i7 is a waste of money IMO. It's meant for very high-end stuff. The i5 750 is basically as fast as the i7 920, but it costs less, and the motherboards are cheaper too. If you plan on upgrading beyond 4 cores, beyond 16GB of RAM or something along those lines, then the i7 is for you. Just the "basic" i7 (920) and a decent board like the ASUS P6T will set you back like $550 right there, and you don't have any RAM, no video card, no hard drive or anything else yet. A very fast i5 750 system, with a nice motherboard, 8GB of DDR3, a good video card like a Radeon 4670, the 640GB drive you were after, a new DVD writer... And another $100 to spend on whatever else you want (nice PSU, sound card or whatever) Full towers are great

Depends on how many shots, and at which resolution The more, the better for sure. The x64 version of Photoshop is great for things like this (although a lot of people use other tools like PTGui instead) It's not as nice as the i5 system for sure, but it's nicer than the LGA775/DDR2 setup in many ways, and it's a lot cheaper. If he can't afford the extra $50 for the MUCH better i5, and also needs the new video card on top of that (more $ over his budget), then I figured he could use something more wallet-friendly. The money saved could go towards more RAM, or a Radeon 4670 (also good for games, a 4650 would be plenty though) and bigger hard drive, or most of a 4850 (if he wants to play games a lot), or if he really wants two cards then it would pay for a pair of 4650's (or the most part of a pair of 4670's), or a quad core CPU, or a lot of other things (including photo gear, or even just keeping the money) Same here. Dual monitors are great for a lot of things, but photo work wise... I really don't see the need. 1920x1200 is enough space (2560x1600 would be nicer, but 30" IPS LCDs are still on the expensive side)

None! (Sorry, couldn't resist) It depends on your budget, and what you expect out of a new card. Around $60 you can either get a 9500GT or a ATI 4670 that's ~50% faster (see here for example). In fact, even the cheaper 4650 is faster (see here) Personally, I don't let nvidia stuff get near my boxes

Ouch. Photoshop laughed at my previous card (8600GT which is faster than yours) before so... For the record, that's what made me upgrade mine. Sounds to me like you're also in for a video card. If you can't afford the extra $50 for the much, much better i5, then I'd probably go AMD then. Cheaper & faster DDR3, non-crippled CPU, no socket that's being EOL'ed... Here's another option: GIGABYTE GA-MA785GT-UD3H AM3 AMD 785G HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail (has two x16 slots just like the previous two) (or the ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO AM3 AMD 785G HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail if you're really into ASUS) AMD Athlon II X2 240 Regor 2.8GHz Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Processor Model ADX240OCGQBOX - Retail (faster than the E5200) A-DATA 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model HY63I1B16K - Retail (faster and cheaper than DDR2) Total: $235.97, so about $100 less for something better. Leaving you with the extra money in case the onboard Radeon 4200 video isn't good enough for you (it will do CrossFireX with a new card too, and you can use outputs from both for your dual monitor setup as well). A machine like this will run Photoshop CS4 and Lighroom just fine. Now, that's closer to what I'd call a budget system (it's very much like the one I build last weekend actually). In a couple years' time, you'll still be able to find new CPUs made for that board (you can even get a quad core for it for like $100 right now), and bumping the RAM to 8GB (useful if you do a lot of pano work and such things -- I've had Photoshop use all of 4GB on me before doing just that) without breaking the bank.

