Speed_Gibson

And dual core even!
After 8 short years my trusty Athlon XP system has decided to die on me. Due largely to financial and time constraints, it is being replaced with an Alienware system. First prebuilt I have ordered in nine years; the last one was a Gateway PIII 650 for $2000 that is still going strong as my admittedly space deprived server.

I am definitely excited going to a 2.7 dual core athlon with the new SATA and PCEI options. Having 4 GB of RAM will be big change as well.
Things that I am not too happy about:
0) no parallel interface on this new system. Fortunately my other system will happily take the printer. The laser printer has a USB connection, but I would rather run win98 again than use it.
1) no IDE connections - fortunately a PCI card fixes that problem. No point in giving up 200 GB of HD space that has worked flawlessly so far.
2) Paying for a flippin' computer that someone else built!! Ideally the old system would have waited until the cash was available for my local custom built system, but this does cost substantially less the Gateway did at least.

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Willravel

Congratulations! Welcome to the dual-core revolution. Soon we'll be using 32 core processors, but until then you're set.

Baraka_Guru

I think the bigger deal right now is getting software developers to actually optimally use each core, as most things use only one core, while few things use two to four.

Getting your 2Gs is a great step though.

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Cynthetiq

I'd say that the IDE drives will be a bottleneck into your system for copying and searching, or anytime the explorer window gets opened.

SATA drives are cheap.

I had a huge bottleneck from my IDE HDs and DVDROM drive because at the time there was no option for SATA DVD that was inexpensive. Since I changed the part with $20, I no longer have a hang at the explorer window.

Put the 200GB HD into another machine.... is my suggestion.

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YaWhateva

Congrats! but wait....you're saying buying an Alienware is actually cheaper than building a custom built computer?! I've never heard of such a thing!

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Radio Monk33

I am also curious about the Alienware choice...I didn't know they did lower end computers..

Not better off with a Dell or HP?

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Speed_Gibson

not cheaper, they simply had financing available. The $40 or so per month minimum payment - we will pay more on a regular basis - for the $1200ish total (hate paying for shipping) was more viable than the $500+ cash for any reasonably close custom built I could do presently.
It was a bit of a shock to me to find Alienware offering a decent "budget gaming" system for only $799; I added $250 to it by upgrading the RAM, video card, HD, etc.
The other good point was three open PCI slots, one of them will be filled on arrival when my soundcard with the breakout box replaces the included onboard audio.

I was thinking of just transferring the data from the IDE drives to the SATA then placing them in the 1.3 Ghz Athlon system - the beastie that I am using currently until the new one arrives. They would nicely replace that f*&(&&ing 80 GB hard drive that died back in december. This is going to feel sloooooow next to a decent dual core system though;already was next to a 1.6 GHZ Athlon XP with 1 GB of RAM.
I need to find that part online again to just read/transfer data from IDE drives with an easy external connection.

And this program should work nicely for fixing that monstrous single partition it no doubt ships with. Never have done that previously and not starting now.

one more thing: seeing the matrix affect is "cool looking" as long as it is not present from the first second of your computer starting.
It is possible to turn off the eye candy in Vista and get that win2k look or something close to it?

---------- Post added at 09:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:23 PM ----------

Alienware is wholly owned by Dell now, they sell their "higher end" gaming systems, something I just found out doing pre-purchase research.
I talked to dell online and did not care for some of the details on their lower end system; I spent 30-40 minutes talking to the sales support guy from Alienware about system specs before going that route.

I did tech support for HP back in the compaq/hp merger days and will never buy from them. They got greedy and put out shit products (at least what I supported) for the sake of higher profits.

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Lasereth

Well, let's see the specs!!!

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Speed_Gibson

these should be right, ctrl-c & ctrl-v from the website
- AMD® Athlon™ X2 5200+ 2.7GHz Dual Core 2 x 512KB L2 Cache
- Alienware® P2 Chassis with AlienIce™ 3.0 Video Cooling
- Alienware® P2 Chassis with AlienIce™ 3.0 Video Cooling
- Single 512MB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTS 250 - Superclocked Edition
- 4GB« Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 x 1024MB
- Alienware® Approved AMD® 790FX Motherboard
Includes PCI-Express 2.0, BIOS Overclocking Utility, and Support for AMD Phenom
Quad-Core Processors
- Windows Vista® Home Premium with Service Pack 1 – DirectX 10 Ready!
- 500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7,200RPM 16MB Cache
- Single High Performance Gigabit Ethernet Port, no real difference here as this will be the only part of my network with the Gigabit speed.
- Onboard Audio, will be ignored and replaced with my Hercules Game Theatre XP

this should last at least 4-5 years if not longer

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Speed_Gibson

I had a few questions that did not seem worthy of a new thread in my opinion -
0) Is there any practical difference between the USB 2.0 To IDE Adapters out there aside from the price? It sounds like the easiest way to transfer data from the old drives and should be useful in the future as well.
1) My win2k box with the 1.3 Ghz Athlon and 458 MB (edit: has 589 MB now after finding an old PC133 stick that works this morning) of RAM will be turning into a *nix box. What distros and/or what *nix windows managers would work "best" for this machine? It will be running the Geforce 7600 GS from the dead system. Debian or Ubuntu are what come to my mind quickly.

