Advanced System Building Guide

Alan writes "FiringSquad has up an Advanced System Building Guide, detailing how to construct your own rig. The first half deals with hardware selection and even esoteric concepts such as PCI slot placement. The second half is focused on Windows XP, and makes recommendations such as moving the swap file and scratch disk to a separate partition." From the article: "You laugh at the so-called expertise of Best Buy's GeekSquad, and are the one doing the teaching when calling technical support. If this sounds like you, you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."

Comments

You builder, you.

[Anonymous Coward]

If this sounds like you, you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."

If this sounds like you then you have almost reached nirvana. Soon, you will learn the advanced knowledge of how to call Dell.

Re:You builder, you.

[mkw87]

What about the fact that he refers to it as a "rig"

I am by far a geek, but I am also a technical person and when I hear the term rig I automatically think of a truck or drilling machine. Maybe this is because I have worked in the oil fields on an actual rig....but calling a computer a "rig" is strange.

I guess thats what you get when hicks get into the technical world a bit too much.

Re:You builder, you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google "killer rig" and you'll see that it is a perfectly crumulent word for describing a pc.

Re:You builder, you.

[LurkerXXX]

"Rig" is used in a lot of places. All the electrophysiolgists I know call their lab equipment their 'rig'. Listen to people who sail, you will find they talk a god bit about their rigging.

From Websters:

n.
1. Nautical. The arrangement of masts, spars, and sails on a sailing vessel.
2. Special equipment or gear used for a particular purpose.

3.
a. A truck or tractor.
b. A tractor-trailer.
c. A vehicle with one or more horses harnessed to it.
4. The special apparatus used for drilling oil wells.
5. Western U.S. See saddle.
6. Informal. A costume or an outfit: wore an outlandish rig to the office.
7. Fishing tackle.

I think in this case they are using definition #2.

Re:You builder, you.

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

I've actually heard it more than once. It seems to be a term in the BYO/gaming crowd (which I cheerfully count myself amongst)

Re:You builder, you.

[mkw87]

I wasnt saying I had never heard it nor that I didnt understand, its simply that I am from 'the country' and even though I am more fond of computers than I am my own 'hickness', it seems real strange to me to hear a pc called a rig.

Take the article with a grain of salt

[winkydink]

You should always have a dedicated partition for your temp files and swap file. It's tempting to actually put this on a separate physical drive to reduce the wear and tear on the main drive, but the disadvantage is that upgrading to a larger hard drive a more involved process.

Reduce wear and tear? Really? I've heard many reasons why one should do this (improving perfmance & reducing fragmentations which he mentions later), but reducing wear and tear?

Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience, the system is overall much snappier with the page file on a seperate physical drive. Even with 1 GB of RAM, my XP machine at home feels like it's doing less "thinking" and more ... well, "doing". Wear and tear have nothing to do with it.

And no, I'm not going to switch to Linux before anyone suggests it. Modern Linux distros make a modern machine feel like a 3-year-old machine.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[pg110404]

Reduce wear and tear?

I agree. To avoid wear and tear, it's better to have the swap file on a separate harddrive whose main task is that alone (perhaps a drive for periodic archival?). That would also give the extra performance.

If you need the extra performance by moving the swap, moving it to a separate partition will just slow everything down because the head has to move further on the platter to get there. If it's interspersed among your data, the chances it needs to hunt for the right track is that much reduced because it's already pretty close to being there already. If you're not actively using more virtual memory than physical ram, where the swap space is doesn't do a whole lot of difference because you're not doing a whole lot of swapping.

A dedicated drive gives the speed AND longevity.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, there is some lack of reading comprehension here.

The article talked about using a separate *PARTITION* to reduce wear and tear.

It's nonsense.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Not_Wiggins]

I created a separate partition for my xp install at home. But (and this depends on how much physical memory you have), I did it to reduce fragmentation and so I could format the partition as FAT32.

FAT32 is not as space efficient as NTFS for larger partitions (and you're way limited, but it allows drive sizes large enough for most user's memory space), but it works faster as there's not the same overhead as NTFS. Having it on a separate drive will also improve performance (much like having SWAP on a separate drive under linux), but I wouldn't say is a requisite for most "advanced computer people."

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you are the one with the lack of reading comprehension. The article says you can put the swap on a seperate partition, but it is tempting to put it on another hard drive to save wear and tear.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[poot_rootbeer]

Yes, the extra ten minutes you need to spend going through config dialogs every time you upgrade to a larger hard drive (and how often does one do that? About once a year? Once every two years?) is more than enough justification to subject your system drive to more "wear and tear" every day.

Disappointed. I assumed an article on "advanced" system building would include a lot more work with a soldering iron and tin snips.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[caino59]

Reduce wear and tear on your hard drive: load the system up with RAM and turn the swap file off.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Tumbleweed]

You want a _reliable_ machine, the #1 piece of advice I'd give is this:

Don't skimp on the power supply and memory! Get a _Good_ PSU (PC Power & Cooling has served me _very_ well), and life is much nicer.

Cheap out on either of these things, and you're asking for a lot of headaches that can show up as just about any symptom you can imagine.

A good quality online ('smart') UPS is also a good idea.

Most reliability problems I've seen can be traced back to bad power or bad memory.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[WarPresident]

Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.

www.newegg.com

Asus mainboard, stick o' Corsair RAM, cheapest Athlon XP (Barton core) left, Antec Sonata case, cheap FX5500 graphics card, check weekend ads for 80-250 GB hard drive deal, mouse and keyboard. You should sneak in under $500. Add another $300 for the 19" LCD.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[pg110404]

Yes, the extra ten minutes you need to spend going through config dialogs every time you upgrade to a larger hard drive

Oh, and don't forget that the guy said 'you COULD put swap and temp on a separate drive, but the upgrade is a nightmare, so just stick to putting it on a separate partition', but if all you're putting on it is swap and temp files that is next to useless on reboot, how is this a nightmare, I wonder?

About as useless as tits on a wet rooster.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[mrjackson2000]

The Ars System Guide gives 3 levels of systems, all built with resonably good hardware

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Martin Blank]

The speed differences between the two are almost nil on current drives. The larger the drive, generally speaking, the better NTFS does in comparison to FAT32. However, the performance difference is usually so tiny that you have to measure it with benchmarking software to see a tiny difference, and then you're just getting pedantic. By going with FAT32, you lose out on security, robustness, and access speeds as fragmentation increases.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[WarPresident]

If you need the extra performance by moving the swap, moving it to a separate partition will just slow everything down because the head has to move further on the platter to get there. If it's interspersed among your data, the chances it needs to hunt for the right track is that much reduced because it's already pretty close to being there already.

What you really want to do is have that physical partition in the middle of the drive, reducing the distance that the RW head travels from data areas to swap, thus reducing latency. Yes, a separate hard drive is better.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[winkydink]

I can buy one from a mfg with a warranty for that kind of money, but thanks for the pointer!

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[BaudKarma]

Let me just jump in with a boring hardware question.

I've got 1.5 gig of RAM, and two 160 gig SATA drives set up with RAID 0. Right now all my swap files and stuff are on the RAID array, but I *could* drop a 120 gig IDE drive in there and move the temp files to it. Would that speed things up, slow things down, or should I not worry about it and get a life?

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

"Would that speed things up, slow things down, or should I not worry about it and get a life?"

Yes.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[pg110404]

Would that speed things up, slow things down, or should I not worry about it and get a life?

Like tim allen on home improvement always says, 'more power, grunt grunt'.

Or you could always get a life.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Procyon101]

Depends on the speed of the IDE drive... This discussion is missing the point that Temp and Swap should also be on a very fast drive. If the IDE is a slow drive and/or slow bus you're definately better getting a life.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[cheekyboy]

Windows VM is crud, if you have 2gig ram, it still pags out firefox and what not, just to have 'spare ram' available for the justincase scenario, which is stupid ass really.

I wonder if its just better to setup a .5gig ram disk and use that for windows since you cannot turn VM off, (unless you use XP-embedded and enable all modules then its like a real xp-sp1 box)

Windows needs a smarted adaptive VM, maybe dynamic VM per app, so you can say give Photoshop 20gig of VM while the rest of the OS uses no VM at all.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[spektr]

This discussion is missing the point that Temp and Swap should also be on a very fast drive.

My /tmp is in RAM, and if the computer has to swap heavily, it is slow as hell - no matter whether it swaps to a slow or a fast hard drive. The difference between RAM and hd is many, many mangnitudes; the difference between the fastest and the slowest hard drive is a factor of perhaps 2 or 3. So it really doesn't matter. (Well, it may matter if you're using an OS that swaps all the time without purpose, like Windows...)

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[gekkotron]

For an inexpensive box, Sharky Extreme does a decent job with their Value PC Guides.
$1000 isn't super-cheap, but it's a good guide to start with.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Procyon101]

I agree that eliminating swap is the best option... but when you ARE swapping is IMHO when that extra 2 or 3 factor matters most. I'd rather have my main drive 1/2 the speed than my swap because during normal operation I experience very little annoyance at drive speed... but during swap, even a 15% increase in speed is very welcome.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[glesga_kiss]

PC Power & Cooling has served me _very_ well

I second that. Heat is a huge killer of electronics and dropping the temp by 5 degrees can make some hardware last much longer than it might have. Especially drives, they always seem to be the first to go, moving parts are also much more prone to failure. When manufacturers want to give their manufactured PCs a good test, they put them in headed cupboards and monitor the temperatures while giving the system a workout. Only a very small sample of the devices manufactured get tested this way though, it's very time consuming and labour intensive.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[hatless]

If you want optimal performance, shouldn't swap and scratch space be on different physical drives entirely?

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Sporkinum]

How about running them not in RAID0? RAID means redundant array of inexpensive disks? Level 0 has no redundancy. You get a slight increase in speed, a larger single partition, and about twice the chance of losing all your data.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you'll be buying a dog of a mainboard chipset with a celery processor (or low-end P4 that's still a dog compared to the XP) and a slooow integrated video chipset and a louder case that you can't shove anything other than a video card and a spare HD into. And judging from the number of dead Dells around this place, you'll wish you had paid another $150 for the 3 year warranty. Cheap, reliable and decent performance, build it yourself. Cheap and pretty, buy it from Dell.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Carnildo]

Swap and temp are the only two good uses for RAID 0. For anything else, the increased risk of data loss outweighs the increased speed.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[op00to]

Do you *ACTUALLY* think that the partition layout has anything to do with actual bits of oxide on the platter? Seriously, now. When you 'partition' your disk, all you're doing is setting up a logical structure that the OS can interact with, it has absolutely nothing to do with the physical disk. The controller decides where to put bits on the disk, nothing else.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[ThrobbingGristle]

So... swap is critical to the functioning of a machine... and you want to stripe that with no redundancy? So... you really have no idea what you're talking about do you? When either one of the drives in question die, you're dead period.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Carnildo]

If your RAID 0 goes and all that's on there is swap, you just reboot and you're ready to go again -- but without being able to use virtual memory until you replace the bad drive.

If your RAID 0 goes, and you've got all your data on there, you'd better hope you've been making backups frequently -- otherwise, you've just lost everything, and the only way to get it back is to spend a few thousand on data recovery.

Which would you pick?

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to get a good rundown on building a reliable machine with good bang for your buck, go looking for tutorials on building a digital audio workstation. Strip out the expensive 10-channel audio card recommendations, drop one or two slots down the CPU speed and RAM size ladders and you'll have yourself an ideal guide.

My suggestion?

* AMD CPUs, not for fanboy reasons but just because they're great value and they make cooling a wee bit easier.

* Get the best power supply and RAM you can afford, they make a big difference for stability.

* Don't buy a crappy motherboard, they're not expensive in the scheme of things and it's well worth getting one that has 90% of the features you need onboard as long as it is decent.

* Don't worry about the "name-brand" cases that people will try to sell you, but don't buy trash either. An example - Casetek make cases that are basically unbranded Thermaltakes without all the plastic case-mod crap and little LED readouts all over them for about half the price. You can get a tool-less case with drive rails, 90-degree-rotated drive bays, room for seven fans and six HDDs and so forth for a fair bit less than you'd pay for one of the budget Antec cases - which are missing most of those features.

* I still like CRTs for price-performance unless I intend moving the machine regularly, a 19" CRT of reasonable quality (say, a Samsung SyncMaster 957DF) is still cheaper than a 17" LCD of any kind of decent pedigree. They're bastard heavy though. ... then it's just a matter of running all your parts inside their rated specifications. Make sure your temperatures are OK, get a good airflow going over disks, CPU and any hot AGP cards and set the BIOS settings to the best available settings that your gear is rated for. That means no overclocking, but you did say that you wanted reliable... Overclockers may champion their ultra reliable machines at 1.5x rated speed, but equally you're likely to have to pay extra to get memory and so forth that's rated to run above typical DDR/DDR2 speeds and so on and so forth. Plus it's time consuming, what with the whole increment-stresstest-repeat-fail-decrement routine taking several days to complete if you do it gradually and with respectable stress tests. And if you miss a problem or develop weird behavior later it can be a major pain in the backside.

I'd also suggest that after you build the machine you Prime95 and test-suite the crap out of it until you're sure everything is functioning perfectly and there's no errors creeping in anywhere.

That's my approach, anyway. There's a load of extra audio-related crap that I do, but I doubt you'd care about it (stuff like keeping audio data and OS on separate drives, using SATA drives where possible, making sure the SATA controller on the motherboard doesn't share a PCI channel with the audio card... that sort of thing).

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[ffsnjb]

Where did you learn that you can't turn off VM in Windows? I haven't used VM in Windows past the first reboot after an install since 98SE, when I finally had enough RAM in the desktop to drop swap. Both my desktop (p2-400 with 640 MB RAM) and my laptop (athlon64 3700 with 2 GB of RAM) are running swap free under XP SP2. The 12 FreeBSD machines I have around the house run swap free also. VM is absolutely unnecessary if my one rule of system building is followed: When building a machine, install the maximum amount of RAM the board will accept, any less is unacceptable.

Please go click a few dialog boxes before spreading FUD.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

They're old. Not updated monthly like they used to be.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[cojsl]

The front page of anandtech.com has their most recent budget system component guide, and extremetech.com does these articles regularly. As someone who does end user support and builds machines for a living, I find little to fault in their guides. Hope that helps!

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many apps that require swap even if you have 20GB of RAM. They will see you don't have any swap and simply refuse to work and there is no way around it short of creating a swap file on a RAM drive or patching the software with SoftIce (do you know assembly, didn't think so).

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a poor craftsman that doesn't know how to use their tools properly.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[ThrobbingGristle]

I wouldn't put anything on RAID0 except for maybe a "scratch" partition. Not even /tmp is worth trusting to something like RAID0. Are you sure you people know what you're doing? No sane sysadmin would EVER put swap on a RAID0 system. I mean do what you want with your personal workstation but swap on RAID0 is insane, there really isn't anything to argue about here!

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[lq_x_pl]

Buy one from the mfg and you have little/no choice regarding power supply, mobo, brand of memory, etc etc. Building a decent box is rarely cheaper than buying some craptastic bundle from emachines or dell.
Building one's own box is more or less for the hobbyist or control freak (like myself) that cares about such things.
Sure, I could pick up a $600 bundle that comes with a flatpanel monitor and a pile of software (most of which is useless), but I'd also severly limit the future upgrade options if I did that - I hate changing out power supplies and mobos, just get it done right the first time around.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[aztracker1]

Me, I tend to favor equipment on newegg that has a good review base... odds are if a MB has 5 stars and over a hundred reviews, it's a good board... if there are
Also, would suggest buying last-generation (still fast, but not insanely expensive) hardware.. a P4@3ghz instead of the new P4 5xx/6xx series as an example.

Generally if you compare pricing you see a break away point where prices skyrocket, and the performance gains don't really justify it...

just a few examples I try to follow.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[kyojin the clown]

guess what genius? it's for a GAMING PC. not a webserver. people reading this article aren't running off to install Oracle databases on RAID 0 arrays. they are installing Halflife 2 and chirping with excitement because it loads 9/16ths of a second faster than it used to.

might be pointless, but to be honest, most overclockers are barely interested in the game if they are honest, its more about fine-tuning the system to the nth degree, which can be good fun if you like that sort of thing.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[astro-g]

Photoshop has its own 'scratch file'
I dont know about the program itself, but the dataset that its working on wont hit system swap, It goes into photoshops scratch file.

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[bdsesq]

Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.

Take a gander at Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-2 00411.ars/

Re:Take the article with a grain of salt

[Carnildo]

Along those lines, I wouldn't put RAID 0 on a server of any sort.

GeekSquad?

[yetdog]

They actually call themselves that? Come on - like any retail store paying their clerks $7 an hour is going to have top notch techies there.

People are stupid. That's how these businesses stay afloat.

Re:GeekSquad?

[pianoman113]

I'm told GeekSquad makes more in the $15/hr range.

Re:GeekSquad?

[boingyzain]

I actually worked in Best Buy out here when I was 16 years old and they started the "BAY TECHNICIANS" at $7/hr. It was sad... Then the geek squad came in. Man, I have never seen so much advertising for a crew that works on computers. I did not join the Geek Squad because I didn't want to wear a uniform that rivals Burger King... But the customer line speaks for itself, and everyone in that line wasn't happy. I started dropping off my card to people telling them to call me if they wanted a better deal. Well.. Best Buy is a big company and they sure can sell a product. Too bad that they cant sell the service too.

Re:GeekSquad?

[arkanes]

They actually do. A big poster at a Best Buy advertising this: "We put our pants on one leg a time, just like anyone else... but ours are polyester". There were others with similiarly transparent attempts at creating "geek cred".

Re:GeekSquad?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently heard an employee at Best Buy use the term "Geek Squad." The irony was overwhelming, so I had to ask.

Turns out that "Geek Squad" was a small company in some middle-sized town (Columbus, maybe.) They were competing with Best Buy. So Best Buy did what corporate giants always do. (No, they didn't study the competition and analyze it's strengths. Funny suggestion, though.) Of course, they just bought them out.

And, to add insult to table salt (or whatever), they decided that the one part of the company they would actually use would be the name.

Re:GeekSquad?

[Menotti M]

I started dropping off my card to people telling them to call me if they wanted a better deal.

Dropped your card off to people while you were in Best Buy? If I saw that, I woulda gladly asked you to leave our store. Just because you don't think we are qualified to work on machines (most of us are), doesn't give you the right to solicit in our store. We get plenty of people like you who talk the talk and, yes, it sucks that big business is taking over a normally small business market in personal consultation, but live with it and don't bothor me while I'm working.

Re:GeekSquad?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm told GeekSquad makes more in the $15/hr range.

$15? Why are they paying that much? Best Buy could hire a slew of Green Card holders for the original $7/ hour.

Re:GeekSquad?

[SynapseLapse]

Just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota as a matter of fact.
A co-worker of mine used to work for them.
Best Buy purchased Geek Sqaud a few years back, (Although, if you ask any of the original Geek Squad crew, they formed a "Strategic Business alliance) and they still run independent of Best Buy which is the main reason their competent. At least, here in the twin cities they're still really good. I can't speak for the rest of the country...

Re:GeekSquad?

[Shalda]

Geek Squad started in Minneapolis. You'd see the old cars around town from time to time. (this was before they started using VW beetles) They had a pretty good reputation for providing fast on site tech support. They also tended to keep things like RAM and spare hard drives on hand (in their little cars) so that they could actually come on site and fix your system in one trip. I never used them, but they were supposed to be pretty solid. They were successful, so they started branching out into other cities. Then Best Buy, also from around here, did what they do best: merchandising. And now you can pay way too much for cheap crap with the GeekSquad logo on it. Huzzah.

Re:GeekSquad?

[Martin Blank]

I've done similar things in Fry's, but I'm polite enough to not do it in front of store people. I also only do it when the person is so absolutely frustrated with Fry's people that they're about ready to kill (about once every third visit). It pays for an occasional new game.

Re:GeekSquad?

[SuperQ]

Even funnier is I'm from Minneapolis where the geek squad started.. When I droped out of school back in 98 I interviewed there. (long before they were part of best buy) They were not impressive back then either.

Re:GeekSquad?

[boingyzain]

Now none of the gripes in this comment are against you as a person, but they do define almost any GeekSquad member I've met.

You guys charge $100 to come out and most of your staff can't even fix a simple problem. The whole ambience thing is nice, with the beetles and all, but come on. I'm not looking for self-proclaimed geeks to come out and tell me that I need a reformat when all I needed to do was run a simple chkdsk/defrag. For people who have no idea about computers, they can't argue with you, and so they listen to you... at their peril.

Now, I'm not saying YOU aren't knowledgable. For all I know, you could be a rare gem in GeekSquad. But, from what I have seen while I worked at BestBuy and from what my family and friends have told me from their experiences, GeekSquad knows just about as much as your average salesperson: not much.

Re:GeekSquad?

[CloudyPrison]

I'm an Agent at a local Best Buy. While I can say it's not my dream job, I do enjoy the pay for the relatively simple work that has to be done. Unfortunately there are many agents who don't know what the hell they are talking about, which is a shame, considering we are the highest paid idiots underneath managers. Gotta love stupid people. :)

Re:GeekSquad?

[DoubleAgent770]

Yes...I work for the Geek Squad. I am what we call a Double Agent which means I go out to folks' homes and help repair, upgrade and network their PC's. There are over 800 of us Nation-wide. I for one am A+ certified and working towards my MCSE. I build all my own PC's including Linux boxes. As a Double Agent I am an expert in removing spyware and viruses (by far our most frequent task), wired and wireless home networking and all other aspects of PC repair. All of our agents are excellent techs, they don't let you drive the Geekmobile if you're not. All Best Buy service techs, whether at the Precinct counter or back in the car audio installation bay are the highest paid associates (read non-managers) in the store and earn substantially more than $7 an hour. Our customers are not stupid. They simply are not techs. I've done work for doctors, lawyers, and college professors. They call us becuase we show up on time, fix their problems for a flat rate, and treat them with respect. We approach our job with a sense of humor. Our customers all get a kick out of our uniforms, Geek Mobiles and especially our badges. Incidently, our uniforms are modeled after the same chain-smoking NASA engineers from the 60's that shot monkeys into space ie ubergeeks.

