bluescreens

MCE is a joke anyway. It's just XP Pro with a fancy Windows Media Player thrown into it. And half the compatibility. Since the binaries are the same, compatibility is exactly the same as well. Somebody's not familiar with the MS productline, and it's not me....

MCE is a joke anyway. It's just XP Pro with a fancy Windows Media Player thrown into it. ...and one of the best and easiest-to-use DVR/PVRs out there thrown in as well. It's a great product. Have you used it?

The TI4600 can't compete with the 9700. The 9700 was significantly faster per Tom's Hardware's reviews. The 6600GT is a great card; the 9700 was too - it was the best for years. The 7600 is a little bit better, but for media center (MCE2005, Vista MC things) you need an nVidia 5200 or so - anything higher is a waste of money. Grab the cheapest 6200 AGP you can find for that.

I'll assume you want to play 3D games at 1280x1024 and higher resolutions. The 6600GT is ATI 9700-esque in performance, so I'd say that's a fine match - but for the tiny difference in price I'd step it up to the 7600GT, if it's available for cheap in an AGP version (I assume your parton is AGP). I wouldn't bother with the 7300 - significantly lower performance.

Well your friend is obviously one of the 56% who don't have problems with it. Luck of the draw. C'mon - you don't really believe 44% of the buyers had a problem with it, do you? If so, NewEgg wouldn't carry them, and/or Antec would go out of business. You do understand that those polls are essentially meaningless as anything but advertising and user venting, right? Think "self-selected sample". I'll leave it up to the reader to ask himself how Dell gets away with 350-400W PS in so many of their boxes. (Example: 9200 @ 375W. FYI, Dell has certified the 8800GTX in that 9200... with 375W PS.)

Don't confuse low voltage rails with overpowering the PSU. It could just be a bad PSU (which is my guess). In all honesty, most computers have FAR overspecified power supplies nowadays. Don't believe me? - see for yourself. Agreed! (Finally, some people familiar with power supplies! So many here just keep repeating 'it's so important to have a 500W PS') Case in point, the ATI1950 system, heavily loaded, overclocked, overvolted, with a P4 CPU that has *tremendous* heat and power requirements compared to today's Core 2 Duo, STILL uses under 300W of power....in fact, it barely uses *250* watts of power. I reiterate my original suggestion - get a simple (under $50) power supply from some reasonable brand, and he'll be fine. Microcenter routinely has them for $30-ish, and they work great.

I think you misread my post. I didn't say idle is off. I said whenever my computer would need to sit in a largely idle state for a long period of time instead of leaving my computer, I will turn it off. Therefore, for me, the idle state is of non-importance to me. You can't compare performance strictly on synthetic benchmarks as they don't deal with real-world performance. Also, some benchmarks axe more on memory usage, not processor usage. As for overclocking? The Core2 lineup are excellent overclockers. Agreed. My E6300 ($220-ish) went from 2.13 to 3.2 on the first try on my Gigabyte P965-DS3 board, and it's continued to work perfectly ever since. That setup should be about 10% faster than the fastest Intel non-quad CPU on those lists - and would beat AMD's offerings across the board.

Exactly - I'd call the machine essentially idle when it's just sitting there. Sure, it will have a few dozen background processes (assuming Windows, Linux, or another modern OS) but that's the nature of the game. I'm sure we've all see Toms Hardware's and plenty of other measurements using the Kill-A-Watt devices showing most people don't need anything close to the mega power supplies people are wasting their money on nowadays. Most of these estimates of power requirement are WAAYYYYYYY too high.

500W is a lot for these simple needs. Wattage requirements have gone down lately, not up. Assuming you don't have an 8800GTX in there somewhere, a simple 350W PS should be plenty, and pick a reputable vendor and brand at a reasonable price (I'd think under $50) and you should be fine. Modular isn't all it's cracked up to be - you'll go into the case once to put it together than never touch it again - why pay extra for that?

