Hello from the cornfields of Iowa in the U.S.A.!

[Guest]

Hello, My board name is GeekOxygen as I am hopefully one day going to realize my dream of having my own computer repair/reseller business. I am kind of a jack of all trades but I have been building and working on PC's and Laptops for 10 years or so. I have done a lot of things in my life, not the least serving in the first Gulf War with the United States Air Force. No political offensive remarks please. Let's see, I was in the Air Force out of college for 5 plus years, got out and worked in various retail stores for about 5 years while going to night time college for Computer-Aided Drafting. I then worked for an engineering firm for 5 years as a drafter with AutoCAD, but it was boring and I had a best friend get me started learning about computers and how to build them. I always played the RPG games like Baldur's Gate, etc, offline until last year I had a friend convince me to try World of Warcraft. I didn't care for it much, too cartoonish. I like realism and good sound.

I have worked several IT jobs as a contractor and I am self taught. I have been everything from an IT Manager to a Help Desk Level II Analyst. Believe it or not it stinks to find a decent IT job right now and I have struggled to find one, so you might find me on this board a lot as I like what I see so far and maybe I can teach as well as learn some things from others. You can never know enough when it comes to computers. Oh and my specialty is taking apart and working on laptops. I can remember like a photograph what I took out and how to put it back together from memory and I just love working on them. I currently play only Lord of the Rings Online, but I have restartoveritis, so I have only had a character up to level 17 once even though I have played it since it came out. Oh yeah, here are my specs for my computer.

Gigabyte AMD SLI Motherboard with Nvidia 570 chipset. Socket 940.

AMD Socket 940 Athlon 5600+ X2 Dual Core (Not Overclocked) 2.8 GHz

2 XFX Nvidia GeForce 8600GT Video Cards in an SLI Configuration

4 x 1 GB PC5300 667MHz sticks of DDR2 PNY memory (The board maxes out at 800MHz and PC6400, 16 GB of RAM)

Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty Pro Series Sound Card

2 Western Digital SATA 2 7200 RPM 80GB Hard Drives in a RAID 0 Configuration

Apevia Gaming Case (Black) with Blue LEDS and Temperature Readout on front of case

20x IDE HP Multi-Format Lightscribe DVD Burner

Rhycom 550W Power Supply

All cooling done by fans and it consistantly runs at 77F in the case even when gaming. I have gotten a 3DMark score of close to 10000 before which is good enough for me.

Does a great job of running XP, but using DirectX 10 really eats up my FPS as I think my cards are on the low end of the spectrum when it comes to shadow rendering.

Sorry for the long intro, I'm a wordy person.

[cluberti]

No worries about offensive replies here, we're a very civil bunch. Glad to have you aboard at THE forums!