Re:GeekSquad?

[stackdump]

Yes, geeksquad.
Untill I finish my BS in CS I get to drive a company car, use a company provided cellphone and sport a frickin badge (we are also BestBuy employees and get a discount).

Its Fun :)

Re:GeekSquad?

[AaronBrethorst]

Original Geek Squad crew? We all left 5 years ago.

Re:GeekSquad?

[randyest]

"their competent" what?
Hands? Brains? Something else?

Re:GeekSquad?

[Zebadias]

Are the uniforms really polyester? Wouldn't this cause all sorts of static problems?

Re:GeekSquad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf? I spent years getting following the geek squad throughout the twin cities cleaning up one mess after another of theirs. They were good, at least 7 years ago or so. They have survived on reputation far too long. Slipshod get em' out work is now their standard. I can't begin to tell you how many geeksquad systems I have had to unfuck. Geeksquad is one of the best advertisements out there for other outfits. One job with geeksquad can do wonders for sending business elsewhere.

Re:GeekSquad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uncle Jed, when I grow up I wanna be a Double Agent instead of a double naught spy. I like them purty uniforms. ;)

Jethro

Re:GeekSquad?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Hell, I'd just be happy if any normal salesperson could answer a technical question on what they sell at Best Buy.

Re:GeekSquad?

[DoubleAgent770]

The pants are polyester. I use a grounding strap when neccesary.

My 1337 system building tip!

[Otter]

Just because your case comes with 60 brass standoffs doesn't mean it's a good idea to use them all!

Re:My 1337 system building tip!

[stupidcomputers]

Actually it is best to use as many as you can when securing your motherboard to the case to improve electric grounding.

Re:My 1337 system building tip!

[Richard Dick Head]

And yes, that scratching sound coming from your case? Thats those 37 loose standoffs you fatfingered into the case shorting your lines over -12V and the address lines! Congratulations on 0wN1n6 your first box!

But, hey, at least you're well grounded. We just can't do without being first in line when the lighting strikes, right?

Re:My 1337 system building tip!

[Ahnteis]

Th4tz s0 l4m3!
I overcl0ck teh megahurts on my brass standoffs!!1

Re:My 1337 system building tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, it's so much cooler to grind down the brass standoffs to have a 'low rider' motherboard, because noone can put in add in cards w/out modding the mounting plates...

Re:My 1337 system building tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone tell me:
1: Why was parent modded "+2 funny"?
2: Why is it NOT a good idea to fasten the mobo with as many raisers as possible? (providing you don't put raisers where they don't match with the holes on the mobo)

Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this REALLY front page news? Must be a sloooow news day to have such a low-brow article grace the front page.

Re:Ugh

[Reignking]

You saw the mc chris article, right?

so sad

[notsoanonymouscoward]

He lost me at "I like Maxtor". Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. Either case... I'd pass a bestbuy job application his way.

Re:so sad

[cortana]

Can you provide any figures of relative failure rates between different manufacturers/model numbers of hard drives? My understanding was that, excepting certain infamous models (120 GXP "Death Star") made by IBM/Hitachi, all consumer-level hard drives have the same, small, failure rate.

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Maxtor and Seagate-branded HDDs are probably some of the most reliable you can get your hands on.

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong w/ Maxtor? I have had a hell of a lot better luck w/ their drives than any other manufacturer and I've been building PCs since the 486 days....

Re:so sad

[pianoman113]

I suspect that hdd brand choice could spark a small-scale religious war.

I've had great success with almost every brand out there (those that I've tried, have worked great), and I've seen spectacular failures with most of them.

Re:so sad

[superpulpsicle]

Do you actually mean the 75 instead of 120GXP? It's well known that the first generation of 75GB IBM/Hitachi had major issues. Is 120 really a problem too? I thought they fixed it.

Re:so sad

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

The really surrealistic thing is that i've had friends Maxtor hard drives die on them, yet i've never had any Maxtor hard drives die on me. (been building systems for myself, relatives, friends, various jobs for about 10 years now)

I've had Seagate and WD drives die on me but never Maxtor.

I think it's Maxtor trying to lull me into a false sense of security, the moment I start trusting Maxtor and putting their drives in everything *BAM* every single Maxtor hard disk i've ever bought will all simultaneously combust into flames.

Re:so sad

[scharkalvin]

Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. No matter which HD brand you recommend SOMEONE is going to tell you they had bad luck with them. I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor. I have had two go bad on me, one was due to overheating (4 disk drives stacked one next to each other in a tight case and not enough air flow). The middle drive would go south (seek errors up the wazoo). The other failure was a case of static zap. I should have grounded myself before yanking cables to swap drives around. First time I EVER had a hd stop working. COMPLETLY. The bios couldn't find it. Maxtor replaced the zapped drive by mail real quick. The other drive actually starting working again when I gave it some room to breath (removed the extra drives from the box and cut down on the heat).

BTW the CompUSA branded Maxtor drives just might be better made. And I've heard nothing but bad news about Segate and WD (and in the past IBM. Don't know if Hattachi has made things any better).

Re:so sad

[notsoanonymouscoward]

nope. nor is it my job to do so. i'm just stating an opinion, which you are free to validate, disagree with, or ignore. being more familiar with the maxtor RMA process than anyone else i know makes me feel capable of making such statements. every time i get suckered in by their lower prices, i have had to re-learn this lesson.

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

I must have got really lucky w/ my 75GXPs I've got a set of 2 of the 15 GB and 20GB DeathStars that have been running in RAID 0 for the past 3.5 years w/o a hicup (knock on wood).

Ironically, the only IBM drive I've had die in a home system was a 10KRPM U160 drive, after about a month and a half of serving as the system drive for my DC.

Re:so sad

[SquadBoy]

A lot of these things are impressions formed early on and never really change. And you are right nobody who goes on about them can ever really produce solid numbers. I've used Maxtors for years and never had a minutes trouble with one. OTOH don't get me started about Seagate. This is mostly due to the fact that I had 3 die on me in a row many years back. They were all bought within days of each other from the same store. The correct lesson is, of course, that batch sucked. The emotional lesson is that Seagate sucks. I've even talked to Maxtor haters who have never had a Maxtor fail but have just taken it as accepted knowledge that they suck. So yeah it is all pretty much just religion at this point.

Re:so sad

[uglyduckling]

You connected a harddrive up to your Dreamcast?

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Of about 15 Maxtor 60-80GB 5400rpm harddisks which friends of mine and myself had bought independently over a timeframe of a couple of months, none has survived longer than 4 years. Many failed catastrophically, losing complete access to entire surfaces or the whole device at once. I know that harddisks older than 3 years should be treated as completely unreliable, but 0 survivors out of 15 is a pretty weak track record. I still have a 6GB Seagate which sounds like a dentist drill but otherwise works without a hitch. My current bet is on Samsung. No failures yet, but then they're only about 2 years old by now.

Re:so sad

[Ironsides]

I've had Seagate and WD drives die on me but never Maxtor

In the past 15 years I've had 3 drives die on me. One was an old 80mb 10 years ago. Another was my 40GB maxtor that died last year after 4 years of continuos heavy usage and the third was a ten year old drive (that replaced the 80) that we just found out had died last week. I only know the manufacturer of the 40GB.

That is on my personal machines. I built a machine for my parents and decided to go with a Wester Digital (WD). It died the first day (no joke). Follwoed by the replacement on I exchanged it for. (That makes 2 different WDs.) After that, I decided to stick with Maxtor. My last computer I bought (and then heavily modified). It cam with Seagates and I have been happy with them so I am switching to them for the SATA drives I buy. Maxtor is good, Seagate is good. WD I no longer trust.

Re:so sad

[gstevens]

A friend of mine was pleasantly surprised when he had a Maxtor drive, that had been submerged in flood water for 3 days, spin up and work perfectly. Every other brand of disk that was submerged was dead, but all the Maxtors survived. So if you're planning to run your hard drive under water, I suspect Maxtor is a good choice...

The company I work for did a bunch of reliability testing on SCSI disks a few years ago. They would run the drives flat out for weeks on end in big RAID arrays. Seagates and Quantums held up about the best, IBMs didn't fair so well, and Fujitsus fell somewhere in the middle. That said, I've heard terrible things about Seagate IDE drives...

Every hard drive manufacturer seems to go through spurts of good drives and bad. WDs were great for awhile (pre 1 GB days), got real unreliable (click of death), and now are pretty decent again. Same can probably said for different brands at different times. Hard drives have moving parts, and all moving parts eventually fail. RAID 1 is cheap and hard drives are huge, so save yourself some pain and just install a RAID 1 wherever you would ordinarily use a single disk.

Re:so sad

[sporty]

As an anecdote, I had a 300 meg maxtor a looong time ago, back in the days of DOS. I had a large tower under my desk, as I had a stack of drives. If I turned around the wrong way, I'd give the machine a good knock. The maxtor drives would panic and they would shut down. Makes sense, but was amusing to be at a DOS prompt and then finding my discs have "failed."

Re:so sad

[Ryvar]

I have 8 machines at my house, and the parts for another 3 lying around. I always have at least one system in some stage of being rebuilt lying around. I've been doing this since I was 16 and I consider Maxtor at least the equal of Western Digital and Seagate. Out of the twelve or so Maxtor drives I've bought over the years, one of those failed in less than three years. I have one that's been working for six years now with no data loss whatsoever. Out of five Western Digital drives, two failed prior to three years. As the guy says in the guide - maybe I just build my systems better (making sure airflow keeps the drives cool), but I have had far better luck with Maxtor than Western Digital.

Re:so sad

[badasscat]

No matter which HD brand you recommend SOMEONE is going to tell you they had bad luck with them. I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor.

Ditto. I've got two Maxtors running right now with no problems whatsoever - neither even gets warm to the touch, and they are both inaudible to boot.

Like you, I have had one go bad on me in the past, but then I've also had two WD's and a Seagate go bad on me, and know numerous people who've had IBM's, Samsungs, and other drives go bad too. It's sort of a badge of honor to have a drive go bad - you're not a real geek if it hasn't happened to you yet. But it really doesn't matter who makes the drive; their failure rates are pretty similar (with a few notable and notorious exceptions - the IBM DeathStar drives, for example, though these were simply defective).

I don't think anybody who saw my house, with its four networked PC's, two of which are scratch-built (one of which is technically 15 years old!), one of which is controlling all my media viewing, would question my geek credentials, and I've got no problem with Maxtor at all. It's almost like a form of nerd prejudice if you really think one drive maker is significantly worse than any other - it can't be based on anything real.

Re:so sad

[nickname225]

I'm with you - I have a stack of bad Maxtor drive that I won't even return - they'll just send me more crappy drives. I'm on to WD now - and they've been pretty good.

Re:so sad

[Dan667]

I work in a factory with dirty power. We had maxtors in our machines and they popped like popcorn. They were replaced with other brands, not sure which, but maxtor got a bad rep here when the new drives have not had the same problem even with the constant voltage spikes.

Re:so sad

[H8X55]

or domain controller?

Re:so sad

[curunir]

Hard Drives are like types of hard liquor. Everyone has at least one that they had a horrible experience with and now avoid like the plague.

Seriously, given that hard drives are one the most common computer failures, most serious computer users will experience them eventually. And given the consequences (data loss), users don't easily forget that it happened. The result is that almost everyone has their trusted brand of hard drive. Also, chances are that if you were to post your preference for your trusted brand, you'd get 20+ responses from people who've had a nightmarish experience with your favorite brand.

Re:so sad

[tehcrazybob]

I've used Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate for years and never had a problem. However, I'm in the middle of an RMA on a Toshiba drive for my laptop (it was a generic computer, bought with nothing preinstalled, and it ran Debian. The drive came with it, else I would have bought a WD). The drive failed spectacularly when it was only 8 months old. Toshiba quotes a 10-30 day turnaround time for RMAs, but today is the 28th business day since the drive was delivered to them, and still hasn't shown up. Getting the drive replaced in advance would have been a $350 deposit.

A bit of time on Google shows that this is typical of Toshiba hard drives. Given this and my past experience, it seems to me that no matter which big brand (WD, Maxtor, Seagate) you prefer, you will be getting an extremely reliable drive as compared to some of the other brands

Re:so sad

[pipplo]

I have a Maxtor 10Gb that I have had for around 6-8 years now. It's been in use by me for years, and hten when I upgraded became my hard drive I let friends use when theirs crashed so that they could function until they got new hard drives. This thing has traveled from system to system, and been formatted and installed on so many times it's unbelievable.. and this thing is still working strong...

My quantum 40gb died in less than a year...

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

1. I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor.

So have I. Only a couple bad drives (hardware failure) and no design defects.

OTOH, I can tell you exactly when I soured on Western Digital (disable DMA), and IBM (a few years before they left the server hd business). Toshiba has been OK, hittachi in laptops are OK, Quantum (old) was always good for me. Currently, Samsung seem like they get my vote overall, though I have no problem using Maxtor's larger form factor drives.

Re:so sad

[cens0r]

It was the 75. I RMA'd the disk twice (30GB)... finally pulled it out of my system a few months ago and recently decided to turn it into a removable drive. I started the format, and it died again.

Re:so sad

[rweller]

I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor.

I haven't :P

I've had very good luck with the WD 8Mb cache range...only recently i have i encounted a duff one (even then there was strong vibrations which isnt normal of the rest of the disk's i have had - i suspect bearings).

Seagate has been ok.

here's my tip - keep the drives cool, make sure they get airflow helps a lot!!

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at the Reliability Survey on http://storagereview.com/

Re:so sad

[Mitsoid]

I have to agree...

I've never seen major failures from a hard drive... Other then a RAID array dying, and one blowing from -maybe- a bad storm (back in like, 1992--and it was WD)...

Maxtor, WD, Seagate... All seem fine to me.. I have two maxtor EIDE drives, and two Seagate ATA drives in my system now.. All seem to run perfectly... and the Maxtor drives I've 'recycled' from up to 5 years ago for this particular machine...

*shrug* I just check benchmarks & price before I buy em, and I've never had issues with the drives I've ended up with... I still have a ~8GB Maxtor drive in a machine I gave to a family member, still running fine.. it's at least 8 or 9 years old...

And by the same token, have a 400MB WD drive lying around that worked too (last time I checked)

I don't see how people could blow so many HDD's... I leave my computer on 24/7, and used to game 50+ hours a week.. No hard drive failures? Are people 'fixing' their own computers with mallets to the side of the case--right next to the HDD's?

Re:so sad

[tardlet]

I have a feeling that most hard drive manufacturers develop a bad reputation like this by producing a conecutive batch of faulty drives. Even though its a small number in the grand scheme of their total manufacturing output, it tends to leave a large impression of the consumer. Nothing is more fun than buying a faulty drive, taking it back to the store for a replacement and having the replacement be faulty as well. Unfortunately, this is something that generally happens with all drive and electronics manufacturers.

Personally, I've had to deal with a bad batch of drives from Maxtor. Out of 800 identical model computers at my workplace with Maxtor drives, we've had over 40 drives die within a year. After replacing them under warranty, we haven't had any problems since. Does this mean that Maxtor makes bad drives? No. It just means a bad batch went out. Like I said, its happened to every drive manufacturer at some point.

My $0.02

Re:so sad

[gregmac]

I've had very good luck with the WD 8Mb cache range

Same here. It's all I've been buying for the last year or so. I have around a dozen in remote monitoring systems, 8 in servers in the office, and probably over half the systems in the office, plus I've used tons of them (not 8 meg) with other older systems (In fact, I just booted a 3gb WD the other day, still working). I've only had one WD go bad on me.

By contrast, I've had 4 or 5 Maxtors die, and I haven't used nearly as many.

Re:so sad

[rikkards]

I also agree. I have 2 Maxtor 120G SATA drives and haven't had a problem with them. The only thing is that they are a bit loud when doing seeks and the software to quiet them down only works on IDE drives.

Re:so sad

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"He lost me at "I like Maxtor". Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. Either case... I'd pass a bestbuy job application his way."

I've owned WD, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and Hitachi/IBM drives. The only drive to ever go bad on me was my IBM 75GXP "Deathstar".

I currently run a DiamnondMax 10 SATA 300GB drive. It's quiet, fast, and has been reliable so far.

The MTBF of HDDs is actually pretty poor. It doesn't vary too much by manufacturer, either. It's not surprising that everyone has their own hated-brand of HDD.

If you need reliability, get RAID. My disk is filled with recorded TV, so I'm not too concerned about a failure.

Re:so sad

[gl4ss]

there's some actual statistics about hd death rates though.

but personally, i've had the best luck with seagates. got one that's from 96 and been running pretty much every day since it was bought.

worst luck i've had with maxtors - and same goes for people i know.

Re:so sad

[drew]

while i don't remember ever having a maxtor drive go bad on me, i still doubt i would ever buy another one. from my personal experience, i'd agree that there isn't one brand of drive that is more or less reliable than any other (except maybe western digital on the bad side, but that may be just margin of error)

however, there are a lot of other factors to consider when buying hard drives. the last few maxtors i bought all sounded like shaking a can full of nails when they were seeking. lately, i only buy seagate drives. they seem to be at least as reliable as anything else out there, if not more so, and they are by far the quietest drives on the market.

Re:so sad

[rpozz]

Maxtor, Seagate or Western Digital all seem to have similar reliability. It usually is specific to the model/batch. A massive mistake people make (as mentioned in the article) is not cooling their hard drives properly.

I have a total of 4 WD drives (don't ask), all are actively cooled, and I haven't had a single problem yet (and that includes read errors from dmesg).

Re:so sad

[danheskett]

I handled inventory and tracking for a large set of equipment, including hard drives.

Of about 12,500 hard drives, here was the break down:

Maxtor - about 3000
Segate - about 3000
WD - about 6000
Other - about 500

So Maxtor represented about 25% of all hard drives. The drives had about equal usage, and about equal capacities, and were of about the same vintage (we're not talking MFM drives vs. SATA). About ~40GB, all made within about 18 months of each other, all deployed and used at around the same 12 month time frame.

Maxtor represented 75% of all drive failures. Far, far above the appropriate number. WD was second. Segate third.

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

He lost me at "I like Maxtor". Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. Either case... I'd pass a bestbuy job application his way.

Actually, Maxtors are pretty much the only hard drives that will work with the Playstation2 (old models, not the recent slimline version), meaning they are the only ones that will fit in the PS2's drive bay. Maxtors are also the hard drives used in the majority of TiVo/DVRs too. Just for the record...

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long.

Or he's been lucky, or he has a magic touch that simply results in not many drive failures. In my case, my main server machine has 4 Maxtor drives (purchased retail at CompUSA) that have been running continuously for over 4 years, without a failure. They are very well heatsinked and vented, though. I keep waiting for one to fail so that my choice of RAID5 over RAID0 will be justified, but the day just doesn't come.

(You hear me, Eris? I taunt you. I dare you!)

Now it may be that I also wouldn't have had a failure with non-Maxtors also, so my experience may be "clipped" due to the good care these drives get. But sheesh, it's not they're overtly bad drives. They're sure as hell a lot more reliable than ANYTHING (even expensive SCSI drives) that I used in the early/mid 1990s.

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the course of the last twelve years, I've had numerous hard drives.

I started with a 250 meg Western digital. That lasted me about a year, before the bearings went.

Next was a 500 meg western digital. Lasted two months. RMA'd for a 600 meg (no more 500 megs in stock). Lasted about a year. Warranty expired, no RMA.

Bought a Maxtor 1.6 gig. Actively used for four years. Still works (I think), but I traded up for a 6.2 gig Western Digital in '99 (You'd think I'd learn, but it was cheap). Lasted about a year before it started to make grinding noises. I was able to recover some of the data, but I lost all my porn (I'll never buy another WD again!). I stuck the 1.6 gig back in until I could buy a replacement (with my porn collection gone, 1.6 gig was all I needed).

Bought a whole new computer in '00. Went for a Seagate 40 gig @5400 rpm, because they're quiet. This drive is still in my computer, set up for my swap, recovery, hibernate and temp files. I've got a nice new Seagate 120 gig in there now as my primary drive.

I've put seagates and maxtors in all the computers I've built for family and friends. They've not had any problems with them.

Re:so sad

[mlrtime]

Hard Drives are like types of hard liquor. Everyone has at least one that they had a horrible experience with and now avoid like the plague.

That is a great analogy... Damn you Goldschlager!!!!

Re:so sad

[cortana]

Precicely! Someone who gets it. :)

For other readers of this thread, I will now present Sam's amazing guide to having reliable hard disks.

1. Secure the drive with four screws, two on each side.
2. Ensure your drives are adequatly cooled.
3. Install SMART monitoring software, and obey the following mantra.

When the software says the drive is too old, replace it. When the software says the drive is about to fail, swap it out and RMA it[0]. When the software predicts a failure in the future, plan[1] to replace it.

[0] If you don't have a replacement ready then run, don't walk, to the hardware store to buy one.

[1] The size of your margin of safety should be proportional to the value of the data on the drive, and quality of your backups.

Re:so sad

[Anonymous Coward]

I've built at least a hundred machines over the years, worked in a few shops, and obviously have a lot of friends who have built PCs also.

I got serious around the 386 days, and have used many brands of hard drives.

I would always, always to this day recommend Maxtor.

Maybe it's just my experience, but western digital always crapped out on me. Right now, I could dig up probably around 10 of them that just shit on themselves over the years.

I've had Maxtor's fail, but at least they would spin up and the data was recoverable. Western Digitals always seemed to just halt. That was the end of it. Very sad stuff.

