CoffeeFiend

I think that was his point. If you're going to run sever OS'es (doing moderately intensive server duties) and other VMs running too, you're just not going to be able to play any fancy game at the same time, even if it's a crazy expensive Xeon monster box. And if there isn't much of a load, then both CPUs are severely overkill. The type of chipset on the graphics adapter, and the type of RAM is more important than the amount I would guess.Yeah, the Quadro FX1700 isn't even a gaming card, it's a workstation card for CAD usage and such. It's a $500 card that's not meant for gaming at all (drivers aren't optimized for that at all either). AFAIK it's based on a GeForce 8600. A $200 Radeon HD4850 would totally slaughter it for gaming. Basically, he's asking us to chose between things that won't really make much of a difference. Either box won't run server VMs with a good load + heavy games decently regardless. He'd be far better off with a simple and inexpensive VM server (Q6600, 8GB RAM, SATA disks) + a gaming computer (E8400 + Radeon HD4850 or such), it would perform better at both tasks, and that would cost less too.

Nearly everything he's posted is exactly like that. This is stolen from here This one is lifted from there The rest of his posts are all pointless copy/paste jobs too but with a link to the source at the bottom. Ladies and gentlemen, we've got us a copy/paster!

Canada. And ~95% of new PCs sold nowadays only come with 2GB, for most of North America, and likely a lot of European countries too. 4GB is just barely starting to be what I'd call "mainstream" (there still isn't much "normal" people with that much RAM in their PCs) The number of desktops I've seen so far with 8GB? Zero (and I see LOTS of PCs...) It's not anywhere near "the norm". 8GB might be mainstream among PC gamers, but that's a tiny minority of "enthusiasts".

Not true. It doesn't affect it as much as emulating or such would, but there definitely is a performance hit (I never said it was big, but 32 bit apps certainly don't run "faster" like someone else put it). Every single API call and such goes thru an extra layer (wow64.dll) where thunking happens, plus more fun stuff to adjust for pointer sizes and such (using wow64win.dll). All this stuff adds overhead. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for x64. I'll be making the switch in a few months (with the next RAM upgrade to 6 or 8GB, and I'll be getting rid of my hardware that lacks 64 bit drivers at the same time).

High disk I/O processes doesn't tend to work so great under VMs Exchange is another of those that's better not running inside a VM. Exchange will use ALL the RAM you throw at it to make mail delivery faster. It's just too much of a memory hog, plus, it tends to use a LOT of disk space too, and disk I/O can be pretty high (again, check relevant perf counters). Exchange can easily max out a dedicated server's resources (again, depends on the # of clients and all). Personally, I'd leave that alone as well, unless you know for sure the server load is suitable. Play games at the same time you have 4 VMs running with decent workloads? Ouch. Sounds to me like what you need is a VMware Server box, and a gaming computer. That should handle both tasks better, and for less $ overall. That can't even handle Vista decently, so of course 2 VMs on top of that...

A good cooler will let you OC more. I'm using the stock HSF on my old E2160, and I got it up to 3.4 stable (a 85% OC), but if I wanted to go past that, I'd have to raise the voltage, and I would absolutely need a better HSF (this one is barely adequate). Those are likely worse than the stock HSF. Again, puntoMX is right (he always is!) The benchmarks you linked to are 3D/video card bound, not memory bandwidth bound. And even a 100% faster memory access wouldn't give anywhere near 100% faster results on most benches (there's still lots of other bottlenecks -- disk, cpu, various buses, etc). So of course there's like no difference there. And they only used one chipset (some gain more from it than others, like the old i865/i875 chipsets where you gained ~50%). It doesn't double the overall speed (there's also other potential bottlenecks, like the FSB), but it's a nice gain for sure. If you don't run in dual channel mode, then you create an extra bottleneck in your system (at the memory controller) where the CPU fetches its next instructions & data. In most cases, it'll run at the speed of the slowest. In some cases, it just plain doesn't work.

