Zxian

I guess I just work a little differently. Any additional systems that I use are either connected to via Remote Desktop or loaded in VMs. That's one of the main reasons I've got multiple monitors, to keep the various "managment" windows open on from my main computer. As for single most expensive single piece of equipment - I'd have to agree with monitor. As with most things, once you start moving up in screen space, it's hard to drop back down. As for highest quality - jcarle has a point in the motherboard department, but you don't necessarily have to break the bank here. I've got two systems built around ASUS P5B Deluxe boards (which were about $200 a piece), and they've been running strong for quite a while now. As for most spent in a single category - storage. In the two systems I have at home there are 12 drives (2x500, 2x640, 8x1TB), and my two work computers have 4 hard drives between them. crahak already outlined the major points here, but I'll add another one - separate redundancy. I've got my main work computer does rolling backups over the past month, and then separate monthly backups for the past year, all stored in two separate locations in two separate buildings. Unless a meteor strikes the university where I work, I've got all the backups I need (at least of the really important stuff).

Links to the $OEM$ folder downloads are broken...

That's assuming that he can get a SAS controller that's compatible with his system. If the disk load isn't too great, then there's no real reason for him to completely change the hard drive subsystem. Also, SAS controllers and drives are typically more expensive than their SATA counterparts.

Bear in mind - the CERC 6ch controller has the infamous "2TB limit" found on some older hardware. You'll have to keep your individual arrays below this size. Otherwise, I'll second jcarle's suggestion.

Have you forgotten where I live? Vancouver, home of the upcoming 2010 Olympics? If there's one thing that drives up overall costs, it's the Olympics. Vancouver is one of the more expensive places to live in North America nowadays... I'm only going to take two of your points and show you where you're wrong... Wrong again. Newegg FAQ - Payment. I'll outline the important parts for you and everyone else reading this. If you live in the states of California, New Jersey, or Tennessee, you'll pay the usual state taxes. Chicago, Illinois doesn't apply. No state or city taxes applied to the order. Shipping is standard FedEx or UPS shipping. Nothing surprising or outrageous about that. It also was not hard to find. Go to the main page, click on the "Help & Info" link, and then on the "Payment" link. It takes all of 15 seconds to find that - even without knowing where to look ahead of time. You could also go to the Help page and search for "tax" What does my status on this forum have to do with this discussion? It's a forum - not an email to/from the board of a company. And no, that's not the way things are done. My girlfriend and her roommates just finished fixing up the house that they're living in. They went back to a lumber and supplies store because they had excellent service and weren't stingy about prices. Heck - I bought some supplies and forgot that I wanted a 50 cent plastic marker for my house key (you know the plastic rings that sit over the head?). Ran back inside, and put the money on the counter. "Oh... don't worry about it. Just take it." was the reply. Of course I'm going to go back to them for more service. Again... the prices from NewEgg are tax free, and their shipping rates are quite affordable. I don't charge my customers for the hardware itself, but I do charge them for the assembly of the hardware and the installation of the operating system and software.Let's go back to Dell... I just configured an Inspiron 518 system with the following options: PROCESSOR - Intel® Pentium® dual-core processor E2180 (1MB L2, 2.00GHz, 800FSB) OPERATING SYSTEM - Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1 MONITOR - Dell E207WFP 20-inch Wide Flat Panel MEMORY - 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz (4 DIMM) HARD DRIVE - 250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™ OPTICAL DRIVE - 16X DVD+/-RW Drive VIDEO CARD - Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 SOUND - Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio KEYBOARD & MOUSE - Dell Entry Keyboard and Dell Optical USB Mouse MEDIA READER - Dell 19 in 1 Media Card Reader Final price - $728.64 including taxes and shipping to Chicago. You have a tendency to overestimate prices, taxes, and shipping. EDIT - Whoops, forgot the printer. Add a Dell All-in-One V305 to that order for $69+taxes. Shipping will remain unchanged. Still nearly $200 less than what you claim as the "bare minimum". Even with three-year warranty, we're still under the $1000 mark after taxes and shipping. Did I read this correctly? "XP SP2 was a complete re-write of the entire kernel for XP"? Windows XP (both Home, Professional, MCE, and Tablet) all use the NT 5.1 kernel. They always have, and they always will. Server 2003 (and XP64, which was derived from it) use the NT5.2 kernel. Finally, Vista and Server 2008 both use the NT 6.0 kernel. No service pack has ever contained a "complete re-write" of the NT kernel. Please, stop spreading incorrect information. You're talking about completely replacing the engine... sounds a lot like upgrading the hardware. Tweaking would be adjusting settings (valve timings, air-fuel mixtures, using lighter weight fuel, etc etc). Now you're not the one comparing apples to apples. Optimizing an internet connection will optimize things, but still won't change the fact that the system itself is slow. You'll also never be able to exceed the rated speed of the internet connection by any significant amount. And... your point with this is? Systems that haven't been updated are usually the cause of many problems and security issues with my customers as well. This is why I keep the full SP3 (and SP2) installers on my sysadmin DVD. That way, I don't need to wait for it to download. You're barking up the wrong tree here... Wait... I'm resorting to personal insults? When have I insulted you directly? You're the one who brought my SMod status into this (which is completely irrelevant to the discussion), and the one who put quotes around "IT". I haven't called anyone stupid, but I will tell people when they're wrong (take the "complete re-write example above"). By the way... what do tomatoes have to do with Vista? There hasn't been any major recall of Vista last time I checked. I can't say the same for laptop batteries though...

