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I'd probably go with Intel just because I like vanilla stability. I'd look at something like a G31 or G41-based board from Intel or Gigabyte, with an E5300 CPU, 2GB DDR2 RAM (RAM is expensive right now and DDR3 isn't giving any benefit to a $500 computer), a pair of 500GB drives (Samsung >...

I'm sitting at a 3.8GHz i7/920 right now. I ran it at 4GHz for about 10 days before it BSOD'd the first time. I could probably push it back up now that I have a high end aftermarket cooler on it.

ESXi is funny about NICs. I know there's one or two models of 100Mbit Realtek NIC that it absolutely won't work with, which is obnoxious because those models amount to 84% of my classroom computers.

I'm not sure that I'd care if the discs were counterfeit, if they had the content at a level of quality that I consider acceptable.

I guess to redirect back to LM's question, I'd build a system when I need one and follow the usual generic advice of buying most of my parts one or two steps down from whatever the best thing I could buy on that particular day, because that's usually the sweet spot for pricing. I wouldn't wait...

No, they're stable and low. My 4870x2 is and always has been audible, but not intolerably so. It's a very low hum at idle. It does get loud when I'm gaming but of course at that point I'm gaming and there's enough noise from whatever game to cover it up. Maybe it stays loud for five or ten...

That kind of thing is what Youtube is great for.

Some of the gamers I know seem to have it. It's delicate and requires more attention than most people seem to want to put into the inside of a PC. Maybe it's not a big deal if you're changing parts every two weeks.

Nah. I'll find some someplace. Ebay has bulk lots, but they're still insane, especially once shipping is factored in.

CCC still fucks up if I load it on this machine, so it isn't loaded. I have the ATI display driver, but not CCC. So it's on whatever the hell speed the fan defaults to. And yeah, I got in and blew the fan out this morning the moment I realized I could hear the damned thing.

I've never met anyone who has done watercooling once who was willing to build a second system that way.

Hundreds. My standard system installation uses three cables. Most motherboards these days come with one or two, and now I'm out of cables.

I just bought a Scythe Musashi for mine, but I'm more than halfway tempted to just RMA the card. There is an nvidia-like level of fail in having a fan crap out on a more-than-$400 card that's only 90 days old.

I need SATA cables. Mostly data cables but also molex-to-SATA adapters. Monoprice.com seems to want $1.21 apiece for them, and that's only if I buy 50 at a time. I do want to buy 50 or more, but I don't particularly want to pay $1.21 apiece for them. Anyone have scads of SATA cables sitting...

For people who say that Firefox is a memory hog, I say that Chrome is actually worse, especially after you get over six or seven open tabs. Large numbers of tabs are also a problem for Opera, according to what I've read. To me, Opera is flat-out missing functionality that should come from...

Fair enough. ;)

That no one understands what the hell is going on has kind of been an ongoing theme of Robert Reich's commentaries on PRI's Marketplace.

Unfortunately, it's still Opera. Better than IE but not as good as anything else.

... and as of this morning the fan in my 5870 is audible even when my display is completely off and the machine is idle. Since absolutely nothing else in my bedroom makes any noise, it's officially the loudest thing in the room and that pisses me off to no end.

I still have a $200 i7 920 sitting here from the last time THOSE were on sale. Anyway, one thing to bear in mind is that the majority of the advantage of having an i5 or i7 are the architectural changes that come from getting an i5 or i7. I'm not sure anybody who has a current Intel i-series...

I'm not sure I want my phone to have flash, knowing how awful it is for desktops.

I think I'd go for the two smaller monitors for a brighter, more accurate picture and more pixels overall.

This program does something incredibly useful for SSD-owning people: It lets you move the Windows Users folder.

Tannin has a history degree and used to post quite intelligently on military history back on SR. I'm guessing he's probably kept up with his reading. :)

If you're going to not use the battery, you should let it discharge to about the halfway point and pull it out of the system. Thinkpads seem to have better power management than Dell systems with regard to not charging when they don't need to (most of the Latitudes I see that are more than maybe...

My cats liked to sit with their rumps on the top vent of my P180s. Being cats, it's not like I could do much to stop them from that. I had two of them but they're presently retired until I get around to repurposing them. You're right that I never bothered with any of the newer revisions of the...

On my systems that used Scythe Ninjas, I actually wound up with two Noctua 800rpm fans, one on the top and one on the bottom of the tower, both oriented to blow air upwards. I wound up pulling the "roof" fan on both my P180s because those fans seemed to have a shorter lifespan than the others in...

I'm not sure why the market needs a 5830.

Sounds like a dead drive to me.

Why are you talking about IDE SSDs? This thread is about English grammar!

ddrueding, you know that Crucial is part of Micron, right? And that Micron has been researching and manufacturing semiconductors since the '70s? OCZ sellls hobbyist RAM and only recently bought some legitimacy as a PSU manufacturer by purchasing PC Power and Cooling. They may become a big...

Actually, here's a fantastic reference to all sorts of writing.

The plural of SSD is SSDs. The possessive form of SSD is SSD's. Apostrophes aren't that difficult, people.

Coug has made a very subtle funny. ;)

OCZ isn't Intel. It's not Micron or Samsung or Toshiba. They're a bit player, and sooner or later, if they remain out ahead of the big guys, they'll probably get bought and absorbed.

There are some Linux-based projects for using GPUs for general purpose computation. Most of them focus on CUDA or OpenCL, but there are people doing work in the way that you're describing.

I usually load Clamwin and make do with a scheduled scan once a day, if I bother to do anything at all.

XP Pro supports two physical CPUs with as many cores as can be found in that physical package. We don't typically associate dual CPU systems with XP, but it's always had that capability. Also, it doesn't sound like these machines are part of the common operating environment where Bozo works, so...

Yes. These days, important people don't even carry cell phones.

The easiest thing to do to make Exchange functional is put a Linux machine in front of it to do all the heavy lifting.

You're right. I don't have any appreciation for it.

A lot of new brand name cases aren't even particularly friendly to IDE cables, let alone full length PCI cards. The trend in desktop cases is really to go with smaller, chambered designs that don't work really well with older hardware, but I'm not sure why you couldn't just re-use the cases you...

In Chicago, the PBS station does four weeks of pledge drives a year, but only during a limited number of hours each day. I suspect only about 5% of the station's broadcast time falls in a pledge period. We're talking about sports. I'm not seeing a huge need for high definition to begin with...

I don't understand why anyone cares about the olympics to begin with. There are a whole bunch of sports no one cares about at any point during the four years leading up to the games, and then there are the games, where people are supposed to care, and then we go right back to not giving a crap...

I do both. I use 8 onboard SATA ports + cards that have 8 more, normally with an IDE boot drive). I've read that you can use two Perc5s in one PC, but I don't have any systems set up that way.

Faced with the choice, I paid ~$250 for two Perc5s (plus the 3ware cards I already had) so I could get enough ports to run inexpensive 1TB and 1.5TB drives rather than paying the premium for 2TB drives. I figure the ports are forever (probably five years, anyway) and eventually I'll move up...

I was able to get two refurb'd Linksys WRT600Ns yesterday for $90, total. I'll be using them for a low-impact PPTP tunnel with dd-WRT. Mine won't be as heavily used as ddrueding's. They're about the nicest consumer-grade routers I've used; the one in my office, for example, has an uptime of...

It works in Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate. Just like XP mode.

The counter argument is that the process of obtaining fissionables is so horrifically awful for the environment that it exceeds the impact of coal power. That's what the anti-nuclear people say, anyway. I have a great deal of trouble believing that, but that's what they say. I'm very...

Nope.