Buying a new computer (Spun-off HIV topic)

Most of what you said is true for less than current gen processors. I don't know of a processory you could by for a stanard PC now adays that does not have a ceramic casing around the core. Also the days of needing to stand over your motherboard with a flat head screw driver in order to push the stupid heatsink clip down are over. Even when that was necessary I NEVER cracked a core. The people who cracked cores where the folks who felt the need to use shims and too much thermal grease where the heatsink would slip off and they would jab either the proc or the board with the screwdriver.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Well, some people have all the motor skills of Magilla Gorilla and probably shouldn't be trying to do this stuff in the first place.I hear you, though. Those Socket A processors had a gotcha where the heatsink has to have this milled-out edge because it's designed to partially rest on one flange of the socket. If you put that on backwards you either crack a core or slag the damn thing when you turn it on.Good to know about the new stuff, though.

...I really, really wish I knew what the hell you guys are talking about.Looks like I'll be on a pretty steep learning curve for this.

I don't play games, but I buy computers for kids who play games, and they're always complaining about the video cards. This past Christmas we bought my son a Dell XPS laptop, it has some fancy graphics card that used to cost over around $350 retail for desktops a year or so ago, but can now be purchased for desktop machines for around $180 because the next generation just came out. It plays games with unbelievable clarity and smoothness that on my daughter's machine with it's normal graphics card have very unsatisfying resolution and often produce "jumps". Examples are Civilization IV and World of Warcraft.I don't pretend to understand graphics cards. All I know is that if I want my kids to stop complaining, I have to spend more money.--Percy

Actually I wouldn't recommend thermal tape. I've seen a few processors fried because of thermal tape. I think Artic Silver Grease (or whatever its called) is the way to go

I didn't recommend thermal tape. I explicitly said don't user thermal tape. I agree it is bad for processors.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

In general if you hear us say don't use {obscure hardware reference}, then if you don't know what that is you will be pretty safe.This message has been edited by Jazzns, 02-15-2006 03:52 PM

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

He he. Yea it can be a problem and video cards are the single component I replace the most. But I have never spent more than $200 on a video card and also never had a problem.Most people have trouble because they go in a tweak the video setting thinking that they super cool video card should be able to do Trilinear filtering while operating at 1600x1200 and 8xFSAA and still have good frame rates. Most games will keep the video setting with playable parameters for that card and really the difference is negligible.Game makers also release with the expectation that their games should run on cards up to 2-3 years old. If they didn't do that they would have no market for their game. Half-Life 2 ran on both my GeForce 5900 and my GeForce 3. Sure the 5900 looked a lot sweeter but they were both quite playable at their respective video settings.I usually turn video cards about every 18-24 months.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Having built a PC for the first time last year the best tip I can offer is to find a friend or co-worker who has done it before and offer them a few beers to come round and help (even if only to answer questions while you are doing it).Of course, don't let them start on the beer until after the PC work is done for the day and everything is safely packed away

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I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then

Never a truer word spoken.

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I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then

Your friends are very different from mine. We don't start building PC's until well after the beer has come out. Sometimes the harder stuff, too.Then again that's probably why we run computers inside of cardboard boxes, etc. Wouldn't do that with anything but second-hand hardware, though.

I always wanted to try to build a computer inside of a mini-fridge. I've seen some done before and it looks rather amusing. Just don't let the top of the ice cream box get caught in the video card fan and you can ramp that sucker up!=)

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

I heard a funny story once - these guys had an old crappy Pentium they felt like breaking. So they got a mini fridge, and started wiring it up inside - course, they had a load of booze too to keep them going and to keep in the fridge with the computer. Anyway, they fired that sucker up and managed to run Half-Life on it for 30 seconds before it exploded.Hehehehe.

I can see the attraction with second hand stuff as you say. When everything is brand new it would be a bit too scary for me.Actually I'm about to buy myself a brand new 300GB SATA internal hard drive to put in the Myth box I built and then install the newly released 0.19 version of MythTV.Then I have to pay somebody to replace my thirty year old TV aerial (i.e. a couple of wire coat hangers twisted together and nailed to the chimney) so I can get digital terrestrial TV with a better signal strength and signal to noise ratio than currently.That's the trouble with gadgets - the spending never ends...

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I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then

Is it worth it, do you think? The only problems I seem to have with 0.18 is that the frontend bombs out at random. 0.19 doesn't seem slated to fix that problem.Linux knowledge doesn't seem to want to remain in my head, so upgrading means learning a whole bunch of stuff all over again. I'm tempted to ignore this new release and go on like I have been.