Re:so sad

[jridley]

I've had better luck with Maxtor than others. The machine I'm on now has a stack of 4 160's crammed right against each other. They're so hot you can't hold one for more than 5 seconds. They've been running fine 24/7 for 2+ years. I've got another half dozen 40's, 80's, 120's and 160s in various machines, all Maxtor, some running for 4+ years. I've used nothing but Maxtor for about 6 years, and I've had one failure; a 40G in a Linux box 2 years ago; it started giving SMART warnings, so I copied the data off it and chucked it in the trash.

I don't buy Maxtor because of good luck, I buy whatever's cheap, because I just haven't had much trouble with hard drives. It just happens that "what's cheap" is usually Maxtor.

My theory: all consumer level drives are close to equal in failure rate. Some people will buy a drive or even two of a specific brand and have bad luck, and forever swear that brand is crap. Sometimes a manufacturer (ANY manufacturer) has a specific drive or series that's crap.

If you're buying consumer level drives, just run SMART monitoring and swap out the drive when it starts going. I've recommended this to many people, a few have done it, of those, two have had a drive start to fail and swapped it, they got all their data, none of the rest have had a failure.

Re:so sad

[aaronl]

I've had a bunch of old 1GB Seagates die on me (Seagrate was nickname). I've had a *lot* of WD drives between 4GB and 60GB die.

I've had Maxtor's give me trouble with errors, but they were overheating. Better airflow fixed the problem. One of my acquaintances had trouble with a pile of 250GB Maxtors drives: heat related. He had them completely die on him though... spindles siezed.

Never had anything else die without good reason. Some newer Seagate SCSI drives died after four years of 24/7 operation, but that's expected.

Maxtor: Good luck, but they run hot and this can cause failures if you don't compensate

WD: Used to be wonderful, up to around 1.2GB. Then they got very unreliable. Seem to be fine now.

Quantum: Same as WD, but only to around 500MB.

Connor: Seemed fine, haven't seen one since 486's.

Seagate: Old drives were junk (I'm talking largely XT systems and 1GB IDE drives), new drives are great.

Fujitsu: Fine

Hitachi: Fine

IBM: Real IBM drives were good, Hitachi produced were good, WD produced were junk.

Micropolis: Haven't seen one of these in a very long time, but they were fine when I did.

Various other vendors: Crap in my experience. Especially this one Indian vendor that made single platter drives in 1/3" chassis (I can't remember the name). Had failed sectors on each one of them inside a month.

Re:so sad

[kesuki]

Jeez, WD used to be pretty bad, but in the 80+GB range I haven't had a problem with them. In fact the only 80gig drives I've had any issues with were IBM drives. and those weren't even my 80 gig ibm drives ;) get over the 1-10 GB era people, EVERY 1-10GB drive had serious reliabilty issues, because drives couldn't detect bad sectors automatically and rewrite the date in 'clean' off partition sectors, things chage, hardware companies change... reliabilty varies by model, always research the model number before buying a super cheap drive off an online e-tailer.

Re:so sad

[Steffan]

I have *eight* Maxtor 160GB drives in a RAID5 array. If the drives were that bad, I would have had problems. Statistically, one is more likely to encounter a drive failure when there are more of them that could fail at any given time.

Mind you, I'm using these by *choice*. I also use the Cheetah 15K for non-bulk storage. They both have their uses, but I've found it difficult to beat the Maxtors for cost and reliability.

Re:so sad

[slittle]

I don't suppose you know any Linux software that does the prediction (T.E.C.) thing? smartctl doesn't seem to. I've only seen Windows utils do that.

Re:so sad

[Skuld-Chan]

I've had a bunch of maxtors running on a 3ware controller (in raid 5) for the last 2 years straight and I've only ever had one fail. They replaced it right away and thats honestly the only problems I've ever had with a maxtor disk drive.

I've had people who say seagate sucks, or western digital sucks too. I've had good luck with those however as well.

The only drives I've actually seen that are consistantly having problems anymore were IBM drives and they sold all that off to Hitachi.

Re:so sad

[dink353]

I have had about five WD drives, and have had two die on me, but they were replaced within days. My problem was also crummy air flow in the case (plus I in one of my smarter moments put the case near the heater.) But the moral of the story is that WD has treated me great with their 5,600 and 7,200 RPM models (IDE & SATA.) I agree that almost any HD company have a little cheering and booing crowd for them, but I have found WD to be good drives. It has been Segate for me that have failed up the ying-yang

Re:so sad

[blackicye]

Honestly I've not had many problems with Maxtor or Western Digital harddrives.

IBM/Hitachi has had by far the highest failure rate of any brand of harddrives I've employed in my builds, and Quantum used to be a regular nightmare as well.

Seagate though to a much lesser extent, has had a fair number of drives fail on me in the past.

I have not dared test the reliability of Samsung harddisks yet.

Re:so sad

[cortana]

Not yet. :( I looked into doing it myself a few months ago, but I don't really know enough about stats to make an accurate prediction.

Re:so sad

[Xerp]

I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor. I have had two go bad on me

I've had fairly GOOD luck with my marriages, I have had two go bad on me. ;)

But seriously, I'd also never advice buying a Maxtor drive. Put it this way, the last 5 drives to fail on me were Maxtors. One was a serial ATA Maxtor drive and was only 4 months old! I get the fear when I see Maxtor drives now as I know they have such a limited lifespan. Popcorn anyone? The problem is that we buy a lot of Dell equipment, and so don't get to chose HDD manufacturer.

On the flipside I've got some old Fujitsu drives that have been running in production for over 5 years now.

Remember - you get what you pay for. Maxtor are "aggressively priced" for a reason...

Re:so sad

[evilviper]

The result is that almost everyone has their trusted brand of hard drive.

Not me, I distrust them all.

But one thing you can't argue with, is that Seagate has (by far) the longest warranty of any drive maker. They're worth the slightly higher price for that alone, not to mention noise, reliability, etc.

Re:so sad

[yyttrrre]

I'm not a fan of Western Digital ever since I last dealt with their RMA department. The drive was well within what should have been a 3 year warrenty period. They told me the hard drive I was trying to RMA was out of region (think DVD regioning). They said drives meant for sale in hong kong or elesewhere for cheaper were sometimes bought and resold in the US. When asked how I would figure out if a drive was out of region before buying it I was told to check the serial numbers in the store and then call them to confirm. Not an option all the time. So basically they are screwing customers by managing to charge higher prices and not honoring warrentys.

Speedy Delivery.

[Anonymous Coward]

Move your swap file to it's own SCSI disk (small one)

Re:oxyidiot?

[winkydink]

Did you even read the article? The author actually "explains" his choice... playing games and better color management.

He should read his How-to.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if he had built a more advanced system, it would have been able to handle the Slashdotting.

Two posts and he's toast. Next article please.

Boring

[bigbadbob0]

Next week on slashdot: "How to get a cooler screensaver."

Re:Boring

[DrEldarion]

Step 1: Disable pop-up blocker.
Step 2: Click.

Re:Boring

[xNoLaNx]

Step 3: Profit Well, profit for whoever's webpage you're on.

Re:Boring

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, thats easy, I just open these .scr files I keep getting in the email!

Re:Boring

[Anonymous Coward]

Next week on slashdot: "How to get a cooler screensaver."

So that means, in two weeks, Slashdot will give us the following story: "Google invents a cooler screensaver!"

Re:Boring

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and then you find out they actually mean "desktop background image" and don't know that it's not the same thing.

Re:Boring

[halleluja]

Slashdot unveils solution to mystery of prophecy: run yesterday's headlines

Pci slots?

[iwearnosox]

Professional tip: I try to line my PCI slots up with the case, the cards work better that way.

Boring

[Necrotica]

"...you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."
The next level isn't very good on details, but full of personal opinions put forth by the author. I wouldn't call that the next level whatsoever. I'd call his article "Things you may want to consider when building a machine." YAWN.

Yes, reducing

[2names]

wear and tear. Each time the machine has to swap or write temp files, the physical moving parts of the hard drive experience wear.

If you can reduce the amount of this wear on your OS and data drives by placing swap and temp on a physically seperate drive, you may prevent major data loss.

I would think this would be obvious, but I guess not.

Re:Yes, reducing

[winkydink]

Insignificant in the MTBF calculation. Ask a hw engineer. The rotational assembley that spins the platters (the speed of which is constant) is by far the biggest failure mechanism.

Re:Yes, reducing

[ashmedai]

I hang out over at StorageReview, and a while ago there was a post where someone did so. The feedback amounted to that:

1. Concentrated seeks from pagefiles etc do not negatively impact the hard drive's life span because the head does not ever come in physical contact with the disk, and in fact
2. Concentrated reads/writes actually increase the hard drive's reliability because it remagnetizes that region every time it is written to.

Re:Yes, reducing

[Some_Llama]

"If you can reduce the amount of this wear on your OS and data drives by placing swap and temp on a physically seperate drive, you may prevent major data loss."

OR if you buy a gig of ram or more you won't even need a swap partition.

I have 1 gig in my current rig and completely turned off the swap partition, in the last year of usage with heavy multitasking i haven't even needed it.

With Ram prices as low as they are currently your just better off going with 1-2 gigs of ram rather than waste disk space or buying a second disk...

Re:Yes, reducing

[Taladar]

Your second point is bullshit. If you constantly write a sector, let us say it is the page-file/partition you probably won't need access to this data after several months of not touching it which is about the only situation where remagnetization helps.

Re:Yes, reducing

[RapmasterT]

sure, you could reduce wear and tear on your OS drive by splitting the data out across as many drives as you can stick in there.

However, due to the realities of MTBF, every drive you add increases your chances of a catastrophic failure. If you don't have a real performance reason for adding spindles, more drives is just more points of failure.

Re:Yes, reducing

[glesga_kiss]

The rotational assembley that spins the platters (the speed of which is constant) is by far the biggest failure mechanism.

Not that you can do anything about that anyway. On any OS, there are enough services and daemons to make sure that the drive NEVER powers down. I haven't seen a drive do that on anything other than a laptop in years, don't know why I bother enabling it on desktops.

Besides, the best reason IMHO to have two drives for the OS is fragmentation, or lack of.

One thing I have wondered, and perhaps someone can answer me; what effects does the data placement have? Say you have a 10G drive, 1G swap, 1G /tmp and the rest as root. (this works for windows as well). Would having things in different places e.g. root | tmp | swap be any different from say swap | root | tmp?

I'd always thought that the seek time was the bottleneck in any armature based data storage. However, with multiplatters I'm not so sure if this matters so much. That depends how the data is striped onto the platters, and if the arms move indepentantly. I know nothing about working drives, having only disassembled a dead one! I'd pay for a clear one just to see how the little bugger worked!

Re:Yes, reducing

[Anonymous Coward]

Say you have a 10G drive, 1G swap, 1G /tmp and the rest as root. (this works for windows as well). Would having things in different places e.g. root | tmp | swap be any different from say swap | root | tmp?

Yes, it matters, though it may be hard to measure.

Most drives these days use soft-sectoring: that is, the outer tracks (which are physically longer) contain more sectors than the inner tracks. But the drive spins at a constant rotational speed. Thus, the transfer rate of the outer tracks is higher than that of the inner tracks. You'd ideally want more-often accessed stuff stored there.

The physically outer tracks/cylinders are lower-numbered ones, and the number "grows inward" toward the hub. Thus, the stuff stored near the "beginning" of the disk, is the stuff that has the fastest transfer rate.

BTW, with Linux, I think the idea of a /tmp partitition is started to become dated, thanks to tmpfs and 64-bit hardware becoming more common. On your next box, you might want to look into having your /tmp just be stored in virtual memory.

Re:Yes, reducing

[budgenator]

We used to partion drive so the swap was in the middle, the next two most likely to be used next to the swap, and unlikely to be used on the outside. I don't think you can do that now as cylinders have so little to do with physical location on the platters now-a-days.

Shit now a disk drives has a bigger ram buffer cache than the machines we used to do that with have. the rule of thumb was 4 Mb for linux, 4 Mb for X Windows and 4Mb for each user; now we just slap in a half gig and call it good enough.

I did see a site where the guy ripped apart old hard disks and hooked them up to his stereo so the platters would spin and the heads twitch back and forth to the beat of the music. interesting thing to do to those old sub-Gigabyte drives in every computer geek's junk drawer!

Re:Yes, reducing

[aaronl]

On modern systems it's not really an issue. Drives seek fast enough for it not to be noticable, and have sufficient memory to rarely need swap.

It used to be enough of an issue that in OS/2's HPFS all the FS structures were located in the middle of the partition to speed up access. It was a discernable gain in performance.

Re:Yes, reducing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ask me (a hw engineer at a hard drive company) it isn't the spindle motor. The motors are very robust, much more so than the fragile head and disk. It's the degradation of the head and/or disk (through particles, head/disk contact, or one of many other factors), which is usually gets proportionally worse with heat. Put those fans over the hdd and they will last much longer.

Re:Yes, reducing

[Random Chaos]

Wear and tear...well...actually speed of access is the real issue. If you HD is being accessed enough for it to be a wear and tear issue you probably don't have enough ram.

Now, for speed of accces I actually split my swap file between two 2ndary drives :)

Of course my setup is also a hodpodge of addons of drive after drive after drive :) - and I do have a seperate programs and data partition...using virtual links to other drives that NTFS allows. But thats all due to running out of room and not wanting yet another drive to install stuff on! :)

here's a tip

[Anonymous Coward]

"Take off you clothes... The static generated by that much clothing could power a small city." -L337 M4S73R L4RG0

Re:here's a tip

[notsoanonymouscoward]

yeah seriously, there was no mention of static damage. i thought it was going to start w/ l33t people build systems n4k3d.

Re:here's a tip

[temojen]

1337 people build systems while wearing polarfleece and standing in sockfeet on carpet, petting a cat, and still don't have static damage.

Re:oxyidiot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well call it a Gaming Color-Managed System Building Guide then.

Re:oxyidiot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct; it should be running Win2K to avoid giving BillG the keys to your, well, keyboard.

Err... how is this news again?

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

I have to say, an advanced tweaking guide isn't really news at this point - if you want it, you go google it. (Or microsoft it, on msdn, liek l33t winhax0rze should) This seems more like a plug for someone's website to me.

GeekSquad

[Anonymous Coward]

The BB GeekSquad has got to be the most ignorant and clueless bunch of retards I've ever talked to. I always end up unteaching the Intel FUD that has been crammed down their throats.

Me: "Actually, the Athlon 64 IS faster, because it does more per clock ..."
Retard: "But ... the P4 has a faster megahertz."

Re:GeekSquad

[moberry]

I currently work for the geek squad in my Best Buy, we have mostly idiots back there, but a few of us (including me) know what we are doing. But it does get really old when 99% of customers have adware and their internet doesnt work. So I get tired of talking to people in general.

Note: I recomment AMD over intel every day. and 99% of the customers tell me I am wrong because intel has higher clock speeds.

Re:GeekSquad

[mboverload]

can you email me at mboverload_at_gmail.com? I'd really like to ask a few questions about your job. A friend is considering it and wants to know more.

so sad-Slam Dancing.

[Anonymous Coward]

"He lost me at "I like Maxtor". Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long."

Most brands are one year. So complaining about one particular brand doesn't mean much. Now the Seagates are longer, but you pay more (naturally).

TFA

[gammygator]

I actually read it. Read like a primer for an A+ test. I kept thinking "It's Mini-Minassi".

Um... swap file?

[artifex2004]

Shouldn't you have enough RAM to disable swap entirely? No more fragmentation worries, and you're just a bit more secure, too. I don't run anything big, so I get by with a single GB.

Re:Um... swap file?

[stratjakt]

Not possible for many of us. My system can't support enough RAM for some of the DB stuff I'll do. I had a 7 gig swap file last week as my poor box choked through 25 gigs of data.

What I want are 5-10 gig or larger "drives" that are made up of cheaper 66mhz SDRAM modules, yet have an IDE/SATA/SCSI/(Whatever) interface, and use one of those for swap.

Do they exist? If not, why not?

Re:Um... swap file?

[Enigma_Man]

I don't have the details handy, but running a swap, even if RAM is bountiful and plenty is always a good idea. It's something to the effect of the system really likes seeing the swap there, even if you technically don't need it.

-Jesse

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a stupid idea.

Next you'll tell us that some ships are unsinkable and don't need lifeboats...

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

My drive is 5% OS and 95% swap. Then I made a huge RAMDISK to store my files. I haven't looked back.

Re:Um... swap file?

[modecx]

What I want are 5-10 gig or larger "drives" that are made up of cheaper 66mhz SDRAM modules, yet have an IDE/SATA/SCSI/(Whatever) interface, and use one of those for swap.

Indeed, they do have such things. I'm not sure about the exact size of them, because last time I saw one, it was probably ten years ago.. At which time they had 2GB of storage, a 2GB SCSI disk and a battery backup--In case the power went out, the drive's controller would dump the contents of memory into the mechanical drive.
The whole thing cost like 5 grand, and took two 5 1/4' drive bays. Of course, the performance was amazing.

I know there's Flash based solid state drives today, but they suffer all of the shortcomings of flash (they wear out, and they're not super fast on writing)... Anyway...

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Swap to flash. Great idea. Not.

Re:Um... swap file?

[SScorpio]

I've need seen or heard of an actual one made up of placing actually SIMMS or DIMMS, but what you are wishing for are called solid state hard drives.

I did a quite Google of the term and got http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_35_ide.php.

I also found a dicussion on Sharky's forums from back in 2001 about this very issue. I doubt we'll ever see one, but you never know what those crazy people in Hong Kong will hack out next.

Re:Um... swap file?

[badasscat]

I don't have the details handy, but running a swap, even if RAM is bountiful and plenty is always a good idea. It's something to the effect of the system really likes seeing the swap there, even if you technically don't need it.

It's more that it's good to have it there just in case, because you never know when you will need it (even with 2GB, you can multi-task yourself straight to hell if you're doing image editing, watching videos, and running crap in the background all at the same time), and it doesn't hurt anything to have it enabled. If your system doesn't need it, it just won't use it, so no use disabling it. But that one day when you run out of RAM in a very bad way because you've disabled your swap file could kill you (or at least your data), depending on what you're doing. Windows PC's do not like it when they run out of memory without expecting to.

There's something of a myth that some people believe in that Windows is constantly accessing your swap file even with loads of RAM, and that turning the swap off will force Windows to use your RAM. Well, a) Windows XP is pretty good with memory management, and doesn't use swap when it doesn't have to, and b) even if it did use swap too much, turning it off isn't going to "teach" the OS to use memory properly. It either needs the swap file or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, what do you have to lose by leaving it on?

Re:Um... swap file?

[lakeland]

Yeah, they exist, but they're f'ing expensive. Unless you're using windows or you're so rich that having proper solid state is worth paying an 50% markup for, you are much better putting more ram into your computer. Windows is to dumb to properly cache the data so you have to go with a drive, but for anything else...

Just get an A64 using a decent tyan MB and you should be able to get 64GB no trouble. The comp I was using yesterday (IBM PPC) had 16GB using just stock components (2GB * 8), which would've made it a fair bit cheaper.

Re:Um... swap file?

[stratjakt]

No, those are flash based, and will wear out like all flash stuff, and are slow throughput-wise, like all flash based stuff.

Ie; an external USB2 HDD is more than likely faster than any USB2 thumbdrive.

I actually boot my router box from a compact flash to IDE adapter, it's great for a read-only setup like that, and the box has no moving parts to wear out.

What I want is a compu-global-hyper-mega-swapfile, that is compatable with my token ring lan configuration.

Re:Um... swap file?

[Total_Wimp]

If your system doesn't need it, it just won't use it, so no use disabling it.

Not true. Windows will page regardless of your available memory. Check your task manager and add up the damage. If you're like me you have plenty of RAM to hold the paged data, yet it's still paged.

But that one day when you run out of RAM in a very bad way because you've disabled your swap file could kill you (or at least your data), depending on what you're doing. Windows PC's do not like it when they run out of memory without expecting to.

Ok, but what if you have a two gig page file and then add two gigs of memory and remove the page file? It's all just bits; if you have enough space to store them then you have enough space to store them.

TW

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a system with 1GB of ram, which is plenty for everything I do (mostly gaming and coding). I don't use a swap file under WinXP since it is noticeably slower than using only physical ram. If I turn the swap file on restoring minimised windows and using the start menu have noticable delays even tho my system is only supposedly using ~300MB of ram.

Well, a) Windows XP is pretty good with memory management, and doesn't use swap when it doesn't have to, and b) even if it did use swap too much, turning it off isn't going to "teach" the OS to use memory properly. It either needs the swap file or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, what do you have to lose by leaving it on?

By default Windows XP will place as much memory as possible for any minimised application into swap. Don't believe me? Load up task manager and add the Mem usage column, this shows actual physical ram being used. Now load up a ram hogging program and minimise/unminimise it - see how the Mem usage drops when you minimise it and comes back up with the window is restored, thats windows paging the apps memory to swap file even tho it doesn't actually need to. Windows of course then makes the memory available to other apps and as soon as something overwrites it, to restore the minimised app requires disk thrashing swap reading and noticable delays with a system that has 70% of its memory still available.

Linux may do this the proper way I, I haven't tested it since I don't use a swap file with linux either because its not required for any of the linux boxes I have setup or run (all for home use nothing real serious).

As long as there is enough physical memory for everything required of the system, I cannot see how its possible for a swap file to make a system run faster.

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are a few:

• 1MFUA12 is a ~90GB solid state drive
• cheaper 1MFUA48 at ~2GB

Re:Um... swap file?

[captwheeler]

What I want is a compu-global-hyper-mega-swapfile, that is compatable with my token ring lan configuration.

The network is your swap file.

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

7 GB swap file? I was under the impression that sizing your ram + swap larger than 4GB was a waste, at least on a 32 bit architecture...

Re:Um... swap file?

[Reziac]

Windows itself doesn't care. I have the swapfile turned off on boxes with more RAM than they ever actually need, and it does help performance especially with WinME (which is terrible about getting bogged down in the swapfile).