Photoshop CS4 works fantastic on any ~$50 video card, even on a basic AMD box, including the x64 version (which is great, apart from 32 bit plugins not working). AFAIK Lightroom isn't GPU accelerated so YMMV. Define semi-pro? Graphics is part of what I do for a living. And even as a heavy user of the CS4 suite, I don't have a need for multiple monitors. One *GOOD* and large monitor is what you really need IMO (works for me at least). You can easily customize Photoshop's interface to suit your needs (workspaces help, there is the configurator too), and make it get out of your way (i.e. press tab, or shift tab -- also learn your keyboard shortcuts!) It's not like the old days where we used a 2nd monitor to move the palettes to (and also because they were too small), the tabbed interface also helps a lot. I never really wanted a 2nd monitor for ACR or Bridge either. BTW, CS4 doesn't make use of more than one video card either (it uses OpenGL, and both cards would have to have each other's data somehow). It can even be tricky with a 2nd monitor on the same card. It would be a fairly expensive setup too (assuming nicely sized and good quality monitors) -- that extra money would likely be better spent on a nice Wacom tablet, unless you already have one. Either ways, it's your money. Personally, I'm definitely not going to waste mine on a LGA 775 + DDR2 setup at this point.

That's a nice basic CPU for sure. But like you said, it's really competing with low-cost AMD boxes, and badly losing (price-wise, which is what matters here) due to the video card requirement and the DDR2 pairing (and no real upgrade path, whereas decent AM3 CPUs will be around for another while unlike LGA775). It's not cheap, but I figured that within $50 (~330 or ~380) of what he was going to buy, it was close enough to mention it, especially when there's that much difference between both setups (it's not what I'd call low budget to begin with) Edit: Nerwin posted while I was writing this... I picked different RAM this time, as the other one ran out of stock since my last post. Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80605I5750 - Retail GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD2 LGA 1156 Intel P55 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail A-DATA 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model HY63I1B16K - Retail Total: $384.97, so $50 more than your initial list (no hard drive counted in either) It totally depends on what you have now, and what you expect out of it. I replaced my old Creative card by onboard Realtek and couldn't be happier (better sound, FAR better drivers, better connections and all). If you're into low-latency multitrack ASIO stuff, then of course onboard won't cut it for you. Yep. No, the second PCIe x16 is only at 4x. The board you picked initially doesn't support both slots at x16 either (you only have so many lanes available). Either ways, there are dozens of other LGA 1156 boards.

Nothing worth upgrading to, unless it's free: Pentium D's (I can't say which models for sur) and older stuff. You can get a decent, standard mid-tower like a Antec 300 for about $50. Motherboard? It *totally* depends for which CPU, which manufacturer and so on.

The CPU costs more, but the motherboard and RAM is cheaper. The prices I was referring to (when I said $50 more -- it was actually $48) was right from newegg.com

Alestorm - Wenches and Mead. Youtube link. (folk metal with a pirate theme)

Just check out the official documentation on MSDN, particularly for the System.Security.Cryptography namespace. It implements everything you're asking for crypto-wise. For example, here's a sample that uses the DESCryptoServiceProvider. There also are AesCryptoServiceProvider and RSACryptoServiceProvider classes (another example here) which you can use similarly. There's also countless articles on dozens of community sites like here, and google should find more relevant hits than you're ever going to be able to read if you use the right keywords. Honestly, this stuff is trivial. It's the key management part that's a pain. You don't normally want to leave those around in text files (even text files you're going to delete as they're often easily recovered). Preferably, you use a hash of a salted password as encryption key or something along those lines. Your system is only secure as its weakest link, and if we can easily get the keys, then your encryption is pointless, no matter if it uses a fancy algo with 2048 bit key.

Lots of reviews are written by nitwits. And the bottom few reviews are all about the board being DOA (something which happens to any board... it's covered under warranty regardless). Either ways, there's plenty of inexpensive boards, so feel free to pick something else. The extra $50 here goes a LONG way (even if it means not getting the newer hard drive just yet if you're too tight on cash; yours is already a modern SATA drive anyhow). I'd sooner build another AMD box right now (I just built another one last weekend actually) then a LGA-775/DDR2 based system. That's about the worst choice you can make IMO. The i5 and the C2D are worlds apart in every way. If that puts it in perspective: the i5 750 has 4 cores which are each more than double the speed of your P4. It should last few several more years than the C2D.