I'm actually not entirely sure as to the exact cause of bad sectors. It could be controller related, or that areas of the physical disk no longer properly magnetize. Perhaps someone else could shed some light on this...?

My friend has a 37" Sharp LCD that's 1080p capable. We use various sources on the TV - DVD, Wii, PS3 - and while you can tell when something's running at 720... I've never really noticed myself saying "I wish that were in higher resolution". The couches are about 6 ft away from the TV, so we're also sitting relatively close compared to some setups. I think that in most cases, the magic "cutoff" point at which you should definitely switch to 1080 comes in the mid 40" range. Again, like crahak said, it depends a lot on your setup and how far away from the screen you're sitting.

That kind of error usually happens when there are bad sectors on the drive, or the drive itself is failing. Simply reducing the size of that pagefile is only going to delay the problem, since you're just waiting for another file to be accessed at that location. Open a Command Prompt (Start->Run->cmd->OK) and type in the following command: chkdsk /R This will scan your hard drive for errors, and if possible, fix them. Since this is likely your system drive, you'll have to reboot for this to complete. Let us know how things go.

Acer 22" widescreen LCD monitor - $206 Microsoft comfort curve keyboard - $23 Logitech optical mouse - $14 You don't have to break the bank to get good quality components. I use Acer monitors for all my systems, and while they're not the best in the business, they certainly do the job just fine, and they haven't broken the bank. I spent about 5 minutes finding those products and pasting the links into this thread. Samsung ML-1640 Laser Printer -$105 USB2.0 Device Cable A-B M/M 6FT - $9 That's not even as cheap as they come, but it's an excellent quality printer that will last for years. Wow... so you'd take an employee's profit margin over customer satisfaction? It's one of the most annoying things about some of the retail stores around here. You can't walk 5 meters without someone asking "Can I help you find something?", just so they can make as much commision as possible. Also, whenever I do ask them for something, they ALWAYS try to sell me something that's more expensive and isn't what I'm looking for. It's one of the reasons why I stop going there, and stop recommending that friends buy from there as well.Ever thought about the fact that a happy customer will often come back for more, as well as recommend you to their friends and collegues? Every successful business is built upon customer satisfaction. Customers aren't happy? They buy something else and the company falls. It's as simple as that, and it applies to both goods and services. Right... but what you're suggesting is that the customer pay half the price of the new hardware (or more) for "tweaks" and cleaning to a system that isn't worth it's weight in lead. It would be like paying $5000 for repairing a car that's worth $1000. If a car is in an accident with that much damage, it's written off, and the owner is handed a cheque for the car's remaining value - not the initial value. If you were to show the customer a reasonably priced system, show them what it can do, and then tell them that it will cost them more than half of that to "tune up" their old system... most of them would be pretty convinced. I've rarely met someone who gets upset when I tell them that it's simply not worth it to fix old computers. You seem to be obsessed with profits, so you don't show customers both sides of the coin (no pun intended).I gotta eat too! I can't really name anyone on this forum who doesn't. I charge customers $200 for assembling a system, installing the OS and drivers, and running a standard set of stability tools to make sure everything is in order. This whole process usually takes about two hours of my time (the stability tests are run overnight). In order to make the most of my time, I'll download all the drivers I need while the OS is installing. After the OS installation is complete, I transfer all the drivers to a USB key and install them on the system. This really doesn't take much effort on my part either... Vista Incompatibilities Thread @ MSFN. Someone beat you to it, and honestly, the list of software that doesn't work is pretty small. Did you see the Mojave project? Are you