Jump to content

CoffeeFiend

Patron
  • Posts

    4,973
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Donations

    0.00 USD 
  • Country

    Canada

Everything posted by CoffeeFiend

  1. Depends what you do with it I guess. I've seen plenty of rather old XP installs that still work great. Depends. It has things like automatic/scheduled defrag that helps a bit, but it still comes down to whatever you do with your PC.
  2. Sorry, I'm of no help when it comes to IE, as I don't ever use it (except for a few seconds now and then to make sure sites/apps render OK in it). Most browsers already have a "password safe" feature built-in though (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc -- they all do).
  3. Compatibility mode *might* work. Also, you can try "printing" to a .ps file, then transforming the postscript into a PDF with distiller. But it's from early 2003, and Adobe won't fix their old driver code for Vista, they'll sell you an upgrade instead (it's supported as of v8.1). Alternatively, there's other apps that can generate PDF files for free, or commercial ones that go for a LOT cheaper than Acrobat (e.g. pdfFactory)
  4. 2.2GHz? Then that would either be a Athlon64 X2 4200+ (most likely) or 4400+. It is somewhat faster overall, but not so much in single threaded performance. A passmark bench says the 4200+ is 3% faster, but overall it's more like 10% faster. The main benefits here are that it's dual core, the x64 support and the hypertransport bus -- not so much the speed gains as there isn't a very big one. Would I personally spend $100 on a motherboard to use something 10% faster (especially when you got old pre-DDR2 RAM and such) Definitely not. That's if it's even possible (almost all X2's are AM2, and all AM2 boards I've seen used DDR2 -- there may be exceptions though) You'd get a LOT more bang for your buck with a complete update. -there's lots of cheap core 2 duos -- my E2160 was like $75 a year ago, and once OC'ed to 3.4 (on stock cooler no less) it benches 3x faster than my old P4 3GHz (a "real" upgrade -- 300%, not 10%) -DDR2 is dirt cheap (like $30 for 2GB of PC6400 CL4) -There's tons of decent boards for cheap. It doesn't have to be a cutting-edge P45-based board. You can still get a P35-DS3L or such for like $75 (takes modern DDR2 RAM, lots of SATA & USB ports, high def audio, solid caps, etc) You could get something like a E2180, 2GB of DDR2, and a decent motherboard for like $200 total and that can still be upgraded later (throw in 8GB of RAM in a year or 2 for under $100 likely, and quad cores will keep getting cheaper). If you got $ to spare, then 4GB is nicer for sure, and/or a little better CPU (although it's still a LOT better than an old P4).
  5. And there's truly nothing wrong with that either I just had no requirement for a very expensive RAID card that has a fancy processor to offload XOR'ing in RAID 5/6 or such (most of my drives aren't in RAID, just mounted on the filesystem, looks like yet another directory). Streaming mpeg4 at around 1mbit or mp3's at a fraction of that isn't very demanding at all. And the ICH9R gives more than acceptable results for the OS (not as good as one of those, but still fast, and so much cheaper). I just went with the inexpensive solution instead of the high-end/high-performance one.
  6. No need to pay anyone, or for a CD to have a driver. A quick google search for the actual filename turns up this or this or ...
  7. Well, I was going to do that a while ago. But most nice Intel boards already have 6 SATA ports, sometimes 8 (like my P35-DS3R). Combined with a $25 SATA [software] RAID card (generic/cheapo silicon image chipset), I got 12 SATA ports, without shelling out mega $$$. And the performance is great on the onboard ICH9R (for the OS and such). As for the silicon image-based card, it works great (no issues whatsoever), and the performance is overkill regardless (just how much speed does one need to stream movies and music?). That leaves you with hundreds of dollars/euros/gbp/whatever currency left to buy hard drives (like a half dozen 1TB'ers) and/or a good case to hold the drives (I went with a Stacker 810 for that -- 12 drive bays, all cooled by quiet 120mm fans with good airflow). For the price of one of those, you can just about buy a case (like the stacker 810), along with an entire PC with 12 SATA ports to act as a iSCSI SAN or such (you could even cluster them...) The cards are VERY nice, and a must-have when the performance is required (server usage), but for home use, it's a lot of $ for performance you probably don't need.
  8. No apologies needed I have to admit they don't clearly state they have drivers/support for Win 2008 yet. I suggested the Areca not so much for the price even (it's just a nice bonus), but mainly because it's somewhat nicer -- tons of little things, e.g. supports more cache memory onboard, the ethernet port, somewhat better software, faster at building arrays, etc. Nothing big, but I just never really wanted to pay extra for a card that seemed lesser to me. Hopefully!