What I do find bitch and whine about it are mainly Photoshop plugins, and graphics apps that do wireframe 3D. They'll "report a memory full condition" because they never look at actual available RAM, only at available swap space.

Side note: on my Win95 box, the most RAM I've ever seen it use under heavy multitasking is about 165mb. On my Win98, ME, and XP boxes, running the exact same apps, doing similar tasks, uses up to 450mb. Sure goes to show how much more overhead there is...

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, google unfortunatley isn't marketing their all DRAM based solution, perhaps because they have a hard time getting vendors to print enough DRAM for their own useage. But in the mean time, you can get a an opteron system, each CPU can regulate 8GB of DRAM per on chip controller, and can collectivly address (in the 8-way chips, which requires a 4u rackmount to actually mount the board and backplane for all 8 cpus) 128GB of RAM. you'll need 32 - 2GB memory modules, 8 8-way opterons, and the only 8-way opteron board on the market that can actually be found on the shelf (well by special order really) which is a modified 4-way board with backplane. As previously mentioned you'll need 4u of available rackspace,
your total expendurature will be around $8,000 for the DRAM, $6,000-$7,000 for the opteron Cpus and another $4,000 for the board/rackmount enclosure and redundant power supplies. But it's worth it to have the the only system that can perform a trillion DB operations a minute on a 128GB DB right? And btw if your DB is under 16GB, you can get a 2-way opteron system, for only $4,000-$6,000 depending on configuration. Note: this is only hardware pricing, DB software prices are not included. Oh yeah, ECC modules will roughly double the cost of said systems, but I believe opterons can control non-ECC modules nowadays, so who cares right you're not going to place this next to a nuclear reactor that's emmiting a few extra rads are you ;)

Re:Um... swap file?

[evilviper]

What I want are 5-10 gig or larger "drives" that are made up of cheaper 66mhz SDRAM modules, yet have an IDE/SATA/SCSI/(Whatever) interface, and use one of those for swap.

I never thought I'd see the day when a /.er actually got modded-up for the idea of putting their swapfile on a ramdisk...

If you need more RAM, buy it. We have 64-bit x86 systems now, so they can handle as much as you might need. Old PC-133 DIMMs are only nominally cheaper than DDR RAM, and even the newest motherboards can accept the oldest and slowest DDR DIMMs.

My system can't support enough RAM for some of the DB stuff I'll do.

So you want to spend obscene ammounts of money on a hardware hack to get 10GBs of RAM (at much, much slower access speeds), rather than spending $300 to upgrade your mobo and proc?

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you either tried fitting 32GB RAM in a standard motherboard???

You often have to fork out a 100k figure to support that kind of ram. Its a lot cheaper to get as he suggested as it means you dont have to go all out on a high end server.

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... since swap is not limited to a 32bit addressing sceme, then yes, it is perfectly possible to have ram+swap far larger than 4 gig. Think of it as a level 4 cache.

And in fact, they do make pure ram IDE drivers, if you can afford it. Yes, it'll speed the fucking hell out of your system if you are using that much memory...

Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

Putting a PC system together is fucking easy. And I'm sick of the "Xtreme l337 d00dz0rz" who spout off about the little LCD temp display in their Corsair RAM modules like they're some kind of gods of Comp. Sci.

It's easy. Build your own, I do, it's fun, and cheaper in the long run. But for fuck sakes, stop bragging about it.

Also, anyone who puts their "specs" in their sig line on any forum is a complete knob. Especially the ones who go on to list nonsense shit like "Vantec 80mm exhaust fan" or "OCZ Xtreme RAM coolers" or "Zalman Copper Northbridge Cooler".

If you don't know who I'm talking about, it's probably you.

Re:Here's what I think

[Anonymous Coward]

damn I wish I had my mod poins from yesterday.

Re:Here's what I think

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is you actually know the product names.

Re:Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

/. keeps posting links to reviews of them.

Actually, vantec makes nice quiet fans, and zalman makes nice quiet coolers, and I use their stuff, because I like a nice quiet room. I just dont list them in my sig because I'm so frigging proud that I installed an aftermarket cooler that everyone needs to know about it.

The ram coolers with integrated LCDs are pure dickheadery, though.

Also, overclocking is something you do when you don't understand software. I know there's more FPS to be found by hacking/tweaking the Catalyst drivers than by overclocking my Radeon card.

Re:Here's what I think

[recursiv]

Hey, I think I have that northbridge cooler. Though I've never mentioned it in a sig. I actually only have it because the fan that was there started making the most horrendous noise.

Actually I was laughing out loud (when's the last time you saw that spelled out) reading your comment.

Re:Here's what I think

[OneOver137]

These are the same cool-guys with "2.2 L VTEC Sooper Duper Turbo Racer" stickers plastered all over their cars. Most of these guys couldn't tell a liter from a gallon, and think torque is just low RPM horsepower.

Re:Here's what I think

[Richard Dick Head]

And I'm sick of the "Xtreme l337 d00dz0rz" who spout off about the little LCD temp display in their Corsair RAM modules like they're some kind of gods of Comp. Sci.

Seriously!

If "bling", as the TFA's author put it, is part of your purchasing decisions, you're a tool! Have a nice day!

Plus, if you read the second page, this tool talks about using a second partition for swap file, and Internet Explorer cache. C'mon, if you're still using IE, you just don't admit these things in pubic! Not to mention, you can set up a static swap space, and not have to bother with the separate partition for that.

So, yes TFAA is a blowhard who is preaching the choir to sleep about common sense hardware layout, and some crap about 'shaft 'blows XP that any seasoned computer user would do without thinking about it. :D

Re:Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

Heh, I have it too, that's how I know it's name. I bought it for the same reason as you, and I don't run around bragging about it either.

It's a friggin 2 dollar piece of aluminum that took me about 45 seconds to install.

But I can now OVeERClocK 4 moRe Mhz and get 103 More FPSes in Doom 3!!!!!1!!! w000t!

Re:Here's what I think

[schapman]

I always put my system specs in my sig on hardware forums (a basic one at least) and I do it for good reason. It lets everyone know what I'm using if I'm asking questions, and that I have experience with certain things when answering theirs. I will however, agree with you on the people who list every last litte detail.

Re:Here's what I think

[SynapseLapse]

You know what I think? Preach it brother! My thoughts exactly! Although, it's mildly amusing to put your sig as: 386sx/16mhz 2mb of ram Fujitsu 80mb hd Win3.11 etc...

Re:Here's what I think

[Evro]

I praise you as the lord of the internet.

The thing with putting your PC's specs in your .sig line on a random forum really hit home. I give guys who tweak their cars a lot more cred than douchebags who think they're cool because they have the latest ThermalTake or whatever-the-fuck heat sink. You can almost go buy random parts on newegg and build a better PC than these hunks of shit, and for 1/10th the price. Putting a PC together is like 20 times easier than putting together a set of Legos. The only part that's even time consuming is putting the shit in the case and installing the OS.

Some closing statements:

• Nobody gives a shit about your PC specs.
• On the off chance someone does care, they don't care about the brand of your ram.
• The 99.9999% of people who don't give a shit find your 32-line sig detailing your magnum opus retarded.

Re:Here's what I think

[recursiv]

Haha.

Lucky you. It took me a good hour to get the original fan out, since I had to remove the motherboard to do it. Actually, that was the first time, when I tried to fix the fan. The second time, I cut it out with a scissors, at minor risk to my motherboard.

Good ol' Abit NF7.

Re:Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

Well, that's why I specified the ones who do it on any and all forums they participate in.

I was on a forum about bearded dragons trying to find out some info on some problems my lizard was having, and idiots there were listing "AMD 2500 OC'ed to 2550, Corsair XMS Mega Super Ultra RAM, etc.."

You can't even get just a regular PC case these days. They all look like, well, all purple and demon heads and stuff.. They look like gay, if gay was a solid object.

I just want a beige box with lots of free drive bays, damnit. I don't need a special mount for a multicolor-LED 120mm fan, or built in temperature monitors, or front panel LCD, or a big window cut in the shape of some lame video game logo.

Re:Here's what I think

[That's Unpossible!]

Also, anyone who puts their "specs" in their sig line on any forum is a complete knob.

Yeah, and what is with these morons in forums that respond with a single line of content, and then its followed by an 800x400 animated gif of their favorite lead singer rocking out?

More importantly, wtf is wrong with the moderators of these forums that they would allow this kind of nonsense?

Re:Here's what I think

[schapman]

well.. for basic, i went with the antec sonata. its cheap ($130 CAD), black (nice glossy finish on the case), nice built in power supply (truepower 380), and yes it has the 120mm fan spots but they do make it noticeably quieter.

Re:Here's what I think

[micromoog]

The only part that's even time consuming is putting the shit in the case and installing the OS.

Isn't that the entire process?

Re:Here's what I think

[Saeger]

Lian Li PC-60 midtower w/o power supply.

Best case I've used, and I've had a few. It's aluminum, not beige, but the selling point is the easily removable motherboard "plate" and drive cages and the filtered front intake fans to cool the drives. The blue power LED is a little annoying, but it's nothing a piece of tape can't mask.

Re:Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

That's not cheap. I bought a black box at Comp USA with a bunch of open drive bays, a 420 watt power supply, for 20 bucks.

It has no fans outside of the PSU (nor does it need them), and is even more noticably quieter than your name brand case.

Re:Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

Not enough drive bays in the PC-60 for my liking. I like a full tower with room for 8 or more 3.5" drives. I only put the motherboard in once, so the removable plate is no selling point to me.

Lian-Li do make nice cases though, if I were to make a machine to sit in someones living room, where it's to be seen, I'd probably go that route.

The prices are a bit ridiculous for a case, with no PSU.

Re:Here's what I think

[Anonymous Coward]

haha $20? And even if most of it was for the PSU you are still left with a $15 420 watt powersupply. I am sure it gives really good quality power for your machine and will last for years and years...

Re:Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

If you spent any time learning a bit about electronics, you'd realize that there's nothing in a PSU that warrants a $100+ price tag. A couple transformers, a couple voltage regulators, some diodes and capacitors to smooth the line voltages somewhat.

But you go ahead and pay extra for 2A on the +VSB line, or extra amperage on the -5V line (which was only used in ISA bus signalling).

Pretty much everything drinks off the +12V line these days anyways, if it's strong, you're OK.

Sorry to break it to you, you payed for the logo, chump.

Commercial arcade cabinet PSU's run 20-30 bucks. The electonics in many modern cabs are just as sensitive, if not moreso, than in your average PC. What makes you think that your PC needs some special magical brand of +12V and +5V?

Nah, spend it on a decent UPS that feeds a constant 110-120V into the PSU, and there's no reason any of it's line levels should fluctuate.

Besides, everything is backed up and under warranty, and I don't expect it to last more than 3 years anyways. I haven't had a problem yet. And since anectodes mean ever-so-much to slashbots, I've seen $150 antec PSU's go up in smoke.

Re:Here's what I think

[rpozz]

Actually, I reckon the total reverse is better. Underclock the sucker. Take for example a Gainward Golden Sample graphics card, and leave it at its default clock speed. That means that you end up with:

1) A graphics card which has more-than-sufficient cooling.
2) A GPU which is one fuck of a lot more stable because it's running below (instead of over) the frequency it's capable of.

A stable system is a hell of a lot better than one that gets an extra 3fps in Doom 3.

Re:Here's what I think

[glesga_kiss]

Sure, $100 is silly, but $15 is also too low. My cheap-ass PSU is running at 12.9V acording to the software diag tool. You want one that has good regulation and is stable. I'm thinking of replacing it and I'd was going to spend about $30 on it, or maybe go for one that has been designed to be quiet for up to $50-60.

Re:Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

You can take the cheap ones back just like the expensive ones, 12.9 is too far out, it's defective.

I could see paying more for one that runs quiet, or even one of those ones with pluggable cables, so you don't have a bundle of crap you dont need (P4 hookups for an AMD rig, or vice versa). But there's not a lot inside of a PSU to get excited about.

Antec and the rest resort to the same gimmicks as the other xtreme gear makers to sell $100 dollar units: blue LED fans, windows, things that blink and beep..

Re:Here's what I think

[stratjakt]

Yeah, but mobo and vidcard makers cater to the "xtreme" market.

I'd love to be able to clock my 3.06 P4 down to, say, 2.4 or so, and go with a completely fanless rig. But, nope, I can pick FSB speeds from 133 up to 200.

I wonder how much of a market there is for PC DIY types, who aren't complete morons?

Re:Here's what I think

[jridley]

Thanks for saying that.
If building a machine didn't involve soldering surface mount ICs and/or writing device drivers for a peripheral you wired up, then don't say you're "advanced".

This guy is as much an "advanced" system builder as some kid who buys some wheel rims and a stupid looking spoiler for his celica is an "advanced" car builder.

Re:Here's what I think

[FuturePastNow]

This is what you're thinking of. Fourteen drive bays. If money were no obstacle, this is what I would use, but I've almost built whole new computers for what it costs.

Re:Here's what I think

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, if you read the second page, this tool talks about using a second partition for swap file, and Internet Explorer cache. C'mon, if you're still using IE, you just don't admit these things in pubic!

Inter what explorer?

Re:Here's what I think

[Anonymous Coward]

And they probably have a 1.6L D series engine to boot (rather than the H22A turbo they claim to have) at least that has been my experience with the Rice Boy crowd.

Re:Here's what I think

[rpozz]

I wonder how much of a market there is for PC DIY types, who aren't complete morons?

The same market that there is for people who run small computer shops. It's kind of a gradual thing - you can get expensive, but tasteful and functional cases like this, or.. there are cases like this or this. I don't think there's anything wrong with making a computer look attractive, but when people start using cases that look like robots or whatever, and that daft RAM with flashing lights on it, it gets a bit stupid.

Re:Here's what I think

[number]

i don't think you'd be able to run that 2.4 ghz p4 fanless, you're still putting out 45 watts or so of heat where most passively-cooled rigs can only support a max of ~20 watts from the cpu.

you might want to try reading the silentpcreview.com forums some time - many people there share your views and are extremely knowledgable and capable when it comes to noise-related computer questions. from the parts you listed (vantec "stealth", ick!) you could have a much quieter rig on your hands. and don't knock the led fans too much - the most popular quiet fan at the moment, the yate loon d12sm-12, was only available in blue led form for some time.

Re:Here's what I think

[Anonymous Coward]

10 bucks says stratjakt blabbers on about a car which he has modded and tuned, same thing for the diff hobby.

get a life, quit whining, ur shit stinks as well

Re:Here's what I think

[Brewdles]

Bonus points to the idiot I saw with a VTEC sticker on an RX7...

Re:Here's what I think

[glesga_kiss]

You can take the cheap ones back just like the expensive ones, 12.9 is too far out, it's defective.

Yeah, it was a while before I noticed it and it's not worth the hastle to be honest given it's value. The box sounds like an aircraft taking off, so a silent one holds potential. However, there are also GFX and CPU fans to consider, plus drive noise, so I can see myself going down an expensive route!

blue LED fans

Apparently that colour of blue is very acceptible to men for some reason, studies have shown this. HiFi makers have been using that trick for years. Here in the UK it was popular to put an LED on your car bonnet/hood where the washer-sprayer nonzles should go. Looks ridiculous!

Re:Here's what I think

[Anonymous Coward]

"Putting a PC system together is fucking easy"

No. After a recent horror experience i have decided to never again build my own comp. I'll have a store build it for me instead. It's much cheaper and much less time consuming.

"Build your own, I do, it's fun, and cheaper in the long run."

No, it's NOT fun. And it's DEFINITELY not cheaper in the long run.

If i made a list of hardware i've installed that somehow malfunctioned on me when running for the first time i'd probably exceed slashdot's post-length limit.

An excellent example is when i just recently bougth a mobo from an internet store. The thing wouldn't work, so i had a local comp technician look at it and he couldn't get it to work either. Nor did he see anything wrong with how it was mounted or anything. I returned it, got a new mobo, same error. So i bought a new PSU (was reccomended that by some people), still wouldn't boot up. Sent it for checking at a computer store and they couldn't get it to run either. Now i'm waiting for my third replacement, which, when i get it i'll have the store mount it for me.

"Also, anyone who puts their "specs" in their sig line on any forum is a complete knob. Especially the ones who go on to list nonsense shit like "Vantec 80mm exhaust fan" or "OCZ Xtreme RAM coolers" or "Zalman Copper Northbridge Cooler"."

Can't debate THAT, though. Atleast the last part :P

Re:Here's what I think

[moonbender]

The Viper has got to be the most hideous PC case ever released to mass market. What on Earth were they thinking? I wonder if it sold well.

What the heck is this supposed to mean?

[TheStick]

If you're playing games, you're running Windows XP. Linux is great for specialized tasks such as number-crunching or programming, or miscellaneous work, but as bad as Windows XP's color management is, it's still better than Linux.

Re:What the heck is this supposed to mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

It means if your job depends on color accuracy, get a Mac and not a Windows or Linux based PC.

Re:What the heck is this supposed to mean?

[stratjakt]

Yeah, what's wrong with XP's color management exactly?

And how is Linux better at "number-crunching", if you have the same CPU. If anything, VStudio will spew out more optimal code than GCC will, since it wasn't designed for every architecture under the sun.

And what does "Linux is better at miscellaneous work" mean?

Then again, I read one of these "I'm a computer hero because I built my own" articles that suggested you get a $1000 liscense for Windows Server 2003, because since it's more expensive and "industrial", it will invariably make your games run faster. The author then proceeded to lambast nVidia and ATI for not keeping 2003 driver sets up to date with the 98/ME/XP set.

Sheesh, just another idiot who thinks sticking components together makes him a PC idiot.

Anyone can install a soundcard, a DVD-R drive, or build a system from scratch.

Oh well, I got some miscellaneous work to do. Time to reboot into Ubuntu!

Re:What the heck is this supposed to mean?

[Kiryat Malachi]

If you have to ask what color management is, odds are *very* good you won't care.

(It relates to translation between different colorspaces, and is mainly important to photographers, video/film editors, graphic designers, and other people who work professionally with visual media that are likely to be seen somewhere other than on a computer screen.)

Re:What the heck is this supposed to mean?

[kneeless]

Oh well, I got some miscellaneous work to do. Time to reboot into Ubuntu!

That's what I say. When I'm done playing a game or anything very Windows-specific, I reboot into Linux. Why? Miscellaneous stuff, web browsing, e-mail, talking to friends, etc. Maybe a bit of programming. Nothing specific. Makes sense to me.

Something's rotten

[ashmedai]

"and makes recommendations such as moving the swap file and scratch disk to a separate partition" So without reading the article, I can already assume it's useless? You have to move the PAGE file to a seperate drive and it has to be on a seperate controller, before you'll see much benefit - not just to a seperate partition. Swap files haven't been used since before Windows 95.

Re:Something's rotten

[xlr8ed]

You have to move the PAGE file to a seperate drive and it has to be on a seperate controller, before you'll see much benefit - not just to a seperate partition

Ding Ding Ding, we have a winner!!!

The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[dauthur]

Here in Oklahoma City (No, I'm not native. I'm from MA), I work on the Geek Squad. I'm the only one with either an A+, N+ or C++ in the whole store, let alone the GS. It turns out that most people, when they think they know what they're talking about, say nothing but buzzwords like Pentium and Windows. They don't know what the difference between 802.11b and g are, and the other blokes on the Geek Squad don't even know that there IS a g. Building a computer isn't anything near as difficult as remembering what FSB freqencies are possible on a socket 370, building a computer is more like a Lego set. Things can go a few certain ways, but there's only one right way. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't belong. If only people knew even the basics about computers, Best Buy's tech bench would go out of business, and I'd move back into my Kenmore vacuum box in the alleyway.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[Orion Blastar]

I agree, I've been building PC systems since 1985. I built my own systems, and I used to have a business that built them for others.

Most people just buy a name brand system, and then wonder why they are paying so much for that $200 system (sans rebates) because they do not know how to operate it properly and maintain it. So they keep sending it back to the place they bought it from and paying big money to fix it.

I tend to teach customers how to use virus scanners, firewalls, and alternative browsers to keep their systems clean. I teach them how to run maintenance programs like Scandisk/Chkdsk, and Defrag. I tell them the danagers of installing too many programs on their Windows OS.

Usually the ones who don't listen to me come back for me to fix their system. As the damage was caused by their carelessness or actions, the warranty does not cover it.

I had a problem with customers not paying me for systems (I couldn't offer the $200 and $300 rebates), and repairs (I billed for my time), so they promised to pay and then stiffed me. Next business I form will have a credit card machine, and if they cannot pay, I hold the system until they can. My partner had a heart attack and quit, and I got sick myself and went on disability.

Some customers went to Best Buy, Geeksquad, etc and then came to us to help them fix the problems the others could not fix.

I think malware infections alone can help a computer business finance itself by offering malware removal services. Granted some people are so ignorant that they will keep coming back to get the same malware removed over and over again. Home Network installs can also be more profitable, as people buy a router for their DSL or Cable broadband connection and cannot figure out how to set it up.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Building a computer isn't anything near as difficult as remembering what FSB freqencies are possible on a socket 370...

And remembering what FSB frequencies are possible on a socket 370 is a complete and total nobrainer, too...So what was your point?

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

See if you agree with any of this;

First rule: Admit ignorance. (If you know it all, you're an idiot. No exceptions.)

Second rule: There will always be one more level of gotcha.

Third rule: Build it, burn it in, test it, then let it go.

Last rule: If necessary, return or replace it and do not screw with it.