possibly one of those people who's never really used Vista? I have this debate with collegues all the time (some of whom are the avid Mac-addicts who stop at nothing to poke fun at Vista), and every time they bring up a "problem", I show them a link or the fix. Just because things are different doesn't mean they're worse. I really don't know what you mean by this, but it's going pretty low... SP1 was for Vista what SP2 was for XP. Bug fixes, stability issues resolved, and overall, a fairly major update. You can add all the custom mods and upgrades you want to a Pinto, but underneath it all, it's still a Pinto. If you're really doing SP3 updates, you should download the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers. Put that on a CD or USB key, and copy it to the system when updating it. No need to re-download it, no need to worry about internet speed, etc etc. There are offline installers for every one of the installers you mentioned. You'd save your customers bandwidth and time by following this little piece of advice. $325 for fixing front brakes? That is overcharging! Just about every shop that I've been to would charge me about $150 for that kind of service - tops. I actually had my front brakes completely replaced last summer (pads and discs), and after taxes the bill was still under $200. The rules might be different in the states, but in Canada, if you pay off the entire credit card bill before the due date, you pay zero interest. The interest applied to your account is only valid for your unpaid balance. I'll say it again. A happy customer will often come back for more, as well as recommend you to their friends and collegues. Returning customers means returning business and income. Customer's word of mouth is often one of the most powerful advertisements there is. You've never had a customer do that, but from what you've written here, you've got quite a few people who disagree with your practices. Some of them waste time, some of them waste your customer's money, some of them waste your money (your brakes). I'm not sure who you're trying to convince here, since nobody's arguing that memory upgrades are often the most beneficial for instant performance gains.Look at the prices of everything in the top of this post. We're talking about roughly $375 for LCD, keyboard, mouse, printer, cable. They also get a 22" monitor instead of the 19" that you're talking about. Sure, I give out free information as well. I'll then offer to do the work for them in order to fix the problem that they're having. Just knowing the answer doesn't really give any salesperson the right to overcharge their customers, and yes - I'm going to say - you are overcharging customers. I've given you concrete, real world examples of quality hardware that's cheaper than everything you've shown. You might charge less as a flat fee than Geek Squad (I'll take your numbers for granted, since I honestly don't know what they charge), but you spend FAR more time than is necessary on the work that you do. While Windows update is running, you could be working on a different computer. Or fixing something else related to their problems. Looking up replacement hardware for them. And so on, and so forth.

If anything, I'd imagine that it would increase the longetivity of the drives, and reduce the overall IO error rate caused by vibrations from neighbouring drives. I know of several manufacturers that have implemented features to counteract errors caused by external sources of vibrations, but nothing really beats isolating one from the other. Heat dissipation really isn't a concern with these drives. At idle, they draw less than 4W a piece, and that only goes up to 8W when they're working... compared to 8-11W of other drives on the market (*cough*Seagate*cough*). The creepiest part of it all is that when I get home, I've always been used to that hum that the system used to produce. I've caught myself checking the lights to see if the system is actually on!

I'm trying to build a very small form factor computer (tiny HTPC to be precise), and one of the parts that still has me stumped is the optical drive. While a standard optical drive would fit inside the case I'm looking at, it would take up about half the volume, cutting off airflow and whatnot. Does anyone know of any slim optical drives that use standard connectors, or where I can get adaptors for laptop drives to run off SATA connectors?

