Anybody else want to put their foot through their computer?

[Smoke353]

What do you use 12GB of RAM for?

So far, not a whole lot.  I built my computer to be future-proof.  I don't plan on getting a new computer for a looong time.

[Alen]

that's quite a bit of ram smoke, my computer is an intel motherboard (to lazy to look what the series is) have a Nvidia 8800, intel quad core, pretty sure my hardrive's a 150 gig raptor drive, and I have like 6 gigs of Kingston ram. But thats like nothing compared to my brothers computer...

Hes got like a terra byte of memory for his hardrive, he sli'ed two BFG GTX 295's, he has a quad core with the biggest cooling fan ive ever seen, 16 gigs of kingston ram, and 6 fans.

[Scott_Irving]

Well I settled on the solution, this particular motherboard seems to have issues with it's RAID support in windows vista and 7. So looks like it's driver/hardware related. However there's nothing that can be done for now. But at least I have a full Windows 7 Enterprise release running now, just no raid. As a side note.. the SSD harddrive I recently added makes this system hela crazy fast. Now to get a second one and when the drivers work RAID them and then get another 6 gigs of ram, why because I can. A system I'll be building for a friend will have 24Gigs... just sick or would that be slick. For now time to overclock  .

 As far as what systems are good? probably your custom pc shops that plaster the internet. Just about anything besides the big prebuilt companies (dell,hp,etc...). The biggest draw back of them is usually low-end parts and very little customization or expandability. The highend dell's (A.K.A. alienware, are nice systems). Otherwise build your own, unless you have issues like I'm havin cause of unproved hardware and new o/s it's really quite easy. You can build a system and get the O/S installed in 2 hours without really rushing.Now Cable management that takes hours.

[Smoke353]

So what's the 'good' computer brand, then? As far as I can tell they all suck, and I don't have the patience or know-how to build my own.

I've used 2 laptops from HP that worked for a good long time.  My 2-year old pavillion I still use every day.  But all my other computers I built, so I don't know about what brands are good for whole computers.  I could tell you the best brands for the inside bits are though 

[Alen]

So what's the 'good' computer brand, then? As far as I can tell they all suck, and I don't have the patience or know-how to build my own.

I've used 2 laptops from HP that worked for a good long time.  My 2-year old pavillion I still use every day.  But all my other computers I built, so I don't know about what brands are good for whole computers.  I could tell you the best brands for the inside bits are though 

Ive never purchased a full computer, partly because I'll get a better computer if I build it. And also because I find its more cost efficient.

[Scott_Irving]

Aah the problems continue... I had to put all SATA ports in IDE mode rather then AHCI or RAID. I had to even put the sata ports in legacy mode.. stupid.  But it still wants to crash randomly. But at least it's not BSODing

[Smoke353]

Aah the problems continue... I had to put all SATA ports in IDE mode rather then AHCI or RAID. I had to even put the sata ports in legacy mode.. stupid.  But it still wants to crash randomly. But at least it's not BSODing

Random crashing is a bundled windows feature.

[Scott_Irving]

Not 7 lol, It appears that Ive got a stable system now it's run since last night with out crashing.

[Rider]

So far my uptime record on any Windows machine would be on this machine, with my current installation. Windows XP Pro SP3, 26 days uptime. After that some programs started behaving oddly and I felt a reboot was in order.

Beyond this I've learned not to rely on windows' stability.

[Smoke353]

Not 7 lol, It appears that Ive got a stable system now it's run since last night with out crashing.

Really?  I was told 7 was worse than Vista.

[Scott_Irving]

otherway around. 7 is great, i even went so far as to go buy a copy of the professional. The First Winblows I've personally bought.

[Nuclear]

Ah yes, the legendary Windows 7 that every computer nerd/starcontrol fan/Scott is talking about. I would say that Windows Vista is overly paranoid and worth ditching for 7 but tell me this. Can it succesfully run WingCommander 4 with its boot disk without DOSbox? Well, actually, does it have DOS/floppy drive support? I love those 3 and a half inch bundles of nostalgia.

[Scott_Irving]

sure, but that's why id buy it for playstation or 3do ;-)

Bright side I've made some progress, i flashed the bios to a beta that's not even "offically" avalible and set the defaults to safe, turned off all the advanced powersaving features and underclocked the ram by almost half and now I have a stable system.. not happy about having to do all that.