Then you have enough to run at least double the VMs you need. So 8GB sounds perfectly adequate for the foreseeable future. What he said. If you're going to be using it for VMs like that all the time, why go for Vista in the first place, instead of say, Windows 2008 with Hyper-V or even better, VMware ESXi? Depends on the workload really, but 8GB surely won't be a limit for like 3 VMs, especially if he's using VMware ESXi (you can overcommit memory, and it only has a 32MB footprint in the first place) And that costs what? 3.5G's? For running 3 VMs? You could build something about 90% that fast for under half the price (and it's not like the fancy $500 vid card is gonna make VMs any faster) This is no cheaper than having 3 computers do the task really. Then again, you say nothing about the workload. Two mostly idle Win 2003/2008 instances plus a client won't put any load on this (hell, I've run more than that on a P4 laptop with a single 5400rpm disk before). Not knowing what these servers will do, how many clients or anything, we just can't guess where your actual bottlenecks will be. If you don't have a whole lot of concurrent users, a single SATA drive might be adequate. Same for the CPU, with only 3 VMs, unless you have a solid load on the server VMs, your CPU is going to sit ~99% idle. Check the server processes you're going to run in those VMs: the disk I/O they create, their memory usage, the CPU usage, etc. Then from that you can figure out what you actually need. For all we know, it could be a network bandwidth bottleneck you're going to have. It's just impossible to tell without knowing the workload (file server? web server? database server? who knows...) and what kind of stress you're going to put on it (5 users? 50? 500? 5000?) Then again, it's not like I'd put a serious workload on a couple server OS'es running inside of VMs, which are on top of a client OS.

Not being a gamer, I have no idea if games benefit of quad cores yet (I never ever look at gaming benchmarks). Vid card wise, I'm told (from very knowledgeable people) that a Radeon 4850 is the way to go now for games, or 4870 if you have the $ (again, not being a gamer, I personally don't follow these things at all) RAM wise, again, if you insist on filling all your slots with small 1GB sticks that you'll be throwing out later, it's your call. I'd rather have room for expansion myself (upgrade to 8GB for ~$100 more later). I really can't think of a reason to go with 4 smaller sticks. That hard drive is fine, no real issues there, but I probably would have went with the new 640GB WD drive (for pretty much the same price) Never looked at that case before, no idea PSU wise, I wouldn't even risk plugging that to my computer. It's absolute garbage. There's no way this pushes anywhere near 630W, and the specs are kind of laughable, 35A on the 3.3v rail (lol), 46A on the 5v rail (high like that means an OLD design), and only 26A total on the 12v rail which is quite bad -- there's quality ~350W PSUs with that much. At 600-something watts, you'd expect more like twice that many amps on the 12v rail. Besides, at that price and that name, you can already tell the build quality (cheap caps, diodes & mosfets that would crap out at half the rated load, cutting corners everywhere basically). And the name isn't exactly known for quality either (more like universally bad). There's TONS of MUCH better PSUs for only a few $ more. Very first review on newegg says "Burned out in under one week of operation with one loud POP."

Using a spreadsheet as a database possibly qualifies as the worst misuse of technology I've ever heard of... (and a very expensive one also -- $600 license of MS Office to install it on the server) Especially when your copy of MS Office already comes with a database in the first place (MS Access). Yeah, using excel as a COM object has got to be super slow, it's not exactly fast to load excel on each page load... And using Excel as a COM object, you're bound to have problems with it not terminating properly and such, and eventually you'll have several instances of it running in memory at the same time, slowly using up all of the server's memory. The ODBC driver also has it's share of issues. If your data is properly formatted in excel, it should work just fine. Again, everybody on this planet uses a database for this, why not use a database when you need one? It's not like basic SQL is hard to learn... Every basic PHP tutorial should cover HTML forms + simple database access (with MySQL or what not). You could easily pick it all up in a single evening. Besides, since he's using PHP, it's likely on a LAMP server (as in Linux), where you can't even install Excel in the first place.

The more apps you install, the more assemblies (ad different version of it) get installed, the bigger that directory is going to grow.