It's a nice board. However, socket 775 is pretty much dead, and that trend will accelerate now that i5 is out. You can even get a half-decent i5 motherboard for less than that one, like this. Which might be hard to find a nice replacement for once you decide it's no longer fast enough... And as usual, Intel cripples it because it's a budget CPU: no VT for you! Forget about Win7's XP compatibility mode or running 64 bit virtual machines under anything (that's my main complaint about my existing C2D, but the cheapest C2Q with VT would set me back $200) DDR2 prices are rising very quickly, and I don't see that trend ever changing. It's already more expensive than many similar DDR3 kits like this one. Buying older types of RAM always end up costing way too much. Adding more RAM to this could get expensive. That's a nice drive, no complaints. meh... I'd sooner get a Xigmatek or whatever. In fact, I'd probably stick with the stock HSF instead of buying this. Let's put it that way: the CPU/motherboard/RAM/HSF on your lists costs $335. For not even $50 more, you could have: GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD2, OCZ Obsidian 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1600, Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz. You get an amazing CPU out of it, no more outdated socket 775 and FSB crap, you get a nice FAST quad core with DMI (very AMD-like: HT-like bus with on-die memory controllers, and even on-die PCIe controller too), it's not crippled (has VT-x and everything else, including SSE4.1 and SSE4.2, it has turbo mode, it has 4x more cache, etc), newer chipset, faster RAM, a somewhat nicer board i.e. the one you picked doesn't even have a eSATA port, should be easier and cheaper to upgrade later on, etc. Oh, and if you wonder how much faster the i5 is... The E5200 gets 1307 in passmark, and the i5 750 gets 4182 (about 3.2x faster). 95W for such a CPU is quite good too.

It doesn't. Also, a new board won't fit in there either (not only it's a Dell, but it uses a modified BTX FF). Your best bet at this point is a inexpensive yet decent case like a Antec 300, paired with a decent motherboard/CPU combo. Not 100% sure about the PSU. If you let us know what's your price range, we can come up with some suggestions. Or you could sell the thing and build a new one...

If you're only using the DVD writer on the IDE cable perhaps, but IDE (PATA) is shared. That's just the very beginning. They're a pain to run (bends are a PITA), they block airflow, there's less and less of them ports on any motherboard as they're now considered legacy stuff and so on. Plus, jumpers are a unnecessary bother (trying to get to it, in a case in a hard to reach place that's not well lit, right between all those IDE & power cables, poking blindly with your fingers). There's no reason to pick IDE anymore these days. Even the slight price advantage it used to have is gone now (in fact, it's often more expensive) Well, I'd say it's really not that hard. Loads of them not long ago didn't work right in AHCI or RAID mode (been burned before), but that's being sorted out pretty quickly. Still, not all drives are the same. The latest Samsung drives I bought are fast, burn fine and all that, but they're some of the loudest drives I've ever seen (annoying). I just installed an LG drive last Sunday and it was quieter, but I haven't tried burning with it or anything (just used it to install Win7 in a new box). Then again, there will be some people replying with their fetish brand (Pioneer seems to be the latest trend to replace Plextor for them)...

Besides, 16GB of space (the min requirements) is worth about $1.50 at today's rates. I find there's an awful lot of people losing sleep over a buck fifty... If they can't spare this much, then just wait until they see the sticker price on Windows itself! Win 7 Home Premium OEM around here is like $128+taxes and shipping, so nearly $150. That would be 100x more expensive than the disk space. And they want it cheap too. And right now, they pretty much nailed the sweet spot. No, it won't run on ancient hardware, but the people too cheap to upgrade to anything half-decent likely won't be buying Win7 either. If they just optimized everything incredibly and wanted to sell it cheap, then it would basically have no new features, and nobody would want of it (save for a handful of extremists). If they optimized it incredibly and added the new features, then it would cost so much that nobody would want to buy it either. Here, you get the new features, it runs great on inexpensive hardware, and it's priced decently. Then again, like I said many times before, Windows has never been so cheap to run. To quote myself, from some thread where someone complained Win7 used 767% the space Win2k needs: And that's not even counting the ~35% inflation since then (10 years @ 3%), so it's more like 7%. Win7 costs like 93% less in disk space than Win2k did. We never had it so good.