You can spend forever finding problems and fixing them and at today's prices it's just not worth it. I've built every computer I've owned of bought for anyone over the last 25 years except for the laptops.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[Reziac]

[laughing] I never had Legos myself, so I always compare system building to TinkerToys :)

But you're right, it ain't rocket science. The first thing to remember is that the square peg more'n likely goes in the square hole. If you can get that far, 99% of the HowToBuildIt is taken care of.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Think is point is that anyone can identify stuff like "I need a hard drive" but once they get it and have the cables hooked up, they may not know the difference between master and slave. Building computers today is more about knowing what settings to use as opposed to assembling them - and that usually is more of a factor of experience then anything.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez... a Kenmore box? You're lucky. I thought I was living it up in my Whirlpool box... and it's a duplex. But Kenmore? That's high class. I'm hoping to move into a Maytag box but with Bay Area housing prices being what they are, that remains a distant dream.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[Sweetshark]

Things can go a few certain ways, but there's only one right way.
Oh, really?

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[xenocide2]

The guide isn't even that useful for those that DON'T know. There's no mention of CPU socket types, or RAM speeds. There's no nod to motherboards with a special orange PCI slot and what that is actually useful for.

I'm not really surprised that your Geek Squad is so poorly trained. Especially in the middle of the Great Plains. Anybody with half a brain prefers the sunny costal areas to the expansive retirement community called Western Kansas.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[dauthur]

+30 Informative. Damn.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Building a computer isn't anything near as difficult as remembering what FSB freqencies are possible on a socket 370 socket 370 support the following FSB speed, 20,25,33,40,50,60,66,75,80,100 mhz there are also boards which unofficcal support up to 88mhz, in 1 mhz increments, from 66 mhz.
HTH.

Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know...

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I guess I'd better watch out my 733MHz P3-based machine doesn't blow up then, what with the "unsupported" 133MHz FSB and PC133 RAM.

Reader's digest version

[guitaristx]

I'll spare you the trouble - if you are aware of the list below, and do it by default when setting up a system, don't waste your time reading the article.

• Good components = good (and bad components = bad)
• space out PCI cards
• use a separate partition for swap and temp
• use a fixed-size swap file
• don't get online with an unpatched system
• use TweakUI
• disable stupid windows crap

Re:Reader's digest version

[Anonymous Coward]

disable stupid windows crap

Inserting Suse 9.2 disk 1 now....

Re:Reader's digest version

[TrappedByMyself]

That's 'Advanced System Building'? What's basic system building then? I do 5 of those 7 with out of the box Dells.

Re:Reader's digest version

[incom]

"-use a separate partition for swap and temp" ;linux, check

"-use a fixed-size swap file" ;linux, check

"-don't get online with an unpatched system" ;I recompile regularly.

"-use TweakUI" ;No

"-disable stupid windows crap" ;linux, check

Re:Reader's digest version

[kesuki]

you forgot "Read firing squad for all your harware information so I still have a job next week"
Otherwise, good 'condensed' version.

I smell BS..

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought it was best to have the swap and scratch on a different physical drive on a different controller set as master. Keeping these on the same drive on a different partition just slows things down more. Does anyone else smell BS here?

Re:I smell BS..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup... one can only hope that in the author's mind he "knows" they should be on separate drive controllers, but just wrote "partition" out of habit. I have seen advice to put OS/System files in one partition and user files in another to ease backup chores, but with current application software, that's never worked out easily.

Re:I smell BS..

[Anonymous Coward]

No he specifically said it was "better" to have them on separate partitions rather than drives, so as to "reduce wear and tear"

(bangs head against desk)

Hmmm

[2names]

It has been my personal experience that the armature fails on drives much more often than the rotational assembly.

Your experience may vary, but I'll stick with seperate drives for temp and swap.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been my personal experience that the armature fails on drives much more often than the rotational assembly.

I feel like I'm reading a veiled argument between an armature engineer and a rotational assembly engineer.

Re:Hmmm

[karstux]

But isn't a dedicated drive for this a rather huge waste? Surely you won't need more than one or two GB for that, and you can't buy drives that small anymore.

Also, is the increase in energy consumption, heat and noise really worth it?

Re:Hmmm

[Mike O'Hara]

A waste? Sure, but at £25+vat for a 40gig drive, its not something you'll miss. Heck, its two days beer money!

Only question uis, can you go without beer for two days to get yourself a dedicated swap/temp files drive.

Re:Hmmm

[meatspray]

Given, I've only been in this since the early 386 days, but I've had the chance to work at several big installations, wharehouses, a few pc shops and the occasional help desk. Every time I see a new type of problem, I conduct a post mortem on the drive. (I'm more after magnets these days)

Most common problems I've seen:

#1 Media has an electromagnetic defect that appears over time: (new regular bad sectors without physical signs of dmg on the platters)
Until 1996, I had seen more of this than anything. Some cases might have been heat or one of the next few problems but far too many succombed to this fate for it to be a symptom of another physical problem. I haven't seen this in quite some time.

#2 On drive controller board failure:
This also used to happen quite frequently, I've seen a few cases of this recently, It's the failure I see most often today.

#3 Spindle bearing failure:
I've seen a few handfulls of these only. They generally get replaced when they get noisy before the failure is complete. The best part was removing a siezed drive from the pc and giving it a whack flat on it's back to watch the user in amazement when you put it back in and it spins up.

Armature failure:
I've seen a few cases of this only. Some of the media defects might have been this in disguise. The best armature failure I ever saw was an old full height SCSI drive that probably got too hot, the heads caught on the platter and over the years whittled themselves down to stubs while cutting through the platters. It was a QNX box that was perfectly content to boot from the master server after it's hard drive failed. The platters ended up being razor sharp rings of death. Nice christmas tree ornaments through.

Re:Hmmm

[RidiculousPie]

Only question uis, can you go without beer for two days to get yourself a dedicated swap/temp files drive.

I think I speak for the students of the world when I say NO!

Re:Hmmm

[dahamsta]

Sure, but at £25+vat for a 40gig drive, its not something you'll miss. Heck, its two days beer money!

I humbly submit that any poster with an Irish surname that suggests that £25+vat is "two days beer money" should immediately forfeit said surname to the Irish Government for reprocessing. Any Irishman worth his salt knows that £25+vat is an hours beer money.

adam

Re:Hmmm

[Nefarious Wheel]

It has been my personal experience that the armature fails on drives much more often than the rotational assembly.

I feel like I'm reading a veiled argument between an armature engineer and a rotational assembly engineer

Yes, but I can't work out which is which...

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wharehouses" eh? That misspelling was really supposed to be warehouses or you're running a charitable "Hardware for Hooking" scheme. Which is it?

Re:Hmmm

[coastwalker]

You drink 7 pints of beer a day....

awestruck...

Re:Hmmm

[meatspray]

my spelling has a crappy tolerance, thanks for catching that for me, we could really use more people like you out there.

Did you get that memo about the TPS reports?

sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

if by "advanced" you mean "really, really, basic" then, yes, this is the most advanced article I've read on this topic,

signed
disgruntled goat

Bestbuy called...

[Dacmot]

they want their employees back.

Re:Bestbuy called...

[Anonymous Coward]

Office Max for paper.

It seems that Geek Squad employees across the company have been busy printing out copies of the article.

No... wait.. They don't have that much initiative.

It seems that Best Buy Management has been ordered to print out copies for all their Geek Squad employees.

Shortly thereafter, plumbers across the nation have been called in to unclog Best Buy toilets as these pages were used to wipe their @$$3$.

Yes, reducing-FAT HD's

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ask a hw engineer. The rotational assembley that spins the platters (the speed of which is constant) is by far the biggest failure mechanism."

Try the control board. Then the mechanical assembly.

Re:oxyidiot?

[brilinux]

Plus, he claims that when he uses Linux, it is Vector Linux, because it is "easier than Gentoo". He probably is just not that knowledgable about using non-Windows OSes.

First step in building a machine...

[gosand]

I have built my own systems since I don't remember when. But my first rule of thumb when building a new system - research all the technology that changed since the last time you built a system.

To put it in perspective, all of my systems at home have PC-133 memory in them. The last time I built an entire system from scratch, 80 gig drives were expensive, DDR memory didn't exist, 12x CD-RW drives were getting affordable, and we were just breaking the gigahertz barrier in CPUs.

Now I have sort of been following things, but not enough to know off the top of my head what to grab off the e-shelf to build a system. I have found that this has been the biggest challenge in building new systems.

Re:First step in building a machine...

[demonlapin]

Agreed. This is definitely the hardest part, and it takes a while to get up to speed.

Of course, I built my system in 1997, so it may not be so bad for others.

Re:First step in building a machine...

[kesuki]

It usually takes a bit of research to catch up if you've been out of the loop for a few years. Fortunately I rarely go through an entire year without building a new system for at least _one_ of my family members (or at least repairing the craputer they got from a mega-chain last week, and everytime they bring it back something 'new' gets broken) Keep up to speed, build your mom's PC, convince your sister to wait an extra week to get a PC she won't be returning 20 times the first month for 'repairs.' It's not that hard, to stay in the loop. if you build for 4 other people, and manage to get them convieniently spaced out so you're building a new pc every year, you should never have to be totally out of the loop, and and that's 4 people you're sparing from the crap that is being sold as 'stock' PCs.

Re:First step in building a machine...

[ticktockticktock]

Do you also buy legit copies of windows and software for windows to install on those people's machines when you build them so they get to see the real price of windows and all its software?

Re:First step in building a machine...

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly can, but I always tell them how much windows costs ;)

Re:First step in building a machine...

[aegilops]

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[WidescreenFreak]

You need to remember that hard drives are NOT solid state devices. They have bearings and mechanical parts. The first rule of thumb when it comes to PCs or any kind of equipment is that "The question is not if the parts will wear out but when the parts will wear out."

That being said, the hard drives will wear out. Period. End of story. Some might die in a few months, some in a few years, and some might never die before you replace them.

Even more important is the conecpt of multiple spindles to do multiple jobs. If you have one drive that suddenly hits swap because you're doing something, not only will your system grind to a halt because the drive head is loaded with contention (it can only do one job at once, obviously) but you're adding that much more wear and tear.

With the swap on a separate drive (and preferably on a separate IDE channel, assuming that that's what you're doing), the main drive can do whatever it needs to do while letting the other drive take care of the swap. So, not only are you greatly increasing potential throughput and system efficiency, you're dramatically reducing wear and tear on the drive head mechanism.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember, when the more components you add, the higher the probability for failure. You now have a system with a lower MTBF

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[ashmedai]

Wrong. Probability is individually deterministic, not cumulative as you are assuming. Go look at the Monty Hall problem for a good example.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Anonymous Coward]

For any given system, as more components are added, the failure rates increase. A bolt for instance has a very low failure rate. Start adding a bracket with that bolt, and the failure rate drops a little lower. To find an overall failure rate, you need to take the failure rate of each component multiply it by the quantity of the component. Then keep adding the products of the quantities and failure rates of the individual components. One bolt has a failure rate of 1E-9, but two bolts have a failure rate of 2E-9. Your probability of failure has been now doubled.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Stealthey]

Agreed that hard drives have moving parts and there is wear/tear and so and so on... I am not going to beat around the bush about how long i've been involved with computers etc., but I can tell you whenever I have had failed drives, just for the hell of it (initially it was for the magnets) I have opened dozens and dozens of hard drives. I've had gone through all sorts of hard drive failures. I have open drives in which the head have actually crashed, had opened drive when the spindle is barely spinning etc. etc. but in all this time I have never opened the drive in which head actuator or motor or whatever you wanna call it has failed. So, logic behind having the second drive for swap to avoid wear and tear is not very smart. I can buy the fact that yes having the second drives takes more wear/tear but not very much more . Things you need to remember, on the regular drive spindle is still spinning, and head is still moving around, spindle doesn't speed up or down its constant, so any wear/tear on the spindle is out of the equation. Head on the other hand moves more often, and even on that, there amount of wear/tear required for the head actuator fail seems to be lot more than the spindle before it fails.(I am simply arguing that on the point that i've run into a failed head actuator) For me only reason to have a second drive for swap/scratch would be speed. and that would be the only reason. Wear/Tear isn't a big deal. I have run in more hard drive failure because of heat, poor power, and other physical factors than because the swap is on same drive. Just my two cents

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[teknomage1]

But wouldn't the system only be as reliable as it's least reliable part anyway? I meanthe failure rate of the bolt isn't going to matter compare to my RAM from Happy Jose's House of Disreputable Hardware.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but there still is a chance (the probablility) that the bolt could fail before the bracket. Though your RAM could go first, and has a higher likelihood of doing so, it does not necessarily mean it will. That's why you exploit the additivity of failure rates to get what a true failure rate is. A failure rate (or MTBF) will always be higher (or lower) than the reliability of the worst component.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[ashmedai]

To put it a different way, suppose we install a widget that has a 1:3 chance of failing in any given day. If I install a second widget of the same type, it also has a 1:3 chance of failure. HOWEVER, the system does not now have a 2:3 chance of failure. Each widget still has its probability of failing determined individually. While we can approximate the system's chance of failure, it is actually only slightly above 1:3. If what you said was correct, installing 3 widgets would mean a 100% chance of failure. The same goes for any other probability scenario - if what you said was true I could make extremely improbable things happen very easily.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Fizzlewhiff]

Yeah but he's talking about partitioning a drive to save wear and tear. It is still the same drive. Would you partition a drive into two equal partitions and mirror them for redundancy? Makes no sense.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[kidgenius]

Yes, even ONE widget will have a 100% chance of failure. You need to look at time dependency.

The probability of failure, or failure rate, is something that is time dependent, not unit dependent. According to you, one out of three widgets will fail in a day. If we work that out, we see that is 1/24 hours. Pretty high failure rate. Now, we have three widgets, each with that failure rate. That makes 3/24 hours, or one failure every eight hours. You are very confused about this. Everything has a 100% chance of failure. It will happen, given enough time.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

Actually, grand parent is right. Two parts with a MTBF of, say, an hour, used in the same system at the same time, sum to a MTBF of (slightly) less than 1 hour. Not directly, which would imply an MTBF of 1/2 an hour, but they sum.

Look at the space shuttle: No single part has an failure rate worse than once in 100K launches (IIRC; it may have been one in a million. It's in the design specs)*

Now, there are some odd million parts. WHOA! No, you don't get a failure every launch, but the failure rate is WAY higher than on in a million -- think the RFP/design specs 'required' a one in 10K chance of failure.

The reason for the discussion was based on some of the 'design requirements' floated about for the next-gen 'shuttle replacement' -- one of which was a 1 in a million chance of failure -- thus necessitating a piece-wise failure rate of around 1 in a billion.

And what in the world does the Monty Hall problem have to do with this?

Try: Math World

and:
NASA

And the most directly applicable:
Hotwire article

Or just consider how they test for MTFB: Take 1000 parts. Run them until all of them die (not really for hard-drives, but this is how you do it for REALLY IMPORTANT things:~} ). Now plot the distribution and take the mean.

Cheers,

* yes, I am a rocket scientist, and this was discussed in classes I took years ago.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Kiryat Malachi]

Given N parts, each with a probability of P of failure on a given day, with the probabilities independent the correct equation for calculating the probability of *any* system failure occurring is as follows:

(1-P) is the probability of a given widget surviving the day.

(1-P)^N is the probability of *all* widgets surviving the day.

1-((1-P)^N) is the probability of a failure within the system on any given day - this may be a single failure, or multiple failure, but is most assuredly a failure.

For a P 1/3 and N 3, the Ptotal is 0.70, which is indeed only slightly above 1/3. This is true. It is also misleading. The complexity gain is much more noticeable with more realistic failure probabilities - given a P of 1/10, and 3 parts, your failure rate suddenly goes to 0.271, near to tripling your failure rate. As you approach the limit of reliability (lower and lower P), your gain approaches the number of parts in the system; essentially, with sufficiently reliable parts, each additional part *does* more or less additively affect reliability. The bound for additive behavior is roughly (1/P) >= 9.6N, for a 5% bound (additive to within 5% accuracy, in other words).

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[WidescreenFreak]

Actually, what you said is only partially true. You're discounting power saving features in most PCs and PC-based operating systems that can shut down idle drives. By pushing swap/virtual memory to another drive, that drive will probably stay up and running due to paging in/out, but the main data drive would have a much better chance of being spun down when not in use. This happened multiple times on a PC that had three drives in it. The main drive (which was also swap) never slowed down, but the two data drives frequently had the chance to shut down, sometimes for hours on end.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[TheDarkener]

I work in I.T. Don't make me rm -r / you.

Ugh!

1) You really wanna hold down the Y button while it asks you to delete every file??

2) Are you calling ME root? I thought YOU were the one working in IT, you IT worker you!

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[WidescreenFreak]

I love how everyone who finds it necessary to comment on the sig never seems to take into consideration that some people have their own *NIX workstations at work. ;)

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[gfody]

it makes sense to use a seperate partition so that you can use the appropriate filesystem.

I always wish someone would make an ultra fast affordable 4-8gb drive specifically for swap space. I hate having to use my main raid for scratch because its a waste of resources, and I hate using a dedicated drive cuz' its either a waste of space or a crappy old drive.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[strider44]

no he's not. He's talking about putting it on a seperate drive to reduce wear and tear.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Zan Lynx]

And this sort of failure probability is why I only buy ECC RAM these days. What's the odds of one capacitor failing? Now what's the odds of 4 billion failing? Much higher.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[xenocide2]

if you bother to actually read the sentence in contention, they explicitly indicate that they're referring to the tempation to use a seperate swap drive, rather than a simple partition.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[shawb]

You really don't want your OS to turn off the hard drives. Spin up/Spin down is just about the hardest thing you can do on a computer. Similar to stop and go traffic in an automobile. I believe the rule of thumb is to leave them on if you intend to use the computer again in one day. Considering the automatic updates, virus scans/etc that generally go on behind the scense these days, you'd be lucky if the computer let the hard drives lay silent for half that time. Only time it makes sense to let the OS spin the drive up and down is in a portable computer where battery life is a concern, and I doubt a second drive will go in a laptop just for the swp.

Additionally, adding the second drive will have negative consequences: 1) HEAT: Higher operating temperatures drastically increase hard drive failure rates. Each additional hard drive puts out a lot of energy in the form of heat, which directly heats up the computer. Each additional ribbon cable also obstructs the flow of air through the chasis, leading to a warmer system. The second hard drive itself also may partially obstruct air flow. 2) POWER consumed by the additional drive could tax the PSU, causing it to provide a less consistant voltage level. This is a bad thing.

honestly, spending money on quality RAM to reduce swapping would have more of an effect on hard drive life. And rather than buying a second hard drive now, buy a hard drive when the size is bigger. Copy your important files over to the new drive, and the old one becomes instant backup. Every true geek formats and reinstalls several times a year anyways (at least on their personal machine.) Why not start with a blank slate?

This really wouldn't apply to a redundantly striped RAID array, as the redundancy more than makes up for the slight hit to individual drive reliability.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Moofie]

Never happen.

Hard drives increase capacity by increasing data density. Manufacturing a 100GB hard drive will cost about the same as manufacturing a 10GB hard drive. Yes, you could probably get by with only one platter in the 10GB drive, but it's not going to decrease your mfr costs much.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[TheDarkener]

I love how everyone who finds it necessary to comment on the sig never seems to take into consideration that some people have their own *NIX workstations at work. ;)

Oooooh, you have your own *NIX workstatation at WORK? Impressive!

I was just pointing out some errors in your rm syntax. You don't have to get all huffy about it. :-P

Advanced system building

[bonch]

I'm an experience system builder, so this article is intriguing. However, I feel he does things the long way or is unaware of better ways to do things when building custom advanced systems. For instance, when I'm building a new freelance gig for use at home, I typically click the drop-down list make sure to select exactly what is going into my custom rig. Or if there are multiple color options available (like when I'm rigging up a new custom-built MP3 player), I will click the drop-down list and select which one I want. Sometimes I might even want to put my mark on the thing and type in a custom message to be engraved on the back, just to remind people of the customization work I put into it.

I'm also curious about the PCI slot positioning part of the article, as my custom-built rigs skip that step entirely. Why bother? Often, I store my parts directly in the monitor itself or even without a monitor so I can hook the box up to anything. Then I might carefully select those drop-down lists to hot-rod the box to my liking and really custom-build an advanced freelance system by upping RAM or processor speed via careful direction of the mouse cursor when selecting drop-down lists. My system-building buddy down the street doesn't even bother with upping the RAM via the drop-down lists and just uses a putty knife to up the RAM with a custom-bought chip of his own liking, but that's getting into levels of extraneous advanced system-building that I don't have time for.

I hope my experience in advanced system building is helpful for you all. If you want to read more about my advanced system building skills, I suggest you check this out and take notes.

Re:Advanced system building

[FortranDragon]

I don't know which is funnier, your spoof or the '+1, Interesting' mod you got. :-D

Re:Advanced system building

[Suicyco]

hehe, that was awesome. My advanced custom rig has a spoiler and cool after market rear view mirror I custom bought.

Re:oxyidiot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well call it a Gaming Color-Managed System Building Guide then.

No. A professional website will obviously use the most advanced operating system available. Everybody with some experience in the IT-industry will know that XP Home has everything that a corporate-level solution will need to orchestrate world-class experiences and syndicate interactive functionalities like games.

Look at Google. They are running XP exclusively, which is why their servers (running the leading web-server IIS) are so much faster than the cheap Apache-servers running on low-end servers.

Building?

[VAXcat]

Hmm...buying a few assembled components and sticking them into a box is called "building a computer". Those of us who have designed and built complicated electronic projects from components find that....amusing.

Re:Building?

[Mainframes ROCK!]

Totally agree. Unless you build the CPU (from tubes, discrete components or simple ICs), it's just like "building" a hamburger. Do you want fries with that?

Re:Building?

[Brandybuck]

Yes, it is amusing. But the Great Unwashed Masses do think that way. People are genuinely impressed that I assembled my own computer, even though it took minimal knowledge and skill to do.

Re:Building?

[nolife]

It takes minimal skill and a basic knowledge of tools and mechanical principals to change a timing belt, replace brakes, or a wheel bearing on *most* cars as well. That does not mean everyone is going to run out and do it themselves. Some people are not comfortable with performing work that others consider basic.

Re:Building?