  9. Drivers are right here (x86 and x64). Anyways, it's completely up to you which one you buy It should work in all x8 or most x16 slots (that probably depends on the chipset/bios/if it's SLI or not/config though -- I never tried). The manuals might have more infos. No, those are in 99% of cases X1 slots. Won't work.
  10. No kidding. Last time I've seen one of those (Trident card) was in a 486... With all of 512KB of RAM. That would be about a dozen years ago...
  11. They are. Mind you, I'd also have a look for a Areca ARC-1230 card. A little better than 3ware IMO, and cheaper too -- around £350 here ($720 CAD)
  12. You can have it anywhere you want really (top/bottom/left/right of the screen). Just drag it there. It's been that way since Win95. Looks like you moved the quickstart buttons and all that too. Everything can be moved around pretty much.
  13. Then someone must have dragged it to the top. Click on it (holding the mouse button down), drag it to the screen bottom and release the button. As simple as that! (you may have to disable "lock taskbar" first)
  14. The odds of finding a computer that has a CPU that happens to have the right type of outdated socket (and not 423, 478, 775, 462, 754, 939, etc-- there's dozens of them) are already pretty slim. And then, it needs to be the right kind (i.e. a coppermine-based chip), and then also happen to be clocked faster than your existing CPU (the vast majority of those very few won't be). The odds of a discarded computer containing what you're looking for are WAY below 1%, so good luck with that... However, you're quite likely to find a far faster computer overall (CPU/motherboard/RAM that still work) like an old P4.
  15. Exactly. It's not worth it to spend any $ on getting a faster CPU for that thing, it wouldn't make much difference at all. As you've seen in your previous topic, it's much past the upgrading point (assuming you still want to play games). Socket 370 was replaced by Socket 423 back in year 2000 (which has since been replaced by Socket 478, then 775, and very soon another one). Combined with the very old chipset, the lack of an actual slot for a graphics card and all...
  16. Eh? Linux has some advantages over Windows for certain tasks, but on the desktop Windows truly pwns it (Linux doesn't quite cut it, in part for reasons I mentioned earlier). I anything but proved your point. Besides, my point was this kind of "advocacy" is annoying. In fact, it's more like walking into a Mosque, and trying to convert people there to Christianity (you join a Microsoft-centric forum, full of Windows users, replying to another guy who clearly states he wants to use Windows -- and then them to try Linux). Yeah, I can't see why they'd be annoyed by it. Especially when every post I remember you posting in you were pimping Linux (and even created a thread just for that), like here, here, ... It gets old.
  17. And you remind me of countless freetar^H^H linux users who just have to try to convert anyone to their inferior OS (forcing it on everyone so we can share their pain), advocating non-stop to people who don't want to hear it. It's like people from other religions ringing your doorbell Sunday morning at 7am "for your salvation" -- thanks, but no thanks! Anyone who has actually used Linux for anything non-trivial would actually acknowledge most of those points. Hell, most of them are, by people who even made the things (e.g. the sad state of half-functioning audio, which the pulse audio dev admits to himself, or metacity crashing because of a "driver" problem with X and only works stable-ish using the latest dev builds, or in-depth instructions to do exactly what I said, that were written bu Linux users in wikis, etc). The fact that you don't makes me think you don't really know very much at all about the OS you're pimping non-stop, yet you have no problem going around calling others id-10-t's. But hey, feel free to refute any claim (not that you'll be able to). Thanks for the funny link BTW. This guy manages to come across as a LOT dumber than the guy he tries to make fun of, showcasing his own ignorance -- and somehow being proud of it... The only thing he really managed, is to insult the other guy, making himself look like an angry little man in the process. "installed Linux on more than 10 computers" LOL. Yes, and I tied my own shoes more than 10 times, so I must know all about shoes, right? The GIMP better than Photoshop? That's got to be the funniest thing I read, ever (it must be a joke, no one can be that delusional)... Self-pwned pretty much. Besides, I think you should get a Mac instead
