OT - Video Card Question(s)

In article ,
"Peter Duniho" wrote:

The Media Center Edition is fine (and may even be desirable). Though,
personally I think anyone buying a Windows operating system today should
make sure that part of the deal is a voucher for a free upgrade to Vista. I
can't say whether Vista will or will not be a major improvement, but one
thing is for su it is the new standard for Windows PCs, and it would be
silly today to spend the $100 (or whatever) on a copy of XP, when it's
already basically obsolete.

Read the VISTA reviews, www.winsupersite.com

In article . com,
"Jay Honeck" wrote:

I told him that I didn't feel "right" using Best Buy or Dell for such a
locally-oriented project. I then offered to put signs up in our
theater that say something along the lines of "The Kiwi -- Powered by
NeoComputers", in exchange for him building a "God Gaming System" for
me -- at his cost.

Sounds like a Win-Win situation.
You may be getting a bigger crowd on Tuesday nights from his customers
as word of mouth gets around.
Has the local press picked up on the KIWI yet?

In article ,
"Greg B" wrote:

As far as Pete wondering if XP is going to be obsolete soon, I doubt it.
Microsoft may drop the XP Home version first but the other 4 versions of XP
should last for a few more years. There's still plenty of stuff out there
that doesn't require Vista, yet. Microsoft just quit supporting 98 and ME
this past summer...

Businesses will not convert until all their apps are thoroughly tested.
Plus, newly purchased equipment and software will have to run their
ammortization cycle before being replaced. What are the cycles for large
corporations? 3 years?

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...
I stayed with a 160
GB hard drive, figuring that'll keep us happy for now.

Have you considered the speed advantage of a SCSI HDD? More often
than not, it is the HDD that slows a computer system's response time;
they are never fast enough, IMO.

This is no longer true (and hasn't been for a while now). With ATA150 (and
of course now with SATA), the bottleneck is typically in retrieving the data
from the media (that is, the drive itself). The interface plays little part
in the overall throughput of the data.

If you want to speed disk access, the solutions involve making it faster for
the drive to provide the data. Two common methods are larger buffers on the
drive (only help up to a point...read enough data at once, and the buffer
doesn't get "refilled" fast enough to help), or using RAID. The latter is
very effective, if the array is configured for performance (not all RAID
modes help performance...only the "striping" modes do). Of course, disk RPM
and areal density improve performance as well. Disk RPM in particular is a
big factor.

For best speed, set up a striped RAID array of 10,000RPM drives. It'll cost
a fortune, but you won't ever spend much time waiting on the disk.

Pete

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
ups.com...
[...]
I, of course, then proceeded to lose my mind further, and authorized
him to upgrade the components until the cost was still at my "mentally
accepted" price of $1500.

A "God Gaming System" without SLI?

I don't get it.

And at his cost, with a budget of $1500, not only should SLI be part of the
package, it seems to me that your other components aren't as high-end as
they could be either.

Anyway, congratulations on the product placement deal. Sounds like a real
win-win for you both.

Pete

On 21 Nov 2006 07:09:20 -0800, "Jay Honeck" wrote:

For those who care, here are some of the specs:

...plus the usual floppy drive


Why?



randall g =%^) PPASEL+Night 1974 Cardinal RG
http://www.telemark.net/randallg
Lots of aerial photographs of British Columbia at:
http://www.telemark.net/randallg/photos.htm
Vancouver's famous Kat Kam: http://www.katkam.ca

...plus the usual floppy drive
Why?

Despite their reported obsolescence, they are still exceedingly useful
for tranfer of small files from machine to machine, especially those
without USB connections and drivers for whatever brand of thumb somebody
has.

Jose
--
"There are 3 secrets to the perfect landing. Unfortunately, nobody knows
what they are." - (mike).
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

In article ,
"Peter Duniho" wrote:

For best speed, set up a striped RAID array of 10,000RPM drives. It'll cost
a fortune, but you won't ever spend much time waiting on the disk.

Western Digital RAPTOR 160 GB SATA is $229 at CompUSA.

"Jose" wrote in message
...
...plus the usual floppy drive
Why?

Despite their reported obsolescence, they are still exceedingly useful for
tranfer of small files from machine to machine, especially those without
USB connections and drivers for whatever brand of thumb somebody has.

Huh? All modern PCs have USB now (heck, any older computer still in use is
very likely to have a USB controller added). As far as drivers go, Windows
has the USB storage device drivers built in. You don't need drivers
specific to the make or model of a USB flash drive. USB is a fine solution,
and CD burners are nearly as ubiquitous. Blank CDs cost less than a floppy,
last time I checked (granted, that hasn't been recently), so if you really
want a viable alternative to USB for "sneaker-net", CDs make a lot more
sense than floppies.

Until I have a chance to try it for myself, I won't bother arguing the RAID
issue that Martin claims, except to say that my nearly-relevant experience
suggests he's wrong (and to explain why I say this).

I built a PC this summer that had a RAID controller on it with a RAID BIOS
setup utility built in. For sure, you didn't need Windows to be installed
to configure the array, and as near as I could tell, once you had the array
configured, Windows would detect it as a plain IDE drive, at least initially
while it was installing, so no extra RAID drivers were necessary. Obviously
once Windows was installed, with the RAID drivers installed, Windows will
handle the higher-level RAID features, such as error reporting and the like.
But I didn't see any sign at all that Windows needed any drivers just to
install.

At the time, I didn't bother to try configuring an array, but for sure
Windows installed onto a single hard drive attached to the RAID controller
without any trouble at all, and no need for a floppy drive.

I haven't bought a computer with a floppy drive in five years, and probably
haven't even used a floppy drive in three. A floppy drive is just a dust
collector these days.

Pete

Has the local press picked up on the KIWI yet?

Nah, I've kept this thing just in the aviation/movie crowd, thus far,
while I worked the kinks out.

Once I get this new system in, and the panel display added, I intend to
have an open house for it.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"