[Brandybuck]

On the other hand, all my friends and relatives aren't nagging me for free automotive repairs just because I know how to change a timing belt. But assemble your own computer, and they expect you to provide free spyware removal for life!

Re:Building?

[nolife]

I actually got out of the white box business for that exact reason. I point people to Dell's rotating outragous deals, the Sunday paper ads, or a link or site I may see on a deal site. They get an above average deal, I look all right because I gave them some good advice, and I am no longer bothered with their various PC problems.
My car and house work is shared pretty evenly give and take across all of my friends ;)

hey now

[Menotti M]

As a part time Geek Squad agent (in the summer and during intersession), I kinda resent the author's disdain for us. True, you may run into some who don't know their ass from their elbow. But, in general, the in-store agents have much more expertise than the sales people, many have at least some certification, and the agents who do field work (Double Agents) go through a pretty legitimate training and testing period. Even if you considered Geek Squad members to be useless, the article does not provide a ton of information for individuals who "built dozens of desktop computers on your own and for others and consider yourself a seasoned system builder." The author has a bias towards Maxtor, for example, without providing any empirical evidence beside the fact that he's had good experience with them. Personally, I've had pretty good experiences with Western Digital drives too, but those aren't mentioned. He also arbitrarily comments on things like adjusting the page file, justifying his recommendations by "thinking" they are good settings. Yes, there are many great points in there, but the author has a bit too much confidence with him/herself and not enough data to back up some his more specific recommendations, not to mention some unfounded commentary on Geek Squad representatives.

Re:hey now

[PoPRawkZ]

You are absolutely right, his opinions are not fact. That being said, he is right for all the wrong reasons, and still wrong once given the right reasons. Yes Maxtors have a reputation of being bad drives. That being said, every drive I have ever bought has been a Maxtor and I've never had a failure. It could be that the most popular line of Maxtors suffer from low quality components, and the high end Maxtors (the type I typically buy) are much higher grade. So whereas the majority of Maxtors do indeed suck, it does not necessarily mean I myself would ever have a problem with one.
This is all theory and hyperbole but it would be akin to saying, "A majority of of Intel chips are Celerons and Celerons suck, therefore all Intel chips suck." Bad logic, but very compelling to emotions. People who are critical thinkers would see this flaw immediately. In fact, most critical thinkers would come to the conclusion that Intel sucks on its own merit. ;)

Re:hey now

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the ill feelings toward BB GeekSquad people are based on stories as related by friends and associates. In my case, I live about 1200 miles from my 80 year old mom. She buys a new computer every 3 years just because she thinks she needs to. After walking into a BB several months ago and telling the sales clerk she wanted "the best computer money could buy", she was sold an Athlon 64 bit HP computer (okay, very gross overkill for her use, but how was the sales clerk to know that). Three days later she called BB to come fix it... they sent a geeksquad agent to take a look. In reality, she had minimized a game she plays several times and after the 5th time or so, it refused to start up a new game. Instead of pointing that out to her, he spent (and charged) mom for 4 hours labor to remove an unspecified "virus" (mind you she generally only plays a couple of different games or websurfs to her bank's website--regardless, she hadn't yet been on-line with this computer). $300 later he proclaims it fixed. When I visited and found out what happened, I was furious and called BB to say for less than half that, you could have simply taken the fucking restore disks and re-installed the OS. They're response... "that would have been one way..."

It's BS like that which causes us to wonder about the intelligence of many in the BB GS.

Re:hey now

[Anonymous Coward]

Their response... "that would have been one way..."

Damn missing edit key.

Re:hey now

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us consider....
GeekSquad
Owned by
Best Buy.

QED..

If that isn't enough to prove the utter uselessness of said organization, I'll tattoo M$ on my forehead. Oh, and by the way, I have no trust for an organization that attempted to convince me that BUS speeds were associated with serial drives which are slower than IDE drives because ATA is bad.

He claimed to have an A+ certification, which i doubt. (however, even if he did - compared to the certs that are out there, that rates between typing class and not getting caught in your zipper, if you catch my drift)

Re:hey now

[Menotti M]

Actually, Geek Squad was its own company and BBY bought it up

Re:hey now

[Anonymous Coward]

And all the people they have hired since are fucking morons

Re:hey now

[Anonymous Coward]

Geek Squad agent is to computers as:

A) Apple is to rock.
B) Cash is to credit.
C) Radio Shack clerk is to electronics.

Hmmm...

Re:hey now

[Anonymous Coward]

Your grandma waltzes in and asks for the "best computer money can buy" and they give her what she asked for and you criticize them for it? Then after she gets this megamachine home to play solitaire she screws it up. Sounds like the problem is your sweet ol' grandma.

The one thing I learned:

[JawzX]

that aperently people didn't already know most of this or it wouldn't have been worth writing an article about. Imagine! placing hot PCI cards where they are easy to cool? Or perhaps moving the big RFI producers away from the sound card? jeez people. And who'da ever thunk of partitioning a drive? I've been using scratch partitions and/or redundant OS partitions for, literaly, 17 years. Since I got my first Mac with an HD. (SE with a 20 meg External!)... I mean really most of this is about how to setup XP, not how to BUILD a system.

My Karma's getting too good, So I thought I'd bitch a little.

Re:The one thing I learned:

[Anonymous Coward]

The one thing I learned: (Score:5, Insightful)

My Karma's getting too good, So I thought I'd bitch a little.

Try harder.

Re:The one thing I learned:

[JawzX]

OK *grin*

You're all a bunch of looser script kiddies who couldn't build a system from a Mac Mini! For fucking christ! Why am I wasting my time on slashdot? I'll tell you why, I'm so fucking good it takes me 2 minutes to install and configure XP! I'm reaming my boss out the ass and billing 12 hours a day for time spent jerking off in the bathroom, if the rest of you weren't so goddamned stupid it makes me sick, you'd all be doing the same thing! I'm bored with all this shit, It's too bad Einstein is dead, maybe I could have an inteligent conversation with him, but no! I have deal with all you fat lazy fucks who can't figure out the differnce between AGP and PCI-X! Breeders! Breeders! They're everywhere, pissing all over everything I do. If it were up to me I'd fucking kill every last mother fucking one of you and take over the world. Hell pretty soon I'll have enough refined plutonium for my first 200 kiloton nuke, then I'll lay waste to all the goddamn losers and show you how to really build a system! I'll hand solder a point-to-point transistor network that'll run at 1 MHz and turn in 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 MFLOPS! Then I'll use it to take over every remaining electronics system in the world and kill all the rest of the stupid ass holes out there with thier own web-enabled toasters! Then I'll personnaly FUCKSTART EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOUR HEADS! I OWN YOU ALL, BITCHES!

Peace.

Re:If you're so l33t

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Wow, kudos for actually speaking up.
How's the pay? I've heard $7/hr, but I don't know if that's accurate.
Oh, and ontopic -- if you've read TFA, what do you think of his advice?

Word

[gordonb]

What he said.

Knob, indeed.

I just built my system--Lessons learned

[angle_slam]

Things that I learned from building my XP system:

• He talks about installing SP 2 after installing XP. That's fine, if you have an SP 1 CD. But if you have a pre-SP1 CD like I do, XP will not recognize any hard drive space over 127 GB. You can't partition it or anything. XP thinks the drive is 127 GB and you're stuck. The solution (and probably a better idea even if you have an SP1 disc) is to Slipstream SP2 onto your XP install disc. Here is an explanation of the process. Basically, you integrate SP2 into XP and burn a new CD. So when you install XP, it is automatically SP2 and recognizes the full size of the hard drive.
• My system would not Standby properly. The fans were still on, which defeats the purpose of putting the system into Standby. You have to go into the BIOS and enable S2 or S3 Standby mode if you want the system to appear off in Standby mode, but still have 5 second startup.
• For some odd reason, my motherboard BIOS didn't have USB 2.0 defaulted on. I have no idea why they would do that. Make sure it is changed to enable USB 2.0 support.
• Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time.

Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned

[ad0gg]

"Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time."

uh.. Theres tons of utilities that you can install onto a bootable disk or cd that can reset the password. Unless you did something stupid like setup ntfs encryption.

Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned

[smitten0000]

You don't necessarily have to reinstall if you forget your Administrator password. Check out the following utility:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned

[thecue]

Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time.

There's a Linux distribution for that.

Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned

[scott_karana]

>Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time.

I've almost done this myself a few times, but I googled around and discovered Peter Nordahl's 'Offline NT Password & Registry Editor', which can just reset the Admin password and avert the problem of reformatting.

Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned

[CodeMunch]

Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time.

You don't need to do it the hard way. Check out this guy's nt pw reset boot CD. There are probably others out there, but this one works - I recommend "blanking" the pw option as that seems to work most often.

Awesome find

[nighthawk127127]

Sweet, my friend and I are currently in the process of starting a custom-built PC business, and this is a great resource. Thanks!

Re:Awesome find

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read and take heed of the article I predict you either will be going out of business or will be approached by PC World for a managers position..... believe me I've spoken to a PC World manager ::::shudderz::::

Glaring problem with build

[novakane007]

Why all the trouble to optimize IE? Shouldn't you be using Firefox anyway to increase system stability. It's when you're browser crashes and doesn't take your desktop with it.

Geek Squad

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for them when they were a small company based in Minneaplis... About 35 people or so in total. We were actually very skilled in comparison to some of the Best Buy techs wearing the Squad uniform today. I still have my badge, though.

Totally weak article

[Quantum Fizz]

The article was weak, only the first page dealt with hardware, and that focused primarily on fans and hard drive with brief mentions of case and power supply. No talk about mobo's, busses, CPUs, etc. The next 4 pages dealt with tweaking Windows XP, which was useless for me. And the slashdot summary implied half the article was about hardware, what a bunch of crap.

Perhaps the only interesting tidbit in the article was the mention of using ferrite bead chokes on the analog lines, which was interesting to me only as far as it's the first time I've seen any mention of ferrite chokes outside of EE circles.

Only after reading that horrid article did I see it was on a gamers website, so that makes sense why they focus so much time on tweaking XP, but even for the hard-core gamers I'm surprised they didn't talk about more hardware options.

Maybe there are some interesting things in the 4 pages of Windows XP stuff, but for me that article was pretty useless.

Re:Totally weak article

[Anonymous Coward]

which was interesting to me only as far as it's the first time I've seen any mention of ferrite chokes outside of EE circles.

Most VGA cables already have one on them already. My $299 Balance Digital Technology brand 19in LCD monitor from Wal-Mart has one on the power and VGA cable.

Re:Totally weak article

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't the article that was weak, it's just that you weren't the intended audience. Yes... the slashdot summary that oversold the article to you. I have learned long ago not to have faith in Slashdot summaries. The article's author flat out said that hardware reviews can be found elsewhere. Come on. He's talking to the person who actually takes pride in being better at computors than the average Best Buy Geek Squad member or call in phone tech. That's like being proud that you and your friends beat up a skinny second grader. Just isn't hard to have that level of skill.

Re:Totally weak article

[Magius_AR]

Only after reading that horrid article did I see it was on a gamers website, so that makes sense why they focus so much time on tweaking XP, but even for the hard-core gamers I'm surprised they didn't talk about more hardware options.

Maybe there are some interesting things in the 4 pages of Windows XP stuff, but for me that article was pretty useless.

The Windows XP stuff was actually near dead-on for making Windows less suck. I've been doing alot of the same for years now. Contrary to popular opinion here, a Windows XP installation can be turned into a pretty clunk-free speedy implementation with the right modifications (akin to the way Redhat can become good if you take all the bloat out and tweak things)

The article should have been renamed "Windows XP Tweaking Guide" or some such thing. Though some of the hardware ideas were decent too.

Re:Totally weak article

[dog_surfer]

The article failed to mention turning off unnecessary XP Services.
A table showing service settings for "Default", "Safe", "Power User", & "Bare Bones" can be found at:
http://www.blackviper.com/
Topic: "Windows XP Service Pack 2 Service Configurations".

A world of options!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can move or even resize your swap partition. Gosh, it must be great to work on such an open system, with so many exposed methods of optimization!

Why build? An alternative view.

[Niet3sche]

I'm going to studiously ignore saying anything about the article. If you can benefit from it, that's great. If not, that's fine too. Here's the meat of my post: with prices coming down and package / rebate deals on new boxes all the time, it might be tempting to ask why should I build my own box at all?.

My personal take on this (yes, I build all my boxes) used to be cost-effectiveness and component picking, but now it is simply that I can dictate exactly which components I want in my system for the same price as buying something bundled. There is no longer any real cost savings here, but I do like to maintain control over what I put in my machines (up very very very nearly 24/7 thanks to this, with downtime only to upgrade or blow out dust). So there is still merit in "rolling your own" box, as far as I am concerned.

I wanted to beat the cries of, "why would I build when I can buy for the same price?". ;)

How to avoid RFI

[netcrusher88]

Just put lead shielding around your GPU and other "noisy" items. No, wait, that would block airflow. Anyone for lead heatsinks?

RAM Drive

[jabber01]

They used to, actually. I've no idea what happened to them, but there used to be ISA cards you could plug RAM into, which would then show up as HDs.

Re:RAM Drive

[stratjakt]

I knew I didn't just dream or hallucinate those. Damnit, I want one. SDRAM modules are relatively cheap, I saw 512's for about 50 bucks are so.

800 bucks for 8 gigs of hyper-fast swap would be a much better use of cash than an Intel Xtreme Edition CPU, or some silly-ass mini-fridge for xtreme overclocking.

Re:RAM Drive

[kryptkpr]

I believe you seek one of these Speed is limited mostly by the PCI bus..

Re:RAM Drive

[daaan]

Do you mean the Cenatec Rocket Drive?

Re:RAM Drive

[stratjakt]

That's exactly what I want!

I'd rather forego all the battery backup stuff (and expense involved), since I just want fast, volitile storage (ie; swap space), but other than that, thanks.

Only looks like they go to 4 gigs, with 8 gigs planned? Sounds like a bummer. Still, it beats swapping out to disc, once you've hit the wall with the amount of system RAM you have.

Time to see if the boss will let me expense one of these things.

Re:RAM Drive

[etymxris]

It says right on the page that you can stripe or span the drives. So just get two of them and do that.

If you don't use the DC supply, the OS will likely go bonkers everytime it boots up.

Re:RAM Drive

[jabber01]

Yes!

Though, my recollection is from the early days of the 80386, when RAM was at a premium. I think I actually had a 4MB RAM-drive card, and wished I could use the space as actual RAM instead.

Glad to see the concept still exists, since it seemed to fade out by way of RAM-cache on HD controllers.

Re:RAM Drive

[stratjakt]

Swapping into a software RAID array? Sounds... wrong?

I'd rather have something cheaper I could "mkswap" or "format" on bootup, than pay a premium for the whole battery backup thing.

Still, I want one, and probably will buy one.

Re:RAM Drive

[Suicyco]

Not at all. Striped swap is much faster.

However, what real value is this device going to add to a system? Look at the prices - you could buy another computer. System RAM is so cheap, this would not really give you a very good price/performance ratio at all. Its a cool gadget that has its niche uses, but for speeding up swap on a desktop its not worth it. For much less than the price of one of these things, you could strip across 3 drives on 3 PCI scsi controllers and get screaming swap performance. Also, what is causing all the swap action? Why would adding a $1600 device be a cost effective solution? Some performance metrics and a good analysis of your system would show you the bottlenecks on your system.

I design and build high performance supercomputers, and ram disks have never been very cost effective. At least with Unix/Linux, more system ram is always cheaper and easier. With Windows, I'm not as sure, but I'd bet the performance gain would not be even noticeable to you.

A faster CPU, better motherboard and more RAM would cost less and give far more obvious performance enhancements.

Re:RAM Drive

[Sir Lurkalot]

Note to self: does not support Linux.

Re:RAM Drive

[kryptkpr]

Ah, perhaps you should google around a bit first:

From this review:

Compatibility*: The Rocket DriveTM supports the following operating systems:

* Microsoft® Windows® 2000, XP and NT 4.
* Red Hat Linux® 7.3
* Free BSD®
* Solaris® 8/UltraSPARC II

Under Development: MAC® OS X; HP-UX®; AIX®; MS-DOS®; and Microsoft Windows 98, Millennium Edition

And judging by some of their press releases from a few years ago, the company realizes that their potential clients for something like this run Linux and BSD servers.

Re:RAM Drive

[Sir Lurkalot]

It would be helpful to them if it stated that on their webpage, without having to Google for it. Thanks for the headsup though. Ken

Re:RAM Drive

[Lost Race]

You're better off upgrading your motherboard to something that can handle more memory on-board. The "Rocket Drive" is really that expensive! ($1600 with 2GB, $3000 with 4GB)

Similar devices have been around for decades, and they've always been insanely overpriced. How hard could it be to put a memory controller (SDR SDRAM, or even EDO or FPM) and a SCSI controller in a drive-sized box with a bunch of memory slots? I don't know, but I first asked that question on Usenet in 1995 and never got a useful answer.

You critics are missing the point

[-Harlequin-]

Sure, criticise that he calls the article "advanced" when you're all light-years ahead, but I read the article expected to be a noobie way over my head, and discovered that I was actually an advanced system builder who simply hadn't realised how 1337 I was.

It left me with a warm fuzzy feeling.

Hmm, he uses IE...no sign of Firefox

[TheStick]

On page 4, he talks about optimising IE, changing the cache size and stuff... But what kind of "professional" uses IE? Houston, we have a problem...

Re:Hmm, he uses IE...no sign of Firefox

[xlr8ed]

Well I know plenty of professionals that don't toss away a tool just because there is a better one out there. I have FF and IE installed, and in day to day tasks, I use both.. real professionals use all the tools they have at their disposal

Re:Hmm, he uses IE...no sign of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, most professionals use IE. FF is just for clueless follow-me, wannabees, and those that don't have access to it. The majority of /. readers use IE as do the majority of desktop users.

Re:Hmm, he uses IE...no sign of Firefox

[ioudas]

god forbid in the real world someone uses IE. do you expect everyone to bend over and like firefox because you do? Most people use IE and you have to know both of them. Or understand most clients to be in a pc repair business. Telling grandma customer #35 that she is a ubernoob because she is using IE wont only make you look like an idiot, but make you look like you dont know what you are doing. Professionals need to know everything about the things they are working on. There is no excuse for anything less.

Re:Hmm, he uses IE...no sign of Firefox

[Reteo Varala]

Actually, REAL Professionals use the tools that do what needs doing. I have a multimeter, just in case I have to measure rails. However, with two exceptions in the last 6 years, it's done nothing but collect dust.

That point aside, the only real uses of IE I can figure are Windows Update and browsing the HDD.

Western Digital and IBM

[kyoko21]

I still have my IBM 360MB Deskstar and WD Caviar 1GB drive from 1993 and 1995 respectively. These two drives were in the IBMDX2/66 Valuepoint that I bought when I went away to college (Virginia Tech) and the system still works, including these drives. IBM's hard drive division of course now is now under the Hitachi brand name, but my Western Digital Caviar..well still a Western Digital Caviar and it still kicks ass. Just not in a very high storage capacity sort of way.

Of course I have had my share of failures with the hard drive vendors in the article: Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate. All these vendors have always been very helpful, as long as your warranty is still valid. They will be more than happy to RMA your drive. Of course if you don't, then you're SOL.

What?

[JumperCable]

Nobody is going to bother posting a link the the mirror of this article?

Should we change the motto?

[goofyheadedpunk]

Slashdot: "News for twelve year olds. Stuff you should have googled."

Slashdotted..

[fish34]

Sounds like the should have followed an advanced server building guide....

Random advice

[slackmaster2000]

At the very end the author does admit to just throwing a lot of this out for discussion, and that's fine.

But really, "Advanced Systems Building Guide?" Much of the advice boiled down to "you should build a good system" without going into any detail. Then there's too much focus on issues that are really difficult to quantify, the impact of heat on a system and the real-world benefit of a separate partition for the swap file. While we're all aware of these issues and they are indeed real issues, I find them to be considerably overrated for regular PC building.

I am glad that the author didn't go into a bunch of ill-advised optimization hacks. I frequently encounter people who screw up their machines by following some registry hacking guide for windows performance. Personally I won't do anything that doesn't result in a measureable impact in performance (in the right direction!). "Oh gee, you need to get into the registry and set SuckyPerformance to 0."

Anyhow, in regards to some previous comments...I too am a Maxtor user. However, I now use Seagate primarily. It seems that hard drive quality per brand really just depends on the year...except when it comes to WD which seem to fail consistantly. :) (sorry, I know that'll tweak some people)

It's called RAID

[Anonymous Coward]

Why use this instead of RAID 1? If your hard drive fails you are still screwed whether you have separate partitions or not. The solution to your problem is RAID not separate partitions.

Really now?

[Cyhawkalewagee]

"Likewise, BIOS optimization is often unnecessary"

One word. Bullshit. It could mean the difference between having useless features (ie onboard video/sound) running and eating resources when you don't need it. And thats just the tip of the iceberg.

Simply put, this is a plug for someones website. Sorry, nothing to see here folks, move along.

FREENX IS ANYTHING BUT FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeNX is not free. Don't use it. Stop saying it is a solution when it isn't.

It might be free as in beer or crippleware but it isn't free as in freedom. Stop being a bunch of crippled drones and use FREE software not CRIPPLED software.

Depends on what you're doing

[temojen]

If you regularly edit several photos at a time (or do video editing), you can have a GB or two and still hit swap. Or if you use Linux it'll automagically pre-emptively write any inactive pages to swap incase it needs to free them (this is a good thing).

Re:Depends on what you're doing

[Some_Llama]

hmm, just the other day I opened 16 1600x1200 photos and watched taskmanager as it was opening them, it ate up about 500MB of ram, but that is still a good delta before hitting the 1gb mem I have, plus if you have 2 Gb then your good to go...

My main point is that you don't really _need_ to have a swap file anymore with ram prices at what they are... unless you are doing heavy, heavy memory intensive tasks, but if you are you would want more memory rather than swap anyway since memory is sooo much faster...