That's perfectly normal. Mine's even bigger (closer to 7)

That's already overkill for like 99% of tasks, but it never hurts. And that will cost you what, 3x as much as your computer costs in the first place? It's not the processor that's the limit here, it's the motherboard. More RAM means either very expensive server boards with lots of slots for RAM, or a motherboard that accepts very expensive memory sticks of large capacities. And Xeon CPUs are also very expensive compared to C2D's. Hmm, I'm not sure if I've seen a single desktop with 8GB of RAM yet, so moving fast to that, I dunno. 4GB standard? Not the case yet either. The vast majority still ship with only 2GB. So what? Spend $100 on a new motherboard in a few years, problem solved. What's wrong with that? Wow, I wish I had that kind of $ to spend on a computer... VMware-wise, you can already run a large amount of VMs within 8GB. If you leave 512MB for the host OS, and assigning 256MB to each VM running XP, that's 30 copies of it running at the same time, or 15 copies of Vista on 512MB each. Do you think you're really going to need more than that? If that's the case, then you should be looking into VMware ESX (or ESXi) instead, possibly running on 2 or more servers. What you seem to want, is a computer that's still going to be a monster rig in 5 years, and basically you just can't buy that. A $50 CPU in 5 years is going to be faster than a $5000 one is now (e.g. a Xeon 1M 3.60GHz 800FSB only 4 years ago was $851, and a $40 Celeron now is faster). You can go the very expensive way with high end Xeons on expensive server motherboards and all that, but it's still not going to last forever. Just look at what's coming out in a year: nehalem. Completely new CPUs, new sockets, no more FSB bus, memory controllers on he CPU (triple channel DDR3), etc, plus various other changes, like PCI Express 2.0, DDR3 RAM, etc -- all of which is gonna require new boards and everything. And again, we're only talking about a year from now. A quad core like a Q6600 would be a good investment for things like VMware, but 8GB should be plenty. And now with SuperFetch, it doesn't go to waste anymore. Everything you would likely load (binaries for your usual apps) get cached in memory in advance, greatly reducing app load times (it's instantaneous). But past 8GB is sure overkill for anything but the most extreme cases.

That would work fine, but they still cost as much as the computer is worth That's what I was getting at really. That computer is so old that it isn't really worth investing anything in it (actually, the computer in that pic is worth more to a collector than his...) No point in getting a new vid card for it, when you can upgrade to something 10x faster for under $100. This is real cheap (a kid could afford this with money made from babysitting/mowing lawns or delivering newspapers) and is still so much better than his current computer (doesn't even compare): ECS GF7050VT-M motherboard - $33 Celeron 430 - $40 1GB of whatever DDR2 RAM - $19 So $92 total. Out of the extra $72, he gets: a CPU about 10x faster, 3 to 4x more of faster RAM, four SATA ports, USB2 ports, a PCI-e x16 slot, 6 channel audio, etc. And he still gets a new vid card out of it. You can get something significantly better than this for not much more $ either (2GB RAM for ~$10 more, dual core for ~$30 more, etc). Or save even more buy going with a cpu/motherboard combo, or open box items, or 2nd hand stuff.

Seeing the actual error message, probably not. He gets a "Permission denied" error on a line that uses the CreateTextFile method of FSO. Odds are either: -there's already a file with such a name, and it has the read-only attribute set (happens a lot when you copy stuff from a CD...) or -he doesn't have sufficient permissions to create or overwrite that file (ACLs) But anyways, personally, I either use the Win32_PingStatus WMI class because you can get more detailed infos, more detailed error codes, and that there's no text parsing involved (doesn't work with pre-XP OS'es admittedly) , or even just plain old nmap e.g. "nmap -iL servers.txt -SP"

No. 32 bit apps don't benefit from the extra CPU registers or anything, so no speed gains. In fact, there's extra overhead associated with running under WOW64 (marshalling/thunking the 32 bit data back and forth). The only real benefits you get, are when you're running native x64 apps (some extra speed mainly due to the extra CPU registers, at the expense of ~15% higher memory usage). Yes. There's many things keeping a lot of folks on the plain old x86 version but it's getting better. Unless one has particular apps not working on the x64 version or missing drivers, there's no real reason not to move to x64. And x64 is your only option if you want to use more than 4GB of RAM.