My file server has gone through it's share of upgrades and revisions over the years. It started out as a lowly Athlon XP 2000+ system with two WD5000AAKS drives and has grown into the behemoth that it is now. Last summer, I wanted to make myself a reliable storage server (which could also serve other purposes later) that had room to expand as I needed it to. The parts list as it stands now: Case: Coolermaster CMStacker 810 PSU: Corsair HX620 Motherboard: ASUS P5K Premium Wifi CPU: Intel E2160 (soon to be upgraded) RAM: 4x2GB OCZ Gold DDR2-800 5-5-5-18 Optical Drive: Pioneer DVR-212D Graphics Card: EVGA GeForce 7200GS RAID Card: 3ware 9650SE-8LPML System drives: 2x WD5000AACS Storage drives 8x WD10EACS Fans: 3x Scythe Slipstream 800RPM Heatsink: ThermalRight Ultra 120 Extreme I had originally setup the hard drives in CoolerMaster's 4-in-3 modules, and everything was bolted together. It was fairly quiet, but there was a distinct hum coming from the computer (more noticable from some directions than others). A local fabric/sewing store had rolls of 25m of corded elastic on sale for $3, so I jumped on that and got myself two. The stacker case makes suspending hard drives dead simple, since there are convenient holes in the case meant for screwing 5.25" drives in place. And as is always necessary, the pictures. The insides of the computer - not the cleanest build, but it works. I guess I could spend a little more time taping cables to the back panel if I wanted to... but I'm a little lazy. The ugly side of things... A closeup of the suspension. The glory!!! The difference in noise is like night and day. 8) I've closed off the top vent of the case as well to prevent the airflow short-circuit that would otherwise happen. The drives themselves run at about 33-35C at idle, 35-38C when working. Not too shabby if you ask me... I know mark is gonna love this one...

You could also try running Dial-A-Fix to see if that can re-register the DLLs for Windows Update.

Whoops... missed that part. I'm not sure what happened with that chip then. There have been cases where the thermal diode is broken, or the TJunction value is set incorrectly, giving you abnormal readings. I've built about 5 systems with E2100 series CPUs (two for myself), and none of them have had abonormally high temperatures. I'm not talking about the hardware here - I'm talking service. Unless you go for business class systems, all OEM hardware sucks. Lenovo ThinkPads are the only laptops that have some out of the box quality feel to them (and they don't really break the bank either).Edit - the latest release of SpeedFan does measure temperatures correctly for all but the 45-nm chips out of the box. Otherwise, it's simply a matter of adding an offset from SpeedFan's default TJunction temperature (100C) and the actual TJunction on your CPU.

It's actually a misnomer in computer terms. Kilo (10^3), Mega (10^6), Giga (10^9), Tera (10^12) - these all describe powers of 10. Kibi (2^10), Mebi (2^20), Gibi (2^30), Tebi (2^40) - these all describe powers of 2. These terms are often mixed up. In any piece of software, things are measured in the powers of 2 (computers are binary systems afterall). In hard drive manufacturing, they use the powers of 10. crahak already gave the conversion factors above, but this is the reason behind it all.

You probably had a CPU that had poor contact between the die and the IHS. Lapping or switching out the CPU won't help there. I've got my E2160 in my server, running at 100% 24/7 (BOINC projects), and it's currently at 52C on both cores (passive cooling on a Scythe Ninja). The point is that I too make my living this way!!! poolsharkz has given this topic nothing but FUD about modern hardware, and has shown us that he's too busy fixing old computers to be knowledgable about current systems. I make about $15K from my university stipend, and another $5K from working as a TA and a tutor. The rest of my income (which is my expendable income) comes mainly from computer repair and maintenance work. I don't have a shop, but I do housecalls for businesses and home customers. I can't name one reputable computer repair shop that actually recommends old hardware over new. I can't think of any large market where products made 10 years ago are better than those sold today...Dell does not suck. My 2.5 year old laptop had a dud hard drive, and the system fan was starting to get noisy (not broken, just buzzed now and then). Here's what happened about a month ago. I called them on a Thurdsay. Told them the hard drive was broken and the fan was loud. We walked through about 5 minutes of their on-the-phone troubleshooting. They confirmed that the hard drive was dead, and said they'd take it in. Friday morning - Purolator delivers an empty box containing a return shipping label. I put the computer in the box, attach the shipping label, and call Purolator. They're at my door two hours later to pick it up. Monday - regular business day. Tuesday - Statutory Holiday - It was Canada Day. Pretty much EVERYTHING in the country, except essential services, closes. Wednesday - Computer arrives at my house at 9AM. Let's look at that timeline again. One business day turnaround. ONE! Now, if you can say that other PC manufacturers can match that kind of service, I'd really love to hear it. Toshiba - forget it. Acer - nope. Lenovo - good, but not this good. LG - pfft... Sony - yuck. In Canada, businesses can claim 30% depreciation on computer hardware purchases per year for three years. This means that according to the government (and all of their financial backings), the value of the computer has dropped to 10% of what it was initially after three years. Not five, not eight, and not ten. Three. No person in their right mind would pay $5000 in labour on a car that was worth $1000, so why would someone spend $450 on a computer that's worth less than 10% of that?

