jcarle

You guess, you assume, you did everything except ASK him what he wants.

In french, I like to call Windows ME... Windows MErde!

There's nothing wrong with 4GB of ram, in fact, for my next system, I'm going to go with 8GB of ram. The only thing is that you need to make sure that your hardware and software are all capable of 64-bit memory addressing. It's a simple requirement that's easy to fill.

Considering his two choices are SLI motherboards and yours isn't...

You know, it absolutely blows me away every time I read one of your posts. Have you learned NOTHING in all the time you've been here? A wattmeter will serve him absolutely no use other then to calculate his power bill. Using the fact that "your friend's computer is fine with 400w" is of no reference whatsoever. You have to be careful on how you juge the power supply you need. You need to remember that Watts are a calculation based on Voltage times Amperage (W=V*A). A computer's power supply will generate multiple voltages, which is why they're called Switching Power Supplies. They generate 12V, 5V and 3.3V, all of which add to the wattage. Look at the following to see what the difference can be. Power Supply 1: 500W 30A * 12V = 360W 25A * 5V = 125W 4.5A * 3.3V = 15W Power Supply 2: 500W 40A * 12V = 480W 3A * 5V = 15W 1.5A * 3.3V = 5W Now, the numbers are unrealistic as they do not reflect typical power supply values, but the principal still applies. Both power supply are calculated to be 500W power supplies but the amperage available for each voltage is completely different. In the parts you list, the 8800 alone is very aggressive on the 12V. A lot of memory can require more 3.3V or 5V, same with the CPU. In general, a large quantity of optical drives and/or hard drives can also strain the 12V and 5V lines. If you want to be on the safe side, get yourself a power supply from a reliable company such as Seasonic and choose one that has an ample quantity of amperage on all rails. A little bit of research and a little bit of time and you will be able to find a power supply that will provide enough amperage in a well balanced fashion to suit your needs. Most of the power supplies in the 500W+ range then to have amperages that suffice all around. If you plan on building yourself a large system, then you'll want to look for something that is in the 70A range on the 12V lines.

To add to that... The HAL stands for the Hardware Abstraction Layer. It acts as an intermediate between the operating system and the hardware. This allows the same code to function on a multitude of different hardware since the software doesn't see a difference.

STOP GUESSING! If you don't know, don't post. There's a lot of different salary levels. There's no real average because it varies so much from company to company and from job to job. "PHP Programmer" is simply too vast to quantify. Some programmers may make a minimum salary wage while others can make up to $100,000/year. It depends if you're working for a large multinational corporation as a head programmer designing specialty code, say for a bank, or if you're working with a small home based web design team making websites for local stores and residents. Even when it comes to PHP, there's different levels of programming involved. There are programmers who do strictly PHP, no HTML, no databasing, no layout, nothing. Just raw PHP. Then there are others who do it all, the entire webpage, right down to the graphics. The amount of involvement in your programming will also play into the payscale.

First off, any programmer who wants to become serious will have to learn a serious language. The only serious languages IMHO are the C languages. C and C++ are starting to get a little old, so my recommendation goes towards C#. If you want to code games, DirectX in C# will do wonders.

Do keep in mind, and this may make you feel a whole lot better. When you see those signatures that say "Your IP is", there's no way to identify your IP to you personally. MSFN is the only one who can directly know that your IP goes with your username. The signature, if hosted on a third-party site, have NO IDEA which IP belongs to who. They have no way of knowing. And you can't hide your IP address from the internet because without it, you wouldn't BE on the internet.

A 12 foot sign that says "If you have 4GB of RAM, READ THIS!".

Where did I say that? The order of the physical drives is determined by the BIOS, then the OS. The order of the drive letters is controlled by the OS.

No 32-bit operating system can read more then 4GB of memory addressing space. This has always been and always will be. If you wanted to address the full 4GB in your system, you should have done more research before choosing your Vista edition.

There quite a few older motherboards that did have the 512MB limitation, but this limitation was per bank. So a 1GB stick may work if it's configured as 512MB per bank. It was fairly common to see motherboard with a 512MB limit per bank and a 4GB limit total. The bank configurations and limits often caused a lot of grief when trying to upgrade SDRAM.

This can also be useful to save your a** when the wife comes around.

Check the "Product as subfolder" option.

Please search the forums next time. This has been answered here, here, here, here and here.

Not quite sure what the point of that would be?

That would be true for most of the graphics cards, nVidia's 8800 is an exception to that though. With the universal shaders, they can be programmed to do anything, including raw pixel filling.

Technical and fancy is fun. We're all tech geeks. When we hear of someone with a computer problem, we get all horny and excited.

Do you ever do research before you post or do you just say anything at all? If the computer is an old Dell system that originally came with 128MB of ram, there's a hell of a good chance that it's a Pentium III or an old AMD. Dual Channel didn't even exist back then. Not to mention that the dual channel architecture only applies to DDR and DDR2 memory. Oh and by the way, you still didn't answer his original question. If we are indeed talking about SDRAM, the size difference is not usually an issue. The different memory banks get attributed to a general memory addressing pool and the OS takes care of the rest. What WILL make a difference is if the 1GB stick is, for example, 133MHz SDRAM and the 128MB is 100MHz, then both sticks will run at 100MHz, therefore reducing performance. A difference in timings can also, at times, cause certain issues.

You can have as many hard drive as you can connect to your computer.

I don't think anything ATI is going to come out with is going to compete very well with the 8800 until they decide to go with a universal shader approach like nVidia did.

Which ones ? I have disks with 4 primary partitions since years and I haven't encountered any problems so far. Nonsense sentence. You are partly correct. I did make a mistake on half the information. I did further and more in depth research and here's what I found out. The Master Boot Record can contain a maximum of four primary partition only. The Extended Boot Record can however allow for more then partitions. And where I was correct is that you can only have a single EBR which will associate itself with the first MBR.

My favourite LCD panels are the Dell widescreen flat panels...

I believe that you'll need to silently install the drivers in that case since those are not technically drivers. They're utilities for the drivers.