If it's like all the Dell motherboards I've seen before, you have very little overclocking options, if any. That video card is so underpowered to begin with it would hardly make any difference. It'll take a lot more than a little overclocking it to play newer games with nice settings. The 8600 was the mid-range card in that series (OK for games). Then the 8500 was a cheap version. The 8400... Not for gaming. GS also pretty much stands for "budget" (vs the GT series or such). So it's like a budget version, of a cut-down version, of a low-end version of an old video card basically... There are some cheap video cards (around $50) that totally slaughter this one.

So basically everything new isn't an improvement? Because, there's always a lot of people asking how to get their old menus, old navigation, old start menu, old task bar, old search and all that stuff back (old deployment methods, old apps, old everything) Yes, there has always been, and there will always be a small but vocal minority that doesn't like change and tries to fight it instead of embracing it (learning something new requires some effort/time, and often changing your ways, even if it's for the best). Regardless of that, everybody else is moving forward. It's only going to make it harder for them in the end.

You're right, it's not like I mentioned a SCSI RAID card, 80 to 68 pin adapters, 68 pin cables and terminators Edit: LOL. And here, you try to make fun of my post in your reply, because I did exactly what you said one should do instead, and you lack the reading comprehension to understand it (willingly or otherwise)? Some people can't recognize being wrong, or losing an argument, and gotta dig deeper I guess.

$99 gets you a basic quad core these days Which should be a massive upgrade from that P3 server, and handle Hyper-V (it has AMD-V) and everything else just fine. Decent Intel quads (that aren't crippled i.e. VT not disabled) start at like twice that price, I'll grant you that. Not that I have a quad yet!

Why would you even bother? They're 18GB/ea. They're just about free everywhere you can find them (like this pair which went for 1 penny), and for a reason. Assuming cheap hydro electricity prices like around here (10 cents/KWh), you're looking at $40/year or more just to keep 72GB of space running (more than the drives are worth in the first place). If you keep them for 3 years or so, you're looking at more in power costs alone than replacing it with a modern 1TB SATA drive now which will perform MUCH better everywhere, save for rotational latency. The drives are quite slow being so old, and the SCSI bus only slow (40MB/s) to begin with and shared. You're going to need a SCSI card of course -- preferably a SCSI RAID card (mind you, most decent PERCs require slots which your motherboard doesn't have i.e. PCI-X or PCI 64), unless you want 4 separate really small and really slow drives... Getting one of those, a bunch of 80 to 68 pin adapters, the 68 pin cables and terminators will run you a lot of $$ for unimpressive performance and very little space. Seriously, you'd get better performance and more space out of a $40 80GB SATA drive (less power wasted too, less space wasted inside your case as well), even though it's a pretty bad value (500GB'ers are like $50). This is 10 year old tech we're talking about (the drives are likely pretty worn out too, I don't think I'd trust them to hold my data). Even the newer SCSI types have been replaced by SAS a while ago. It's a bit like making yourself a P3-class Xeon server in this day of dirt cheap quad core monster CPUs.

Arch Enemy - Silent Wars. Not many women can sing like that

Good news! Don't forget the animated GIF overdose, scrolling marquees, rainbow-colored text, blink tags and all that other stuff that makes you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon. Although as like if it was reborn as those "social networking" sites -- only, with tons of flash crap and extremely distasteful music tacked on top of it all. Geocities^2, and still without content. Oh yeah, pics!

The enterprise ed doesn't have MCE and other multimedia stuff (like movie & DVD maker), premium games, or the ultimate extras like dreamscene (stuff you normally wouldn't use at work anyway). That's about it.