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xuvio38

~~~~~

Speed_Gibson

No personal experience with them aside from an external drive using an USB 2.0 connection, but I am using the two drives (80 & 120 GB) for the "new" *nix box after transferring the data via a USB 2.0 to IDE adapter. Decided to go with a $20ish option from Newegg that had good reviews.
Would like to add a 1 TB drive eventually to the 500 GB shipping with the system and the 500 GB external SATA previously in use. I think the PIII 650 server data will be transferred to the new SATA and that system shut down after 9 years of service without a single problem, that was my last system to never have or need a CPU cooling fan. Enough rambling for now.

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Speed_Gibson

In a bit of irony, now my other older system has decided to die (as in not even go to POST) just days after this lovely new Athlon dual core arrived.
Egads, might have to drag my old P4 1.5 Ghz northwood system out of retirement just to replace it. Hopefully I can fix it tomorrow.

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xepherys

Wow... this brings back some memories. I gave up keeping older equipment sheerly due to the cost to keep them powered up. Old power supplies @250W are a lot more pricey to keep running than newer 500W-700W supplies.

A northwood system? And it still works? Wow...

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Speed_Gibson

that is the big question now that should be answered tomorrow - it has not been powered up in 3-4 years at least. My other two computers are officially dead (as in not trying to replace the CPU or motherboard), and my other "options" are a 166 Mhz and 333 Mhz machine
hoping to avoid more debt by buying a new nice budget laptop, but that would be my first choice money aside.

this dual core 2.7 Ghz is screaming fast - very nice. EAC and Wavpack Frontend fly through CDs/wav files compared to the Athlon XP system.
I question Vista using 31% of 4 GB RAM just sitting there though.

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Wyodiver33

Speed_Gibson, from the research I've done, Vista and Windows 7 use a lot of memory "just sitting there." But both Os's release RAM as quickly as apps need it. My Windows 7, 64 bit, install uses one GB of my 2 GB just sitting there after a system boot. But when I'm running PS, several tabs in FF/Chrome, etc all at the same time I rarely go over 70% used. So it does seem to be the truth. XP for the most part just used what it absolutely needed. Can anybody else add to this?

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Lasereth

Vista and 7 have RAM taken up while idling, but the RAM is still being utilized to its fullest extend. Vista and 7 simply allocate the memory differently so it looks like it's being wasted, when in reality it's simply being used to "prep" your PC for anything that may happen. In the end there is no negative consequence. When Vista first came out people didn't understand this and it got a bad rep for no reason.

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Wyodiver33

Thanks, Lasereth. I should have been a bit more clear about the FUD that Vista introduced when it came to memory management. To be honest, I fell for it, too, soon after Vista was launched. It was probably one of the main reasons I skipped Vista.

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Martian

Regarding your Linux questions:

The window manager is entirely personal preference. The one that works best is the one you like. I prefer Gnome myself, but that should not be taken as gospel.

There are slight differences in terms of applications available, but each has an analogue with the others.

As for distro, which one is 'best' depends a lot on what you intend to do with the box. Ubuntu is a good noob distro, so if you don't have any *nix experience it's a good place to start. I found that a lot of Debian's quirks and bugs carried over, and ultimately ditched it in favour of Fedora/Mandriva for daily use, but that was just me -- lots of people use it as their primary OS with no issues whatsoever, and the community is much more new user-friendly than some of the distros out there.

Ubuntu ships with Gnome. If you want to use KDE, you'll want Kubuntu instead. It's the same thing, just with a different window manager. Same goes for Xubuntu and Xfce, if that's your bag.

One thing I will say for Ubuntu and Debian -- Synaptic is the slickest package manager that ever was. It makes managing your installed software a breeze, and is the first package manager I've seen that makes me think it may in fact be possible to run Linux without having to compile any code (and thus, not having to spend potentially hours tracking down obscure libraries to resolve dependencies).

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Speed_Gibson

That is what I figured, and was not definitely not a negative point about Vista for me. My only problem so far has been the somwhat flaky DVD burner which my research tells me was caused by the bad hard drive that shipped with this beastie. Tomorrow I get to use the recovery disk to reinstall Vista on the new drive they sent me.
Then I will be installing soundforge and other apps that will actually be using more of the ram. It sounds sacrilegious to me, but I am keeping the eye candy even after seeing how to restore the classic look I have always used before on win2k and XP. This is the biggest upgrade for me since the 286 10 Mhz -> 486 DX2 66 MHz, and it has plenty of power for the extra visual flair from what I see.

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Speed_Gibson

It actually works! I am using Firefox 0.8 on Knoppix 3.2 to post this. Just need to retrieve email from this 10 GB drive (old school drive from ITT Tech) then it can it completely retired.
I do believe my 40 GB and 120 GB wil go in this one and recieve a newer *nix option, video card, and two IDE DVD burners from the recently deceased systems.

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