You will find that the number of delphi users nowadays is VERY low, so don't expect too much... I used to use it myself, but that was in the windows 95 era (10 years ago). It's been several years since I encountered anyone still using it too. Delphi should have standard functions to get just the date, or just the time from a standard DateTime format. Same answer as the previous really. Delphi should have standard functions to generate standard DateTime format from separate date and time values. Then use that to update the database.

That card is dating from 1999, and it doesn't support the common widescreen resolutions we see lately, like 1280x800, 1440x900, 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200. Besides, it's far too old to have a DVI output. But then again, seeing it's a 2001 vintage, it's likely a late P3, or early P4 (socket 423) that's also pretty low on RAM (256MB?), and probably is limited to AGP 2x... A new vid card for that would cost more than the entire PC is worth in the fist place. A new vid card + monitor several times that. I've seen Athlon64 3500+ barebones (everything except the drives) for ~$100 many times, or you could get a mATX motherboard with everything you need onboard for $60 (perhaps something built around the 945GC chipset), plus $40 or so for a basic CPU like an Athlon64 4000+ or a Celeron 430, and around $30 for 2GB of fast DDR2 RAM for it. Not a whole lot of $, but a GIGANTIC step up from what you're using (in terms of CPU speed, LOTS more RAM, SATA, USB2, far better audio, etc), and it would work with a new monitor just fine.

It wasn't Dell, it was HP. But then again, the problem affected AMD boxes, whereas his is a P4. The fix was basically removing the offending Intel driver, but since it's an Intel CPU, I doubt that's really going to help much. Anyways, he should be able to make a backup of his documents somewhere else just fine from safe mode.

It's surprising it will even let you create the user in the first place. Go in the user manager, and try creating a user with the same name as the compute name, it won't let you.

Nicer board for sure. RAM wise, it might be somewhat faster, but then you've filled all your existing slots with smaller sticks. So next time you want to upgrade, you have to throw your existing RAM away first (I'm there). If you go the 2x2GB way, the time you'll want to upgrade to 8GB (for Vista x64 or Windows 7 or whatever), it's just a matter of buying another 2x2GB kit. Hard drive, that's a tiny drive, from a company I never heard of and it's likely not that fast either (tiny buffer too). I'd totally go for something else. Besides, what's the point of going for a quite fast CPU + vid card, and then skimping on the absolute slowest part of the PC (the biggest performance bottleneck of them all)? Power wise, try this, and buy a good quality PSU from a reputable company (nothing no-name).

Alright Didn't know (don't use that app). Just thought I'd mention that as it's the usual work-around to non-allowed file types, that's all. Sounds like a good idea now that you put it this way.

Why not zip it first?

Like I said, a Wireshark capture would let us see exactly what's going on: if the requests are made properly, that the router gives proper answers and all that (for both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic). Then if it gets the right answers, and uses another IP, then we can blame windows for it. Perhaps 192.168.1.1 is a server and he's running his own [misconfigured] DNS, some routers also send invalid replies to IPv6 devices (blame dproxy), etc. There's tons of possibilities here, and again, a Wireshark cap would let us know for sure if the problem is with the computer or the network, and propose solutions based on that instead of the current guessing game. And indeed, since everything resolves to 1.0.0.0 it's not the hosts file (what's the odds of every web site being in there in the first place?) Did I mention a Wireshark cap yet?

IPv4 and IPv6. It's perfectly normal to have this many DNS server entries too. You've established this how? Either ways, it sounds like your router (or whatever device is at 192.168.1.1) has some issues with DNS requests (perhaps the sites IPs are in the DNS cache of other machines, who knows?) Try to flush your DNS cache on your clients, and see what happens. The best thing to do to find out for sure what the problem is, is to log some traffic with Wireshark (try loading a couple web pages), then we can have a look at it (the requests and the replies) and tell what's wrong without guessing.

ICS is known to be quite flaky like that. Quite often, it's the included DHCP server (running on the box that's doing the sharing) that isn't working, so the other NIC doesn't get a proper IP address, so it can't connect to anything. First thing you should do, is look at what IP address you have on the computer when it doesn't work. If it's 169.254.x.x, then it's the DHCP server that's broke. One simple fix to that issue, is setting a static IP on the machine. Or then again, you could buy a good & cheap router, like the Linksys WRT54GL (problem solved for good).