Remember that Swap was first used because RAM was SOOO expensive, it just made sense at a cost per MB to use hard disk space when low on ram.. nowadays it really doesn't make sense anymore...

Re:Depends on what you're doing

[Some_Llama]

I forgot to mention that with 64 bit cpus you aren't at the 4GB of ram barrier anymore either ;)

Re:Depends on what you're doing

[temojen]

I edit my 35mm photos at 4680x3120, 48bit colour, which is 85MB, so 16 would take ~1.3GB, not including undo, alpha, layers, etc.

I'm hopeing to start scanning my 6x6 images soon, and they'll be about 7200x7200, or about 297MB each. I'll only want to edit one of them at a time. Even if I had several GB of RAM It'd be slow loading & storing it.

For me, 1600x1200 is a size I might scale a picture down to for display on a monitor, not a size I edit or print at (and I don't even have as high resolution of scanner as I could use with velvia or provia).

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[stratjakt]

You can't always buy new for the same price though. At least, not if you want a decent gaming/high end rig.

For cheaper, every day, mom and pop, email and word processing machines, yeah, I say just buy an eMachine or an HP or whatever's on sale that week.

But for the gaming crowd, who do you buy from that has the latest and greatest ultra video card, and RAID 0 setups, and all that type of speed freak hardware?

If you check prices at Alienware or Falcon Northwest, building your own becomes sensible again - especially if you shop around online for parts.

My point is, most retail boxes either give me more than I want, or less than I need, and I'd end up compromising something. Ie; "This Dell has a nice fast video card, good deal of RAM, but only shitty stereo onboard sound.."

Lots of times, I'll buy the cheap eMachine or whatever, then upgrade it with a real video card, RAM, etc, just so I don't have to do all the gruntwork in assembling the case, PSU, etc.

I know 14 year old xtreme d00ds get some sense of accomplishment from it, but to me it's pretty dull and thankless stuff.

I do.

[WindBourne]

I have / and /alt on 1 hard disk (a 40 gig). Then I have 2 other samsung 160 HDs that are /opt/Resources, /home and finally /opt/Movies. Both of the samsung drives are put to sleep after 15 minutes while the slow 40Gig handles the OS including the ability to install a new OS.

Worst HDD Experience

[MightyMartian]

The very worst experience I ever had with harddrives was the Quantum Atlas IV 9gb SCSI drives. We bought three, two of which were dead within three months. The two new Atlas drives we got (same model and specs) both died. Our dealer started wondering about us, but then the guy that was colocating a server with us bought three of the same drives for a RAID setup, and two of them bit the dust within six months, as did one of the replacements a few weeks later. We finally told our dealer we did not want to see an Atlas IV come within a mile of our office.

In the end, I inherited one of the survivors (never opened, we were too scared to use it on our servers), and I have it running on an old Pentium MMX dual processor machine, and it's been humming along for about a year now, so I don't know whether we were ridiculously unlucky or I personally am just really lucky (and the machine it's one is just a test machine, so if the HDD blows up, I don't give a damn).

Re:Worst HDD Experience

[Reziac]

[blink] I know someone who has lately been fighting with a whole raft of 9GB Quantum SCSI HDs that "went bad" -- only to discover that the problem seemed to be the SCSI HA itself.

But after reading your post, it occurs to me to wonder if this line of HDs is somehow damaging the SCSI HA (could continuously dumping electrical noise do that?)

Those HDs would have been mostly from just before Quantum got out of the HD business, yes? (When I went searching for that model, they came up as being rebranded to Maxtor.) Remember Micropolis? When they went out of business, they dumped tons of 9GB SCSI HDs onto the market. Every single one I know of went bad within a year.

Let that be a warning to ya... don't buy mission-critical stuff from companies that are in the process of going out of business, and therefore have no reason to care if something needs warranty service.

Re:Worst HDD Experience

[Zerbey]

Similar experience here, but with Quantum Fireball 9 Gig drives that where shipped in our HP VEi8's and VL400's (yes, old hardware). I think HP got a bad batch, we had a 25% failure rate here (that's a LOT of hard drives!).

Personally, I've had a 10Gb Quantum Fireball drive running fine for 6 years in my home PC. Hmm, I probably just jinxed myself saying that... :-)

Re:Worst HDD Experience

[MightyMartian]

The worst part of it for us was that we couldn't just swap for another brand. We (and the guy that colocated with us) kept getting the same shit. In the end we all just wrote it off and got different drives, but it was ridiculous. I suspect it might have been a bad batch, but our colocator didn't buy the drives through us, or even through the same supplier.

Re:Worst HDD Experience

[Anonymous Coward]

My worst HDD experience was when it became possessed by a japanese anime Collectable trading card monster, came to life and blew up my house.
Luckily for me, a cute japanese school girl flew in a magical staff (wearing a skirt you could see up, to see her teddy bear panties, of course) and she transformed the monster into a collectable card and then flew off with it... my house and HDD were dead, but that was OK I was still happy until I woke up the next day a poor homeless bum.

Great...

[NMerriam]

I'm all for bolstering self-confidence in new computer users, but if your technical skills aren't enough to encompass moving the windows swap file, I had better not overhear your asinine arguments with the Best Buy guy when I have to run in and buy something.

Firing Squad just got shot...

[2bluemike]

by the /. effect

No dammit, no!

[Datrio]

Once I install Service Pack 2 and I'm secure, I install SpyBot and immunize my Internet Explorer from the copy of SpyBot I have on my DVD. I then install my anti-virus software. Only now do I connect to the Internet and download the latest virus signatures, and motherboard, video card, and sound card drivers from the manufacturer webpages.

No, you go here and install this nifty software called a good browser. Then you can immunize IE, delete every damn icon with the blue "E", or simply leave it as is. And don't enter the URL in Explorer's location bar, for God's sake!

umm...??

[temojen]

Why not just get a 64 bit system (Opteron/POWER/whatever) and cram more RAM into it? It'd probably be way cheaper (due to mass production).

Avoid Fujitsu for *anything*...

[Dogtanian]

My understanding was that, excepting certain infamous models (120 GXP "Death Star") made by IBM/Hitachi, all consumer-level hard drives have the same, small, failure rate.

That having been said, there are some brands I wouldn't touch with a bargepole. I wasn't surprised to learn that Fujitsu had left the HDD business after their notorious denial of problems with certain HDDs. Obviously batches of faulty HDDs will happen now and again, but to weasel out of responsibility like that doesn't exactly promote confidence in *anything* they make, does it?

Would you want to buy anything from them after that? I wouldn't.

Ignorance

[operagost]

Can we stop it with the system guides from people who don't want to let actual facts get in the way of their superstitions? Putting your page file on a separate partition? Pure rubbish. Do you like having your hard disk seek over a large fraction of its surface every time it has to page? If fragmentation is a concern for you, then set your initial page file size very large (two times the size of RAM, perhaps) on a hard disk with lots of free space. It will be contiguous, and will stay that way unless you have a serious memory leak. As for a partition for "scratch" space -- even dumber. A scratch disk? Yes. In fact, scratch disks are one actual GOOD use for stripe sets (RAID0). The reason this guy gives for having these items on one disk instead of separate disks is that it's easier when you get a bigger disk. Why? Must you upgrade ALL your disks at once? What's stopping you from keeping the disk with your page file and scratch space? Replace it whenever you like! It's more expensive to buy two disks, I'll admit that. Oh yeah, and he tells you to disable System Restore on the system disk (where you need it) and leave it enabled on the scratch disk (where it is useless).

To be frank, this article is actually better than the usual. One of the worst I ever read was about four years ago in 2600 magazine, if you can believe that.

No it's based on something real

[Sycraft-fu]

Just something invalid: Personal experience. Your personal experience isn't a representitive sample of the actual facts of the matter. Also, even within that, people don't usually consider all the factors.

Like I've had seen more Maxtors fail than any other drive. More unreliably right? No, not so much. Rather they are what are in just about every desktop in the building, many of which are crammed in areas with inadiquate ventelation. The small number of other drives we have are in servers and so on in properly cooled rooms (and some of them fail once and a while).

As for home systems, I think I've had drives from every maker fail on me. Western Digital has the highest rate at 2, but then over 50% of the drives I've owned have come from them.

Until I see some empirical evidence showing a higher rate of Maxtor (or any other drive maker) failures in equal condtions, I'm not putting any stock in what the haters say.

Re:No it's based on something real

[Reziac]

Okay, here's my experience and observation (actually, it's mine plus several friends who also build and repair systems), covering IDE HDs in a wide variety of systems and working conditions:

-- W.D. have the longest, most reliable lifespan, and hold up best under 24/7 use. When they die, they usually give you *ample* warning, like weird noises or obvious bad sectors, and are likely to live a long time even after that; sick ones can usually be tricked into reviving long enough to extract your data. As a general rule, they run cooler and quieter than other drives, and usually much faster than their own operating spec, probably because they put less lag on the bus (they use fewer CPU cycles).
-- Seagate (but not their rebadged Conners) are also okay but lifespan is generally not as good as W.D. (tho if it gets to the "gee, that's an old drive" age, is likely to live forever). Also, they tend to be noisy, run hot, and have more lag (high CPU cycle usage), so are slower than expected.
-- Quantum, when they existed, tended to be fast, but ran rather hot for a year or two, then quit.
-- IBM, I've only seen in old IBM machines, not really a good sample, but I do remember about the "Deathstar" line, and have heard of some of their glass-platter HDs where the platter broke in half under normal use.
-- Maxtor have pretty good performance, but have by far the highest death rate, and give absolutely no warning when they die -- they just quit, and there is no getting them restarted.
-- Conner, when they existed, were relatively slow, and while few died outright, many simply lose data if they sit around for a while, and after that are never reliable again. Same applies to those rebadged as Seagates.

I have a pile of salvaged HDs here, of various age and size. The vast majority of still-working HDs are W.D. Some are Seagates. A few are Quantums. The Conners have finally all died. And until last year, I'd *never* seen a working Maxtor HD in a salvaged box.

Conversely, the majority of HDs in my "dead" pile are Maxtors. Some are Quantums. A few are Seagates. Only one is a W.D., and it had suffered a physical misadventure.

Re:No it's based on something real

[Artifakt]

I've still got a Connor CP 3544 that works. It's formatted at 544.3 Mb. I acquired it after it was taken out of an instrumentation package that had been used for onboard data gathering. What was it onboard? A series of passenger cars, being tested in t-bone type collisions with Deisel locomotives - The package was usually bolt mounted to the shift column area between the two crash test dummys in the front seats, and was recording accellerations from multiple sensors in the dummys, not the car. The design involved a time delay so it could write data after the drive had settled down - The guys who kludged it together having decided there was no way to do it in real time. They said most of the drives worked at least twice before failure.
On the other hand, I've had newer Connors fail after 8 months or less in a benign environment, so the one exotic stand out on reliability proves nothing.
Now if I just had a real use for something that small.

Re:No it's based on something real

[Reziac]

I should rephrase... I can still get most of my old Conners to boot if I reformat them, but they uniformly won't hold data for very long (never more than ~6 months, but sometimes no more than a few hours!) unless they are then used every day. The problem arises when they sit around doing nothing, as is the fate of most sub-10GB drives these days -- for whatever reason, some lose all data, and others merely lose the ability to boot. This is so consistent with Conner HDs of every age (I have 'em from 40mb thru 1.nGB) that I've concluded there is something fundamentally wrong with their HDs.

I've also heard that Conner HDs were in fact rebadged Samsungs (and Samsung home electronics have a distressingly consistent tendency to die one day out of warranty). To my understanding, Conner never actually *made* anything, but bought and rebadged stuff. (Those "Conner" tape drives of yesteryear are all either Irwin or Archive under the hood.)

I have a pile of WD HDs in the 300mb range that still work perfectly, that I can't bear to throw out but like yourself haven't quite figured out what to do with... remember when that was a MASSIVE amount of HD space??!!!

Re:No it's based on something real

[Artifakt]

I just pulled that one out of a drawer and plugged it up as a slave drive, and found some files still on it. I didn't try to boot from it or run a large executable off of it or otherwise verify that it was still solidly there, and it very probably isn't.
I feel your pain re. old junky parts. I just threw out about 240 Kg. of less than 1 Meg video cards, 10 M. Ethernet hubs and cards, CGA monitors, and 5 1/4" hard drives. I had to steel myself to push the button on the compactor. They'll take my SX-64 away from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Re:No it's based on something real

[Polymorph2000]

I completely disagree with you on several points. First off, I am a person who typically puts 4 hard drives in a case, so my experience is mainly with the low end consumer server market (ie cheap stuff). Also, my sampling of new hard drives has primarily been over the past 6 years.

WD: produce by far the most heat of all drives I've used, and have an extremely high failure rate unless you do something to change this (HD coolers, dedicated intake fans, water, etc.). I've had roughly 15 WD hard drives and while I admit that most of them weren't high end, 12 of them failed (this makes me a bit biased against WD drives). Their RMA process is very quick/easy, and their customer support is very nice though, so I guess they make up for their poor quality of drives.

Seagate - I'm somewhat new to seagate, but the two drives I've bough still work(3 years later). They produce a reasonable amount of heat/virbrations, but it's nothing compared to WD drives. Performance is a bit lower since most of the low end drives have half the cache that they should. High CPU usage is not a fault of the drive, but more likely the drive controller or the OS drivers. Seagate drives are roughly equal to the noise level produced by similar drives at 7200RPM. I agree with your statement about age though (350meg Seagate drive that still works).

IBM - I've only owned 9 IBM drives, and most of them are quite old (>15 years). Of the newer ones that I've owned, they produce less heat than a WD drive of equivalent capacity(80gigs).

Maxtor - these drives are by far the worst of all at 120gigs and 160gigs (200 and up are generally good). I've had 2 120gig drives that shake violently and are painful to touch when running (due to heat).

Now for some general things:

1. Data loss over time is a problem with all hard drives that is NOT typically a fault of the drive itself. Data loss can occur if the drive's electronics are exposed to sufficient heat such that they malfunction and corrupt data that they write. I've had zero data loss (I do automated CRC checks of my frequently accessed data to monitor this). Prior to adding cooling to my hard drives, I had rampant data loss on WD/Maxtor/IBM drives, and many failures.

2. Speed of a hard drive is difficult to measure directly. There is a maximum drive speed, RPM, a bus speed/size, relative fragmentation levels on the drive, seek times, etc. About the only measurement you can trust are seek times, since they tell you how the drive will respond under inideal conditions (a seek after each block of data and a cache miss). Regardless of how the drive feels, this is the only thing you can trust, and it is a good indicator for the quality of the drive (low seek time + low heat + low noise = good)

3. All hard drives unless they have SMART and you use an OS or third party app that checks this, WILL likely die without warning. Typically if you hear a hard drive dying, it's already too late (a stratching noise, or read/write head hitting stuff). Furthermore, even if your drive has SMART, your controller card might not support it, so there's still no warning even with a good controller card.

Re:No it's based on something real

[Reziac]

My oldest working IDE drive is a 20mb W.D. of 1991 vintage, still 100% perfect (tho it won't speak to any machine later than a 286). I've been told it's a collector's item, even tho it's not the oldest of its line (1989, IIRC). It served me faithfully for some years as the boot drive in my test rig, and I'd hate to reward its service with a trip to the dumpster!

Now, CGA monitors, those I'da cheerfully helped you cart to the trash! Tho I'm told they work nicely as the video for stuff like baby monitor cameras. And someone just dumped a bunch of 10Mbit and even 2Mbit NICs on me -- boy, some friend! :)

What's an SX-64??

Re:No it's based on something real

[The Archon V2.0]

What's an SX-64??

A portable Commodore 64 - basically, a C64 built into a suitcase. (No battery, you needed a wall socket.) 20-some pounds of mobile computing goodness.:) Had a tiny monitor and a floppy drive built in, though it could still hook to peripherals or a TV. Only thing it couldn't do that a regular C64 could was use a tape drive.

Re:No it's based on something real

[Reziac]

Oh, a luggable :)

There were a number of species of luggables back then, all just about the right size to break your foot if you dropped it. Some even had TUBES!!

Re:No it's based on something real

[The Archon V2.0]

I feel your pain re. old junky parts. I just threw out about 240 Kg. of less than 1 Meg video cards, 10 M. Ethernet hubs and cards, CGA monitors, and 5 1/4" hard drives. I had to steel myself to push the button on the compactor.

Ouch. I know the feeling as well. I'm fairly new to the game and I've already got two computer cases worth of parts in varying states of age and usefulness that I'm having a hard time parting with. (It's a perfectly good 15 inch monitor, the power button just doesn't work! I'll fix it someday!)

They'll take my SX-64 away from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Hear hear! Even though I don't use it, I'm going to lug my C64 stuff around until I'm old and gray. And if I ever can't for some reason, I'll let it all go but my MSD SD-2 dual disk drive. Saved it from the dumpster once, I won't let it go back there.:)

Re:No it's based on something real

[The Archon V2.0]

Oh, a luggable :)

I remember an ad from about 10 years ago featuring a series of businessmen lugging progressively lighter portable computers (the last, of course, was the company's offering, a laptop). The first was really hunched over, the second less so, etc., until you got to the last guy, who was standing upright. Was made to look like one of those "evolution of man" posters.

There were a number of species of luggables back then, all just about the right size to break your foot if you dropped it. Some even had TUBES!!

Man, and I thought the SX64 was a handful!

Good plan. But go one better

[CdBee]

Put System swapfile, temporary internet files and temp folders on a Flash memory RAID array

Use USB 2.0 Flash sticks and RAID striping. Silent, unlike the SCSI volume, low-power and also very fast.

Re:Good plan. But go one better

[ShyGuy91284]

Hmmmm... A flash memory array to work with a swap file, or more RAM.... Hard decision....

Re:Good plan. But go one better

[CdBee]

In Windows XP and 2000 you require a swapfile regardless of the amount of RAM you have. Its about the way the OS works. Ars Technica have some good articles explaining it all...

Re:Good plan. But go one better

[Anonymous Coward]

Um they are talking moving the swap not removing

Re:Good plan. But go one better

[kscguru]

And you hit the 100K write limit for a flash device, and BANG your disk is dead.

Swap and temp are the most active parts of your disk! The last thing you want is to hammer the same bytes of memory with write after write after write. Regular data on a flash drive, great; swap, stupid.

P'shaw!

[infochuck]

Since when are swap file optimization, partitioning schemes, and tweaking the UI considiered 'sooper-dooper expert only' skillz?

I have been building systems for 20 years now

[MerlynEmrys67]

Now I just go to Dell.com and pick out what I want. Easier, cheaper (you build me a system for the 229 I got my server for yesterday - I dare you), and frankly more stable than most of the crap I see out there with random motherboards bought as returns from Fry's (all at 5 dollars off)

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

i didn't even bother reading the whole thing. just the bit about PCI placement. he may seem to make a good point on where to place a TV card. but if you're buying an advanced rig, dont bother buying a tv card, because the quality is shit compared to a television set. but no where does he mention anything about IRQ sharing? i [from experience with benchmarking, degraded system performance, etc] try to place all my pci cards so that none of the IRQ's are shared. i suppose you can turn of ACPI and set up irq's on your own, but some boards [like my old epox board] are unchangeable. just a [somewhat] big point he missed in an "advanced" rig building article.

I was Geek Squad

[CoolSilver]

"You laugh at the so-called expertise of Best Buy's GeekSquad"

I used to work as a Technicain at a Best Buy store. True they hire anyone to fix computers. I am A+ certified. Did I get a pay increase for my knowledge and less risk of frying a computer? No.

I can see how you can laugh at some. Just not all. That comment hurt. Good thing I don't have that highly politicalized job anymore.

Amateur with "bling"

[Anonymous Coward]

I got as far as:

I've never had a Maxtor drive crash when the drive itself was at fault

Then he hasn't had to deal with very many drives. I like Maxtor. They are currently my preferred brand, but I've had about a dozen of them fail. I doubt he's been responsible for that many drives or he would have seen some failures.

SS hard disks

[quarkscat]

Quantum (the hard drive manufacturer) used to make
solid state hard drives (SCSI interface). In fact,
their SS disks were designed so that you could
build a RAID (0,1,5) array out of them -- brought
an entirely NEW meaning to the term "Redundant
Array of Inexpensive Disks", because they were so
freaking expensive. At $12K to $80K each, you
really needed both justification AND deep pockets.

As I recall, these disks did not have battery
backup, so you really needed an enterprise level
UPS for the server these were on. One of their
technical white papers recommended a RAID 0 system
boot disk, a RAID 5 of their Solid State Disks,
and a RAID 5/10 of their rotating media disks for
static storage and backup. Booting (or rebooting)
the server was not something you really wanted to
do very often, because copying the appications
and databases from rotating storage to solid state
storage could take quite some time, as well as
updating the rotating storage before shutdown.

This is one of those items that if you need it
and can justify its cost, you really really need
it. I always wondered why, with the availability
of much higher memory density SIMMs, this technology
hasn't become far more popular. And
especially why more vendors weren't out there
selling SS disks. Imagine a NAS or SAN based on
this technology! I can.

Re:Welcome to The United States of LARD

[RM6f9]

A suggestion, if I may: Read "The Only Dance There Is", by Ram Dass. The word choices in your post suggest to me that it might just be time to learn some more.
Just don't feed the trolls...tt

What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[RapmasterT]

The article shows it's roots in voodoo and urban myth with the statement about moving the swap file to a separate partition.

A separate partition is STILL THE SAME DRIVE. Same platters, same heads. The only benefit is that it's a little cleaner to look at.

If you need better swap performance, the ONLY way to get it is to move the swapfile to a seperate, hopefully faster, drive.

However, if you're looking for ways to improve your swapfile performance, you're a freakin' idiot who needs to stop touching PC's.