  18. People always bring up price, but I think that's mostly a non-issue. That $100 copy of XP (assuming it didn't already come bundled with the PC for even cheaper) lasted you like 7+ years. Big deal. Worth a try? Been there, done that, no wasting time over it anymore. Here, he's looking for plain old Windows which just works, has worked fine for just about forever, and runs pretty much any app you'd ever want to run i.e. no reason to even consider switching to something else. Linux mainly offers different problems. Things like: -crappy support for a LOT of hardware (like ati vid cards -- thanks to fglrx and such, or wifi cards -- unless you resort to ndiswrapper and what not, webcams, etc) -did I mention fglrx? because your box freezing hard a couple times a day or having to restart X several times a day isn't my definition of fun. Oh yeah, and LOTS of heavy flickering too (e.g. in Supertux). Oh ya, and the heat problems, and fan speed issues too. Yay. -often not having 3D acceleration, and never having any of the cool and useful stuff like H.264 decoding done in hardware like you can on Windows (nor being able to watch Blu-Ray discs actually) -an overwhelming choice of options (like GNOME or KDE or whatever) -- which most people actually DON'T want -talking about choice, the choice between several audio systems, none of which actually works well -various incompatible ways of doing things (e.g. different package managers & formats and having to use tools like alien to work around that) -no need to use regedit -- just too bad you'll have to edit xorg.conf to set video resolution in the login screen and such things instead (100x worse IMO -- every single config file is 100% different for each app) -lots of things are seemingly getting worse with every distro upgrade e.g. the god awful network manager garbage that comes with GNOME these days, or the switch to Pulse Audio -themes that aren't really set centrally (each toolkit set has its own themes and fonts seemingly) -having to install development tools & stuff, then download the source for ALSA everything (wget), then decompress it (tar), then recompile it (make, make install) & then editing the alsa config file (trying a dozen values) and then unmuting the IEC958 output from alsa-mixer -- all in a terminal, to have audio working over spdif, instead of that one checkbox to click under windows. Just a short glance at how to get it working here -- yeah, that's not complicated at all for your average end user! -having to resort to tools like autocutsel for copy/paste to work at all in many scenarios (e.g. VNC) -always running into problems over trivial stuff, and having to go such great lengths to fix it (like installing flash -- oh, you're not on the sudo'ers list? oh well!) -Oh-so-shiny compiz fusion... Yeah, too bad metacity is a crashy POS (missing window borders 10x/day anyone?) and all that. Aero Glass may not be so cutting edge, but at least it's stable. -flash audio always crashing (it's a underlying problem with how it uses ALSA), or not being able to have 2 apps make sound at once (thanks to pulse audio again) -- that's if your apps can even make sound at all using pulse audio... -the update manager saying its up to date when sometimes it isn't -ACPI just not working quite as good (especially compared to Vista's sleep which actually works great) -having to resort to dpkg -i and such fun stuff to un-crash an app install rather often -distro upgrades (i.e. apt-get dist-upgrade) crashing in general -crappy fonts overall -the lack of business software (no quicken, no tax return software, anything Adobe, very few CAD/pro audio/pro content creation/whatever apps or specialized tools overall, etc) -- I'd just make that "lack of software" in general really -the lack of just about any games (save for WINE) etc... Yeah, it's like so much better than just running Windows, where stuff actually works, and where you have tons of great software for every task! I'm glad I gave up on it. Now if I could only have my time back...
  19. I think this is done a LOT better in other ways too (not batch) i.e. vbscript/jscript or even powershell (exporting a list of this to a HTML page would be a one-liner). But the Win32_Product class is very slow as it starts the windows installer engine... Reading directly from the registry is probably a lot quicker.
  20. Never had a nice green monochrome monitor, did ya? In fact, I've used one around 5 years ago (on a univac system)...
  21. 45.36489%
  22. When you can afford $55000 monitors, I don't think you really care if the built-in ATSC tuner adds an extra $50 to the bill...
  23. What version of AutoCAD anyways? Older versions of it (the ones I knew how to use seemingly) don't work quite right on newer versions of Windows... In fact, AutoCAD 12 is one of the very, very few DOS apps I kind of miss
  24. That box should run XP great. I see no point in even suggesting Linux (not that it was even in his list of choices either). No, Linux isn't the ultimate answer to everything (far from it), and all the Linux users who are always trying to push it onto everybody else can get pretty annoying. -Linux free for ~3 months, and happier than ever.
  25. Updating score or not, drivers shouldn't make it crash. Whenever you get a crash due to a faulty driver (of any kind), the very first thing to do is to find the latest WHQL certified drivers (you can always try other versions too if those don't work).
×
×
  • Create New...