jcarle

Settle down there. He's still correct. Anyone who believes that Windows 98 offers better security then the Windows NT based platform obviously doesn't understand the metrics behind the equations to determine so. That lack of anything that is capable of user rights assignment for the file system or registry should be a glaring difference to start with. The list could go on forever.

80 different thermal pastes from the best to the absolute worse display a difference of no more then 5C and I'm misinformed?

From that very article : Optimized or unoptimized does not change the reality of the fact. I'd love for you to do so using the same settings as I run, using the same add-ons, using the same resolution and in the same IceCrown locations.And from that article, as you've already stated : There is significant overhead in modern display drivers that can very well affect performance. Again, video cards by themselves are only part of the equation. It's also the reason why the gain from SLI or CrossFire is not 100% per card.

I correct anyone who gives incorrect information. It happens simply that ripken gives out incorrect information more frequently then other members because he does not take the time to properly read posts, do research before replying or gives generalized statements which in themselves can't always be true. That's only partly true. Your gaming experience on a PC can be affected by many components. If you're memory starved, or running a very very slow hard drive, not even the strongest card can help. All aspects of the computer must be balanced for the video card to work well. In this instance, sure. A classic Pentium 4 3GHz is not a weak CPU. Had it been a Celeron 1.2GHz, the story may have been different and the 9800GT may not have been enough. I may have simply overemphasized. Again, see above. But in your case, that's most likely true. I cap my framerate at 60FPS with vertical sync. I am able to far exceed that. The problem is that when WoW hits 100%, the entire game starts to stutter and becomes almost unplayable until the CPU usage drops below 100%.

You don't need operating system support to use SSDs. He could very well use Windows Vista or any operating system with SSDs for the same performance gains. Windows 7 is simply SSD "aware" and optimizes certain things like turning off automatic disk defragmentation. Hard drives are not locked at 6.1. And you don't need SSDs to go higher. SSDs just make it easier. The Windows Experience Index is purely based on the metric results calculated from the tests it runs. It just happens to be that the current generation of hard drives usually achieve those scores. My 2 x 640GB Western Digital 32MB 7200 SATA drives easily achieve 6.2 in RAID 0.

No, it was not. The Windows 7 RC was released on May 5th, 2009.

Another misinformed myth of yours. Stock thermal paste isn't junk. It's been proven time and time again that the quality of thermal paste has very little bearing on the final thermal dispersion results. The quality of the bond between the two surfaces has a much great impact on the final result then the type of thermal paste. This information, as shown in the 80-way Thermal Interface Material Performance Test, cannot be more evident.

That's utterly incorrect. As in most situations, you can't generalize the entire gaming spectrum to determine hardware. There are many games that are CPU starved so badly that even the fastest GTX 295 is insufficient alone. When I play WoW at full resolution of my 24", even with my E8400 overclocked to 3.6GHz, I'm STILL running into 100% CPU issues.

Modems in the C640 were of the WinModem kind, so if there was indeed a physical modem installed inside, it would show up as a question mark in device manager. The lack of any unknown devices and no modem installed leads me to believe that these laptops, as gamehead mentioned, simply have unconnected ports.

I'm running an Active Directory domain on a Server 2008 R2 VM and to it I've attached 2 x 500GB WDs in RAID 0 from which I provision ABE filtered shares and I'm able to get 60 to 80MB/s sustained read and write with no special optimizations between the server and my desktop. The simplicity of administering domain shares and the raw speed makes this full of win over a NAS in my opinion.

Personally, I'm using an APC Back-UPS NS 1050VA for my personal desktop which is plugged into an APC Line-R 1200VA. I also have an APC Back-UPS HS 500VA for my network. My server is also on it at the moment as I'm undecided between the APC Smart-UPS SC 450VA and the APC Smart-UPS 750VA.

Then you should prefer ClearType. The intent of ClearType is just that. Reference : http://www.microsoft.com/typography/WhatIsClearType.mspx Someone who's familiar with the fact that vectors can't be accurately reproduced across square pixels should be able to appreciate how ClearType aliases the vector/pixel path to improve the font fidelity.

I personally do not own a blu-ray drive. I appologize if the wording used was confusing. I meant that I was referencing the link to that model as an example. I did not mean to say that I was currently using it.

1.44 Floppy Disk is his enumeration of his boot options. He does not actually have a floppy drive. Although, as you may know, you can still set your BIOS to indicate you have a floppy even though no device is attached as floppy drives are in no way PnP.

There are others. LG makes one, for example. I just used that model as an example.

Silicon Image chips tend to do fine as well. I wouldn't necessarily consider one to be better then the other. They're both budget chips.

Looks like it's just you.

Take a look on nVidia's website.

The distinguishable shape of the letters make it Segoe UI. A beautiful font in my opinion.

