superrangerman2002 XP really is pretty good. It crashes way less than 98 or ME did on my old machine. To make XP look more 98 just right click on the taskbar, hit "properties", then "start menu" the check the "Classic start menu" button. I still like to classic 98 style better than the new XP style.

 

Dell dimension 8200, pentium 3, 2.0 gig, 80 gig hard drive. It was top of the line about 16 months ago.

 

Compaq Presario
Amd athlon XP 1500 1.33 Ghz
256 MB of Ram........Getting ready to upgrade to 512 MB
52 GB Hard Drive
Nvidia G forceMX 400

 

AMD 800 T-Bird, 704 mgs pc133, xp pro, 2 4o gig hd's, voodoo graphics and a hitachi 32 pro video monitor with pc and video inputs. ( hitech security firm went out of bussiness and got it for $200 bucks

 

Get Windows XP Pro. You'll never look back. I've had it installed since about August of last year and never had ONE CRASH. With Win98, I had to reformat and reinstall about every 3 months because of compatibility issues. Win98 is probably the worst version ever and I've been using Micro$uck since DOS 3.1.

Linux is the way to go, however. If you want to be able to totally customize your O/S the way you want it and NEVER have to worry about a crash, Linux is it. I recommend Mandrake or Red Hat versions for noobs. I actually still use Mandrake on one of my boxes.

 

That's more than fast enough for gaming. I use a very similar system (see above post) and I do a lot of online gaming.

 

The two "warranteed" ones are:

AMD 1.7 Gig + 80 Gig Hd midtower

SONY VAIO 1.8 Gig 40Gig Hd notebook

But for most things I use a tried and true 1 Gig AMD on a KT6A RAID motherboard with 40 Gigs of Hd that screams right past the both of them...

 

In my home network, that I work on everyday, I have:

Etower 633 with 15 Gb hardrive - with internet access
Gateway heap of junk, with 12 Gb -w/o internet
AMS 441 with Pentium II pretty slow, and 5GB. - w/o internet
Home made PII with 6 Gb. - with internet access
HP something, for music programming.

married to that lot I have a DVD player, an HP cd-writer, a double media floppy disk, an NEC hifi sound system, with powered woofer, MIDI keyboard, Synth card, and a network 20 Gb hard drive. for printers there are a Minolta Magicolor 6100, HP LaserJet 3100, HP Laserjet 4L and a Cannon Bubble Jet, now nearly retired. We have a couple of laptops too, a Dell, and a CTX.

You can only imagine how many cables there are in here. If ever I need to find anything it is hidden underneath cables, connectors, routers or other complex junk. When it is fired up, the A/C has to be on to keep the room cool, and the noise makes everything else around inaudible. The only advantage in the whole system is that it only has two keyboards, and two mouses.

I hate Computers, Printers and Networks so my life is not enviable at all. I have had more trouble with this set up than I care to remember - at one time I had all of them internet accessible, and got viciously hacked - burned three motherboards, and two chips. Now I have all manner of bits attached that are supposed to stop this happening. It seems to work, I have apparently thwarted 2 vicious attempts in the two weeks it has been up and running again. Talk about frustration, these things drive me crazy.

I do not doubt that one day, my wife will enter my study, to find me expired on the floor, lifeless, and the Blue Screen of Death mocking my corpse from the monitor........


Theo

 

I work for AMD, I don't get any discounts. But, I feel I should have a powerful machine just because I help build the chips.


I build my own machines.

Current big PC (There are 3 total at my house):

Dual MP1900 Processors
1 Gig of DDR memory
Dual SCSI Seagate Cheetah Hard drives, one 10,000 rpm and one 15,000 rpm on an Adaptec Ultra 160 SCSI controller.
Sound Blaster Live
Some 64mb video card, forget the brand.
A new 550watt power supply, I cooked the last 500watt.
Canon scanner, HP deskjet 550 printer, Olympus c2100 camera (it's awesome, see some of my gallery links for pics)

Just setup for web-cam, I have been video chatting with my brother in Dallas and my friend in Rhode Island at the same time..pretty cool.

I have ethernet running out to my shop for my shop PC and wireless for the wifes laptop.

And cable modem to keep the internet moving.

 

Mines a custom one I built a year and a half ago.

Generic full size tower.
Asus mother board.
AMD 1000
512 MB Ram
Dual hard drives - 40 GB and 80 GB maxtors.
ATI All in wonder radeon Video card.
Sound blaster Live sound card.
40x DVD rom
16x8x4x CD-R burner
5 usb ports
Samsung syncmaster 17" flatscreen monitor

This computer is great for multimedia and gaming. The sound is great, the video card is even better. I can use it watch movies on the TV nearby. Connect all sorts of goodies to it. And best feature of all, My computer gets me to FTE !

 

The one I use:

Dual AMD Athlon 2000MP CPUs

Tyan Tiger Tiger MPX S2466N-4M motherboard which includes:
4 standard PCI slots
2 64-bit 66Mhz PCI slots
3Com 100 mbit Ethernet controller

NVidia RIVA TNT2 64 video card

Adaptec 21960 Ultra160 SCSI controller (64-bit/66Mhz)

18 gig IBM 10,000 RPM Ultra 160 SCSI hard drive

120 gig Western Digital IDE hard drive

1 gigabyte RAM

Dual boot Linux and Windows XP.

It sounds like a lot, but for testing and software development its a must. The FTE server puts this one to shame.

 

Welp, I just upgraded like 3 days ago...
I was running a 566 mhz, 17 inch monitor, 15 gb HD, 128 mb SD ram, Boston Acoustic speakers w/ sub... etc etc etc

Now I am running:
15'' Flat Screen monitor
2.4 ghz Pentium 4 Processor
120 GB Hard Drive
Altec Lansing 4 Surround sound speakers w/ sub
512 mb DDR Ram
DVD Player/burner
CD Burner
Microsoft XP (its growin on me, dont like it that much yet)

I thought my old PC wasnt bad... but this one is great.

 

This is one I built myself:

ASUS A7N8X motherboard
AMD XP Barton 2500 processor
2 X 40GB Western Digital ATA100 7200RPM Hard Disk
2 X 333MHz 512MB DDR (True) Samsung RAM
Sony CDRW 48X16X40 (read, re-write, write)
Toshiba DVDRom
Aluminum mid-tower with five exhaust fans
Windows XP Pro SP1

Network:

Westell ADSL modem
Gigafast 10/100 Router

I currently have the privilege of having the fastest, most reliable computer in our home. Prolly not for long....

 

Yeah, I was going to say you must be doing something other than gaming because there's no point to a dual processor setup in that case. Matter of fact, I've seen tests where it was actually slower for gaming than a single processor. Sweet setup, though.

 

I know it's disgusting, but I run my dual setup to check email ,surf, FTE, edit photos or small videos and now to web video chat.

It's way overkill, but that's how I approach just about everything.

My PC buddies at work are totally confused as to why I built this beast.

Somethimes, I wonder myself.

My shop PC , cost $189 brand new at Fry's. Case, board, memory, processor, power supply, 52x CD, floppy, kbrd, mouse, spkrs, onboard sound, modem, maybe even LAN? No wonder we can't make any money building computer chips.