I'll give you an example of how "tweaks" are costing a company more money and time (i.e. my time). I've been asked to run IT for a small decor company (they do the decor for conferences, weddings, etc etc). They've got four systems around the office, of varying age and performance. I'll start with the "slowest" since it's most relevant to this discussion. Remember all those people who swore that FAT32 was faster than NTFS? Look back to threads from when XP was first released and people migrated from Win98 to XP. You'll find countless reviews, threads, and articles saying that NTFS is slow and "bloated", etc etc. The previous IT setup the partitions on this system as follows: C: - 1GB FAT - for pagefile D: - 4GB FAT32 - for Windows installation, some programs E: - 8GB FAT32 - for data and programs that didn't fit on D: Now... the main problem - there's a measly 200MB of free space on D:, since the twit wasn't smart enough to allow enough space for the system. Secondly - why would you put the pagefile on a separate FAT partition? You're increasing the disk head travel time, slowing things down greatly. Finally, they're FAT/FAT32 partitions. The guy had disabled the Network Location Awareness service, bringing up this exact problem for computers connected to the network. Honestly - why would you disable this? Sure, I could also start taking any computer hardware and max out the specs to raise up the price. Let's all go configure Apple Mac Pro's to over $20K!!! jcarle's setup is still less than half of what you're suggesting, and would still blow it out of the water performance wise. It's pretty much exactly what I built the above mentioned company to replace one of their reception computers. Oh, and dispite the "low end components", it's possible to run Vista on that without too much hassle. My mid-line Inspiron 6000 from two and a half years ago runs Vista without a hitch.@Th3_uN1Qu3 - If your programs don't work properly in Vista, you should also be talking to your devs to update their software. You're talkingabout making it all Microsoft's fault, like ZA tries to do here. Filezilla is one of the examples that I give to all my friends. The XML settings version threw up UAC warnings left right and center, since you're trying to write files to the Program Files directory. There are countless documents out there, direct from Microsoft to developers, telling them to save settings in AppData or in the user's registry (HKCU - not HKLM). Poor programming is the cause for most UAC prompts out there.

I've had one problem with the Linux drivers. I was using a OpenGL based modeling tool (Comsol Multiphysics, to be precise), and with postprocessing of the display, the entire system would hang when running off the Intel ingrated video (this was a G965 chipset). The moment I tried an ATI or nVidia card in the PCIe slot - no hanging.Still - that's the least problematic of the lot.

No, I don't believe that everything MS makes is perfect, but having dealt with several OSes on various hardware, I'd say that it's better than the rest at a lot of things. BV makes it seem as though you can disable those "unnecessary" services at will and not worry about the possible repercussions of doing so. The worst part of it all - if something breaks, you often don't know which service it is that is required without a lot of trial and error.If you want to disable services on your own computer, go for it. If you're doing work for others, chances are you'll end up disabling something that's going to cause them problems later. While this might end up giving Poolsharkzz more customers in the long run, I think it's just wrong, and isn't worth the "OMG 3 seconds faster boot" that you get. EVERY time I nlited my system or started tweaking services, something broke in the end. My laptop had a plain vanilla install of XP on it for two years. No tweaks, no services disabled, just plain XP and updates. Number of incompatibilities with software - zero. Number of times I needed to enable a service for something - zero. It worked. Plain and simple. I'd bet you guys a beer that the OP's uncle would rather have a system that works reliably rather than one that's 10% faster. As you're typing your reply - is your browser that much faster at responding to your typing if you've twaked your system?