You can run Windows 7 on a Pentium III 500MHz and 512MB of RAM just fine as it's been demonstrated here and all over the internet. I suppose proper instructions require too much work. And he's already stated that his RAM was fine and that's he's tried it in another PC and does not have any issues with it there either. @dmjalz : To verify your processor's temperature, hit the DELETE key while your PC is booting (the first black screen). Once you arrive in the BIOS menu, hit the right arrow key to select the POWER menu, then the down arrow key to select the HARDWARE MONITOR option. Hit enter and you will see after a moment the temperature for your CPU. His motherboard. His question is perfectly valid. Modern motherboards have BIOS files that exceed the capacity of floppies. Not to mention the OP is obviously not familiar with the procedure. That doesn't address the problem. Disk Operating System. Specifically, Caldera DR-DOS. You should take the time to read his posts before you reply. Confused because you don't know what you're talking about and that's the point where you should duck out of the conversation. @dmjalz: From the information you've provided so far, it appears to me that you're having problems with your hard drive. As the TUSL2-C is a very old motherboard, I find it likely that your hard drive may be equally as old, and as such, it's quite possible that the drive spindle motor is fatigued. So sometimes it will spin, sometimes it won't (the no boot device available message you receive) and other times it will start spinning while you install Windows and slowly die off as you're installing (hence, the lag) until it stops spinning completely (hence the freeze). Do you have another hard drive available that you could use with this PC? If not, it may be a good investment for you to purchase a new hard drive. As your motherboard supports UDMA/100, you should have no problem installing a brand new 80GB IDE hard drive from a reputable brand such as Western Digital to replace your older hard drive.

If you'd check instead of shooting off your ignorance, you'd know. They are rare and few, but they do exist.

Some things never change. Just because you don't see the point doesn't mean there isn't one. Everything about this thread is completely valid and there are other aspects to gaming then performance statistics. Who's the real n00b I wonder? @CoffeeFiend: I started out as a console gamer when I was a kid and became a PC gamer way back when in the days of the 386 when Dune II, Doom and 3D Wolfeinstein started. I had sworn to PC gaming and vowed to never go back. Today, at the exception of FPSes and strategy games, I prefer gaming on the console. I enjoy gaming for the purpose of gaming, not to figure out if I can get more FPSes by tweaking this setting that might make card unstable. I just want to insert the game, sit down and play. Gaming's about entertainment, isn't it? Anyone who believes that PC gaming is cheaper either a) pirates their games or B) have never owned a console. There's nothing cheap about PC gaming. You need a good PC, you need a good video card, and if you plan to always keep playing new releases, you'll be faced with constant and never ending upgrades. New release games are no cheaper for the PC their console versions more often then not as well. Consoles are fixed performance points. So developers have a fixed target platform to develop against. That results in a repeateable and predicteable gaming experience. PC gaming is like pitching a baseball at a blind man. The first time you put the game in, you pray because you never know how it'll actually run until you've tried it on your own PC. I've been a life long fan of the Need For Speed racing game series. Everytime a new title came out, I pre-ordered it. I was always amongst the first to have it. And I was always often amongst the first to be frustrated. There's nothing more disappointing then to wait three full months for the game, excited like a little boy at Christmas from the teasing of slowly appearing pre-release screenshots and videos only to find out that because you bought the $300 video card instead of the $600, that the game runs like crap. So you spend the next hour tweaking settings, trying to get the run smoothly because everytime you turn a corner, the game stutters just enough for you to turn into a wall. Finally you just give up, toss the game into a shelf and figure you'll try it in 6 months when you change your video card *again*. On the console, it's a completely different story. You buy the game, you put it in, you play. The game doesn't stutter. The game doesn't require you to tweak your video settings. You just play. And it's fun. Does the fact that the game runs at 1920x1080 instead of 2560x1600 matter? No because in the end, it's not about resolution, frames per seconds, vertex counts or shader performance. It the end, it comes down to the gaming experience. If you've ever seen GRID, DIRT or Grand Tourismo on the PS3, you'll see that there's not enough of a difference visually to say that the PC is the ultimate platform. Today's consoles are not the NESes we had as kids. Who cares if they're built using PC based components? They do what they're designed to do. Be fun. And the cost? Buy the console, once. Something important to take into account if you're going to get a console though is your adaptability to the controllers. The XBox 360 controller and the PS3 controllers are both very different to handle and offer a vastly different feel when you hold them. It's worth taking the time to hold each one for a bit to figure out what you're most comfortable with. Although the game list for the XBox 360 is often more appealing, I couldn't personally adapt to it's controllers and I ended up getting a PS3.

We don't yet, at this moment, have any contributors for 2008

What operating systems are you running? And updated to what level?

Thanks for the excellent observations. I've taken notes on all of these things.