Okay, but why would you build a computer to leave it at idle all the time? The power consumption is most important during it's heavy usage, is it not? Why would this be an issue? To determine the size of the power supply required? Most people vastly over-spec this (500W PSs for most people not building 8-drive megaservers is comical...) but aside from that, the vast majority of the time people will have CPUs running at near-idle, and so temperature (if not power) used at this setting is at least somewhat interesting if the power bits interest you (or you live in a country where electricity costs a lot).

I've tried the backup ISO many times here - it's worked great each and every time. I couldn't be happier with the product, as long as they manage to price it reasonably.

Run a 64 bit OS, and the issue will be fixed. Otherwise, yes, removing video cards and other add-in cards can increase the RAM you can use. Building an nLited server? Really? (/surprise) -- for test use only, right?

Where did you get the 90% figure? Agreed - it should be higher. Apps should run fine; it's the things that require kernel drivers that won't work.

Your video card or other hardware is using that 2MB of RAM - you actually do have 512MB. However, since another 512MB or 1GB stick of RAM is so cheap at BestBuy, Circuit City, Fry's, or other retail stores, it would be wise to just grab a stick and plug it into your laptop - lug it to the store one day and grab the RAM you need, and install it at the store to ensure it all works. More RAM is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to get a huge upgrade in performance these days.

You could also post your zipped minidumps here, and we can look at them and tell you why the machine crashed....

You can use the SEARCH feature to look for files on your hard drive. They should be in the ALL USERS profile; you can go into MCE and change this if you like with one of many of the tweak utilities. I boot from a 40GB drive and have the media recorded to a 500GB drive to work around space issues, for example - d:\tv.

Does that happen when you're booted in safe mode and leave it overnight?

Sorry but this MB doesn't support my DDR 400MHz. I also forgot to mention I have a SATA1 HD & not 2... I wouldn't make purchase decisions (and put lots of $ in obsolete hardware) to save a little money on RAM. 2GB in sticks are $85 or so at NewEgg, so it's tough to suggest buying now-obsolete equipment to save just a few $ (and have to upgrade anyway later...) SATA is SATA... your drives will work fine.

I'd suggest sticking with the certified WDDM drivers included with Vista. Why would you want to include non-WDDM drivers?

It surprises many people when this works. It shouldn't - Windows is actually pretty good at booting, as long as you plan ahead a bit: 1. If your new machine has a different and incompatible HAL type, XP won't be bootable after the motherboard change. There's no quick workaround for this. 2. If your motherboard has a different IDE controller (and it will - the vast majority of the time) you'll want to put your IDE controller driver to "PCI Standard IDE" before you shut it down for the last time with the old motherboard. Obviously, your new motherboard *must* be able to boot with the standard PCI IDE driver; as long as you don't put the controller in a RAID mode, you should be fine. Vista adds new drivers to the mix, and removes the HAL issue, so #2 is really what matters with it.

what about: New MB: ASUS P5PE-VM New CPU: INTEL Pentium 4 630 3.00GHz In this day and age I wouldn't suggest anything but Intel Core 2. That's an E4300 plus, say, a Gigabyte P965-DS3 (or the G version with built-in Intel GMA3000 graphics, if you prefer that). The DS3 version is very overclockable (mine's running at 3.2Ghz with an E6300...); the built-in graphics version isn't as overclockable. You should be able to get both for very close to and slightly under your $250 target.

Can you cut & paste the information found in 'view problem detail'? That's the technical information that could help someone out in fixing this. Also, be sure to report the issue to Microsoft, and take a few minutes to google any bits found in the 'view problem detail' section to see if someone else has already posted this and a fix.

Reboot in safe mode and fix or change whatever you like - while logged in as admin. While you're there, make another admin account.

1. Stick with 32 bit unless you have over 4GB and must use it, and then switch to 64 bit. 2. I'd reformat and install from scratch; save your data! 3. I'm not in favor of RAID0, but if you must, be sure you've got your drivers available if Vista doesn't natively support the RAID 'card' you have. 4. There are plenty of (free) Vista AV programs, so I think you should be OK there. 5. Ultimate has a (basic) burner software included with it. 6. Can't comment directly on the printer, but most remotely modern HP printers are supported, at least somewhat, with inbox drivers in Vista.