Sorry, but this simply isn't true. The system in question has 512MB of RAM, which is plenty for a basic web-surfing, document-writing system with two or three users. My parents system was an Athlon 1GHz with 512MB of RAM, and they used this for years before changing to a laptop (they live off the grid now, so power consumption is a concern). An idle user in the background doesn't apply any "burden" to the system resources. If the system does need more RAM, idle pages will be written to disk, and then read back when needed. For the tasks that the OP's "limited knowledge" Uncle has, this really shouldn't be a concern. Sure... so you remove the entire A/C system from the car (let's assume it's currently winter time) because you have no need for it. Then the summer comes along... you might be wanting that A/C back again, but the driver has no idea how to do that. Even worse, in cases like with nLited installations, the A/C system has been thrown out altogether! The system described in the original post is a very typical 2000/2001 computer. Those specs are exactly what XP was originally designed to run on. I suggest you check again. You're suggesting that a DNS lookup from a web server is faster than looking up that same entry from cache? Your hosts file might be helping things by blocking ads, but otherwise, the setup that you described will lead to slower page load times. Erm... "only" 512MB of RAM? Look at the recommended system requirements! You're talking about "only" 512MB when that was the equivalent of modern systems with 8 or 16GB. 512MB was a LOT of RAM back then. My mother's system, with 256MB, boots up, and task manager reports 100MB free. I'd like to see this "40%" performance gain. Benchmarking tools test raw CPU power, or memory access speeds, or disk access speeds - none of which are going to be affected by additional registry entries. There have been far too many discussions and reviews about this, and they've all been turned down. Read the results for yourself. Wow... you charge people half the cost of a modern computer... to make their old computer slightly faster, if not more broken? Please tell me if I've been rude or off-topic in any way here. I've simply been trying to debunk several myths that have been brought up by Poolsharkzz (which have come up time and time again over the past 7 years). Again, I never suggested that he simply get a new computer, but rather that a default clean install of XP would probably do a world of good. Your hardware troubles are the reason why I'm rarely a first adopter of new technology. Up until this past year, I've always worked on older hardware. My main workstation up until last summer was also a dual PIII 1GHz system with 1GB of RAM. My new computers were built, installed, and updated, and the only major problems I've had have been from a couple of sticks of bad RAM (hey - it happens).

@PoolSharkzz - I have to disagree. Usually, you can be safe by disabling those services, but like I said before - what happens later? What if his aunt (I'm assuming he has an aunt there) wants her own account, and both people want to use the computer. You'd just disabled the Fast User Switching service. Most people I do "computer cleanup" for are techno-clods (let's be honest here), and if I were to start telling them "Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services", they'd get scared and say it was too complicated - not even kidding here. Like Mr. Snurb said, the processes might be up and running, but chances are they're sitting there doing nothing, and chewing up zero resources. Also - NEVER disable the DNS client service. I can guarantee you that your internet speeds will be slower without it since all your DNS requests are always sent back to the DNS server instead of simply being looked up in memory. Honestly - if you can't afford 2-3MB of RAM for the DNS client service, your computer shouldn't be running XP anyways.

Monowall will do that nicely for you, as well ClarkConnect (don't know if CC is free anymore...). Here's a list for you to look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux...l_distributions

Can you disable all other boot sources from the BIOS and leave ONLY the USB-CD drive? What model drive is it?

Are there other accounts on the system? Is yours an admin account? If there are other accounts on the system, your scan might only be able to find the size of files that you have permission to access (i.e. your own). There could be files owned by another user that you can't read, and therefore, can't see the size of. I just checked JDiskReport, and it was off by 2GB on my file system usage... I'd recommend SequoiaView to analyze the file space used. It also gives you a much better breakdown of where the large files and folders are.

Sure, you might be alright with disabling a few here and there, but when it comes to new programs, they might call on that service that you turned from Automatic to Disabled. Imagine that you "fix" a friend's computer for them by defragging the hard drive, uninstalling Norton, and disabling a few services. Then they go and buy an iPod and start using iTunes. They might run into problems updating their iPod firmware. There's little to no reason to disable services. Idle services don't use any memory or CPU time, and disabling them can lead to problems.