Swapfile is a necessary evil, if swapping is degrading your performance YOU NEED MORE RAM, not a faster swapfile. It's not rocket science. That $150 you'd spend on a dedicated swap drive would buy you a gigabyle of RAM and end the problem forever.

I guess anyone can write an article...

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[pg110404]

Hey, here's an idea!

Create a ram drive and put the swap file on that. That'll speed things up.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[jonhuang]

Create a ram drive and put the swap file on that. That'll speed things up. Um... why not just use the ram as ram and not swap at all? That'll speed things up.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[Minwee]

*wooooosh*

Look up. Look way up.

That was the point.

I think you may have missed it this time.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[aztracker1]

not entirely true, some applications will favor the swap file for certain things, as opposed to the physical ram.. not necessarily on a separate drive, but a contiguous swap file *IS* better performing, and will help with fragmentation of other files that happens more with win9x swaps, and windows swaps without sufficient ram.

I tend to make separate partitions to manage my data a bit better, projects on a separate partition, media files on another, download/temp files on another still... I usually put the swap to a fixed size (usually 2x the physical ram) on the second partition, which is a fair trade, since the closer to the beginning of the drive the faster access you get, but would rather have less fragmentation than best performance, and a decent compromize... for win9x, you can dissable the swap, defrag, then set the swap to a fixed size, as this tends to work best.

yes, it is also cleaner to look at, but swap/temp files are what causes most of the fragmentation that occurs on a system.. me, I have defrag scheduled to run nightly (machine is on 24/7, I turn the monitor off), which tends to work out well... I am not a typical user, and do have 2gb ram in my system, but when doing video, it still uses the swap file, and some large programs will use it irregardless of the amount of ram in your system, because the author cared enough to optimize for performance, and push lesser needed stuff to swap itself.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[nmg196]

What kind of idiot wants a *slower* swapfile???

If you leave it on the same partition as all your other stuff, it will become massively fragmented and extremely slow to page stuff out to disk. I've come across machines where the swap file is in several thousand chunks.

My preferred method is to simply fix the size of the swap file instead of letting windows increase and decrease the size when it wants to. I'm pretty sure this works just as well and doesn't require a seperate partition.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[goober1473]

Another idea, SAN boot and keep your files on your SAN box, I have been trying to clear some space for a Hitachi Lightning 9900 to connect my PC to for a little while now. It's much quicker.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[horza]

The article shows it's roots in voodoo and urban myth with the statement about moving the swap file to a separate partition.

A separate partition is STILL THE SAME DRIVE. Same platters, same heads. The only benefit is that it's a little cleaner to look at.

If you need better swap performance, the ONLY way to get it is to move the swapfile to a seperate, hopefully faster, drive.

However, if you're looking for ways to improve your swapfile performance, you're a freakin' idiot who needs to stop touching PC's.

I thought the first partition, being closer to the inside of the platter, had shorter seek times. This means that the arm would move less hence less wear and tear. Also means faster to access information than that stored on the outside of the platter hence better performance. Can you point out the site that proves this to be urban myth?

Phillip.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[RapmasterT]

I thought the first partition, being closer to the inside of the platter, had shorter seek times. This means that the arm would move less hence less wear and tear. Also means faster to access information than that stored on the outside of the platter hence better performance. Can you point out the site that proves this to be urban myth? Phillip.

Phillip,

You should really read the article before thinking you understand the commentary on it. Let me help you out. The statement was:

You should always have a dedicated partition for your temp files and swap file. It's tempting to actually put this on a separate physical drive to reduce the wear and tear on the main drive, but the disadvantage is that upgrading to a larger hard drive a more involved process.

Note that it says "dedicated partition", not "first partition".

The outer sectors are the faster ones, not the inner ones, although your assumption about that being where the first partition ends up does hold true. Here's a good explaination of why: http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_dis k_sector_structures.htm

If one were actually to go to the trouble of installing XP with the intention of using the first partition as swap, and second etc for OS and data, there would be some validity to the idea. However, you'd be putting your OS and data deliberately on slower parts of the disk, to speed up the swapfile which you don't want to ever use anyway (if you can help it).

Just trust me, if you're performance tunig your swapfile, you're putting your efforts into the wrong bucket. You need more ram.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[Magius_AR]

The article shows it's roots in voodoo and urban myth with the statement about moving the swap file to a separate partition.

A separate partition is STILL THE SAME DRIVE. Same platters, same heads. The only benefit is that it's a little cleaner to look at.

If you need better swap performance, the ONLY way to get it is to move the swapfile to a seperate, hopefully faster, drive.

Incorrect. Spatial locality on the drive does matter in performance. If the swap is located in a more convenient location on the drive (such as in the middle of a platter), the head needs to move less to reach it, making seeks cheaper.

Now, whether or not these seek benefits are neglible or not is another story. But there's definitely advantages to spatial locality.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[Anonymous Coward]

you have been modded funny, but under windows, your suggestion is actually realistic. windows aggressively pushes items out to swap even if you have gigs of ram free. it would be nice if that sort of behaviour could be controlled in a fine-grained manner.

strike

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[RapmasterT]

I keep having to point this out for some reason: deliberately moving the swapfile to the outer sectors will take advantage of the faster I/O from that location (never heard anyone suggest the middle for "convenience" before though...hah). However, that's also got the effect of deliberately moving your data and OS to the slower parts of the disk.

This is not an optomization scheme, this is a misguided overthinking of a simple concept. Swapping memory to disk is a necessary evil that needs to be avoided at all costs if you're concerned about performance. Use a seperate disk for swap, or buy more ram. anything else is an exercise in futility.

Re:What kind of idiot wants faster swapfile???

[Reteo Varala]

I dunno... I remember one time where I had to replace a HDD, which at the time, had started failing. It was split in a number of partitions.

For some reason, when I restored the backed up data to a new drive (the pagegfile was on another drive entirely), Windows tried to start up, only to blue-screen with a complaint of not finding the pagefile.

Needless to say, I ended up having to reinstall anyways...

I thought I was a knob, but...

[IronChefMorimoto]

I thought I fell into the "knob" category that you mentioned above, but then I thought about it. I always considered putting specs (not damned coolers and computer bling) into your sig was helpful in forums when you were there for technical support.

That's how I've always approached a technical/hardware forum sig -- you put what you have in the box, including minor BIOS and OS information -- so you don't have to repeat it every friggin' time you have a question about your rig.

The true "knobs" are the ones with damned graphic treatment sigs who share the shit you mentioned -- Zalman coolers, LED bling memory coolers, etc. That's horseshit -- you're just bragging/showing off at this point.

But, no -- showing forum users that I'm running ABC motherboard (BIOS rev. XYZ), XYZ processor (XYZ competes w/ AMD, by the way -- wink wink, nod nod), etc. helps them get a quick overview of my rig before they start filling up a thread with redundant questions about the setup. You just don't need a fucking Gundam background to explain that you run a P4 2.4GHz w/ PC3200 Crucial RAM in a WinXP SP2 box on an Abit motherboard.

Checking again -- hmmm...I might be a "knob," but not because of my forum sig. ;-)

IronChefMorimoto

Re:I thought I was a knob, but...

[stratjakt]

Well, I'm not talking about hardware forums, I have my specs in my account at ACBXZone, or whatever asusforums turned into, because, well, it's appropriate there, if I ask or answer a question, to know what type of stuff I'm talking about.

I'm talking about people who put it in their sig lines on like the pokemon fan forum, or other such shit.

Re:I thought I was a knob, but...

[Vicente Gonzlez]

Then again, someone who is a pokemon fan is a fag anyway.

Please let it be the last article for the guy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like fired Best Buy geek decided to write an article useful for other BB geeks to be able to keep their jobs.

a. tuners don't overheat. mpeg processors may, but tuner circuits don't have anything in them that requires so much power.
b. never enable autologon, it is a nirvana for hackers.

Luke, don't forget the Deathstars

[copponex]

Remember the IBM Deskstar series? There were some of the first 7200RPM drives out at 20, 30, and 40GB. The failure rate within a year was about half, though. I had a friend who lost his entire collection of, um, educational videos two or three times. He finally learned his lesson and got a WD after that.

Yeah, and if this guy is recommending Maxtor, he must get a lot of free ones to compensate their failure rate.

From most to least reliable:
1. Seagate
2. Western Digital
3. Hitachi
4. Drug addict who just won the Cash 5 Lotto
5. Maxtor.

Re:Luke, don't forget the Deathstars

[toddestan]

I've had nothing but bad luck with Western Digital drives. I don't currently own one, because everyone one I have ever gotten my hands on has failed. Same with everyone I know who builds computers.

I have never had a bad Maxtor, but I have seen a couple of other people's drives fail. Rarely have I seen a failed Seagate either.

I agree, the IBM drives were terrible, but I never lost data to one. I could always tell when they were going out (the "click of doom") and have plenty of time to copy everything off of them, as opposed to Western Digital which would suddenly just stop working.

I also have two Samsung drives which have not given me any trouble either, though I have only had them for about a year or so.

The next level

[NeedleSurfer]

" If this sounds like you, you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."

And I would still be using winXP? How is the next level just a few tweaks? If I'm that good shouldn't you teach me really advanced stuff like how to use the serial interface to monitor my computer or access my hardware firmwares to modify them... shouldn't you teach me how to boot several system in one computer, depending on which "startup button" I have pressed (imagine an external keypad, each button labeled with a different OS it boots when pressed). I mean, what if I'm beyond swap file relocation, what if I'm truly advanced but don't have the money to learn computer engineering?

I mean, I have tried MIT online electrical engineering courses but I was lacking a tutor or someone to explain to me some of the concept shown there without explanation...

anyway you get it, this is just another winXP tweak guide, gazillion of them are on the net, none of them actually does something truly usefull..

show me ADVANCED and then we'll talk!

1993 called...

[caudron]

it wants its joke back. ;-)

Re:1993 called...

[tchapin]

"The jerkstore called, they want you back..."

George Costanza

-\infty, Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

You loser. It's nice to see that people have stopped modding every pro-firefox comment to +5. Firefox is 'better', move the fuck on.

Re:-\infty, Troll

[novakane007]

such anger against what I thought was a pretty simple post.... Have you tried switching to de-caf? ;)

Ditto here

[phorm]

I've had Maxtors go, recently lost an 80GB Western Digital. Some of the best advice I can give is if you have the space, try to keep your drives apart. Clustering them only increases heat and quickens death.

Swap space crack

[tweek]

n general I think 1GB is good for 512MB systems, 1.5GB is good for 1GB systems, and 2GB is good for 2GB systems.

There is no frelling way I'm going to set a swap space to 2GB. I'm sorry. I made this mistake with a production server and I've been paying for it ever since.

Sure the general rule used to be double your physical memory but that rule just doesn't fly anymore.

We've got a few RHEL servers that were installed with 2GB of memory. I couldn't bring myself to create a 4GB swap space so I set it to 2GB. It was the single worst choice I've ever made.

There is no way in hell I want to swap out a full 2GB of memory. If my system needs to swap out a full 2GB of something, I've got other issues. There is no way you're going to be able to fit that back in when it wants to go from swap to RAM so something else is going to get paged out and the cycle continues.

I've contented myself to set a max of 768MB no matter how much memory I have. One of my DB2 servers has 16GB of RAM. There is no way I'm creating a 32GB swap vol much less a 16GB one.

Re:Swap space crack

[Grey_14]

This just in: Standard configuration for desktop systems is NOT applicable to production servers, Film at 11. Really, I mean I hate to use a cliche, if you've got a machine with 2GB+ of RAM, you should know what you need, and not be taking the advice of some random tech site which is referring to desktop configurations.

Re:Swap space crack

[that _evil _gleek]

>We've got a few RHEL servers that were installed with 2GB of memory. I couldn't bring myself to create a 4GB swap space >so I set it to 2GB. It was the single worst choice I've ever made.
What a lame worst choice, unless it was a 7 gig drive, I mean, really, your single worst choice?

>There is no way in hell I want to swap out a full 2GB of memory
True, true, but do you want DB2 to get hard killed when you totally run out memory? Larger swap gives you more time to respond, so you don't lose data. And with 768 Meg of swap, and 2 gigs of ram, your could crash in situations where the server with more swap, could've worked it was way out -- peak usage situations -- where the cruft is swapped out, but there's enough room for the working set to stay in ram.

Re:Swap space crack

[stefanb]

Who the hell modded this "funny"? Anyway...

Most systems I set up these days have so much RAM I just skip swap entirely, unless it's a production server: if you do want crash dumps, your swap space needs to be big enough to hold the dump.

Saved my ass once on a big database server where Oracle was triggering an obscure kernel bug; the customer I set the machine up for didn't want to "waste" so much disk space, but I insisted. Since the problem only occurred after several weeks of uptime, he was really glad we were able to identify and resolve it the first time it happened...

Building vs Buying

[yoho_jones]

When I was younger and felt the need to prove my geek credentials I'd build my own machines. Problem is I could never afford top of the line parts and I was always on a Celeron with a budget video card.

Now I lease. Have a better income and my own business so i can write it all off. Might be looked down upon by geeks for owning a Dell but my P4 3.4 with 1g or ram and Geforce 6800 GTo (with pipelines opened and overclocked,) Spanks anything I ever built myself.

Dell has always treated me well. My hardware/software has only had 1 problem that I couldn't solve myself. (Motherboard went on laptop. Overheat I imagine. Sent it off and Dell had it fixed in under a week.)

Dell support gets a bad rap. How can you explain over the phone to someone how to fix their computer when they can't even get to the control panel? A true geek should NEVER expect tech support to know more than they do. You pay for techsupport in the event of hardware failures.

Yoho

Re:Building vs Buying

[rrhal]

I certainly look down on you for owning a Dell ;)

I really don't much care what others think of my geek credentials - I started building machines to save money. Now I still do it to get the machine I want with the parts I want. Dell just doesn't offer that.

If you don't think spending afternoon drinking beer and building a computer is a pleasent pass time then it may very well be worth the extra money (and loss of freedom) to purchase.

And know what you want: silence, looks, or power

[DoctoRoR]

First figure out what you want in your custom-built system. After all, that's why you are building your own instead of buying from Dell. If it's price, then it's questionable whether you'll be able to beat a huge distributor like Dell when they have special sales or outlet sales. Then it's some tradeoff between silence, looks, and power. When you start hunting around for cutting-edge motherboards, graphics cards, SATA 10k RPM drives, and also trying to make it generally silent with large diameter fans, silent power supplies, and noise insulation, it's cheaper to build your own. Then you are putting together your jaguar, not purchasing the decent but ordinary Dell.

The article is a nice start. For getting the lay of the land, I like the enthusiast sites like Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, and ExtremeTech. Silent PC Review shows some nice components for building silent PCs.

Usually, I buy CPUs that are not the latest (better bang/buck) but couple them with the new motherboards, decent (but not overextravagant) memory, and a nice video/TV card like the ATI All-in-wonder series. It's difficult to get the latest ATI A-I-W card from the stock computer builders. If you don't do excessive gaming, you can opt for slightly less CPU and a lower power ATI A-I-W; that will help you build a more silent computer. Building your own also lets you try out the better cases, so there's less Apple envy. Cool cases can be had from places like Ahanix, Lian Li, and Nexus (check out both the iStyle and Breeze cases).

How do you do that?

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Put System swapfile, temporary internet files and temp folders on a Flash memory RAID array

I didn't think that it was possible to separate "temporary internet files" from the rest of the profile.

I know you can use things like roaming profiles to move the entire profile directory [essentially the value that lives at %USERPROFILE%] to a network share, but again, that tends to move the entire profile there, not just parts of it:

Application Data
Cookies
Desktop
Favorites
Local Settings
My Documents
NetHood
PrintHood
Recent
SendTo
Start Menu

And that was why people got out of the habit of using roaming profiles [about five or six years ago]: Because roaming profiles forced GBs and GBs of useless, nonsense data to live at the server, it was damned near impossible to pull it all back to the local [client] machine each time you logged on.

But if there is a way to select some of the directories to live in one place, and others to live in another place, then PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO DO IT!!!

I'd like nothing better than to be able to keep most of that stuff on the server [the remote machine], but keep the really GB-intensive nonsense stuff, such as

Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

on the local machine.

Re:How do you do that?

[spdt]

In Internet Explorer:

Tools > Internet Options... > Settings... (Temporary Internet Files) > Move Folder... ..to move the Temporary Internet Files directory.

Jerry Pournelle had a son?

[gdav]

Who knew?

I wish this guy did more research.

[unsigned integer]

Uh, placement of PCI cards / sound cards because of RFI interference from graphics cards? Uh?

I'm more worried about the placement of sound cards because of IRQ sharing / dedicated IRQ's depending on the PCI slot. Some cards don't IRQ share well. Simply leaving this small, yet important piece of information out really makes me question his tech knowledge.

Uh, and he contiunes to use IE? My first step with a new XP install is to : go get a better browser. Firefox, Opera, whatever. Well, after I turn off all the lameness that is XP (Color scheme, menu styles / animations, etc)

Oh, and he turns System Restore off. Um, while I don't like XP all that much, if something totally fucking trashes your registry, this is a handy thing to have.

Which database are you using?

[jgardn]

My system can't support enough RAM for some of the DB stuff I'll do.

This is curious. Which database are you using?

PostgreSQL was designed for low-memory situations, and if you fill up all the available RAM and start using the OS swap, then you will get killed. If you limit it to a reasonable range, it won't use the OS swap but its own and it does quite well because it can predict what it needs to swap or not quite well compared to the OS trying to guess. PostgreSQL will really suck every ounce of performance from your box in more ways than one (memory, HD read and writes, etc...) It has some pretty neat algorithms for figuring out how to approach tasks in the best way possible.

I imagine Oracle has a pretty good database on low-memory systems, but I've never had the opportunity to play around with it. I do know that the rollback segments will kill you (which PostgreSQL doesn't have.)

If you're using SQL Server or MySQL, I would consider switching DBs. Those aren't known for great performance with large datasets, and you probable want the increased reliability that Oracle or PostgreSQL can offer.

Re:Which database are you using?

[Anonymous Coward]

SQL Server CAN very easily go thru this kind of data size. It's better than PostgreSQL at it. I can see switching away from MySQL to a "real" RDBMS, but saying SQL Server isn't up to it sounds like MS bashing just for the hell of MS bashing. It's a VERY capable DB. If SQL Server can't handle it, than only Oracle or preferably DB2 will do.

Re:Which database are you using?

[Anonymous Coward]

SQL Server CAN very easily go thru this kind of data size.

But can it handle a good slashdotting? hell no. That's what he meant. I hate 505 errors... G-damn clueless SQL Server Ladmins...

Re:Which database are you using?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean 503 errors. damn, my bad. now i gotta wait 2 mins to correct myself, at least i'm an AC...

Bad news about Seagate? You are mistaken.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, its not entirely opinion. There are documented failure rates per thousand drives. And for the last 8 years or so seagate has consistantly had the lowest, or very close to the lowest failure rates in the industry. Seagate drives are so reliable that they come with a 5 year warrenty standard, unlike other drives with 1-3 year warrenties.

And IBM doesn't consistantly make bad drives, they just had a VERY bad model that had huge failure rates. We got bit by it and lost about 10% of the "deathstar" drives we got inside of the first year.

"Advanced"

[The Cisco Kid]

"(I) laugh at the so-called expertise of Best Buy's GeekSquad"

I wouldnt consider anyone still using Windows to be "Advanced".

Beyond boring... AND mostly Windows, not hardware.

[Roadkills-R-Us]

What level is it? Well, if computer building were nethack, this article would be, at most, level 3.
Gridbugs and newts.

I'd call his article "Things you may want to consider when building a machine."

It was 75% Windows tweaks, not even that much for machine building. I'm not a Windows guru, and *I* even knew most of it. So how about, "Things you may want to consider when using Windows machines."

YAWN.

WARNING: Article may cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery in vicinity of htis web page.

Repeat after me, Windows != PC"

And while we're at it, lets add some more people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux dweebs that list their kernel version, gcc version, glibc version, uptime, nvidia driver version, and worse yet when they are gentoo users, 6 pages of CFLAGS they used to make their system unstable.

Linux is not new. It is not special. You are 10 years too late to be bragging about using linux.

It means he's a moron.

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, the last thing gamers care about is colour management. Second, windows xp has no colour management, you tend to use adobe's.

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[Anonymous Coward]

but now it is simply that I can dictate exactly which components I want in my system for the same price as buying something bundled.

Please share. Who is selling such customizable bundles? Forget the question of whether it's cheaper or not; my limited experience is that I've never found a vendor that lets me control much of the details. Obviously I'm under-informed, so give me a hint.

CompUSA Maxtors?

[potatoBBQ]

How do you figure that the CompUSA Maxtors are any better than Maxtor Maxtors...? As you've said, no matter what brand you get, there is always someone who's had bad luck with them... it's no different for Seagate and WD. And yes, pretty much all hdds these days are equally crappy.

That's the page I quit reading at.

[Aldric]

I have no interest in tech advice from someone that doesn't know better than using IE. Not that the content previous to this was anything particularly special.

Dell?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? Dell only sells systems with obsolete CPUs. Not only do they not sell Opterons, but not even Athlon64. And certainly no dual-Opterons. And just try to get them to sell you a system with an old Matrox G450 video card or Radeon 9200 or something else that you can get drivers for.

Dell only sells weird stuff.

And then you have to install an OS on it.

And their website sucks. You have to guess whether "home" or "small business" or "medium business" and there are different choices of computers there, AS IF where you're going to use the computer, actually has some kind of bearing on the specs you're looking for. Ha, I pick a computer and then click on "customize it" and there's hardly any really substantial options.

Nirvana??

[TennesseeJeff]

Make that "Nerdvana."

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[Peter La Casse]

My favorite computer store sells pretty good customizable bundles. Obviously they only let you customize from parts that they carry, but so far, they've carried everything I've needed. They're rated pretty highly on resellerratings.com too.

If you're looking to pay somebody a little extra to build something just how I like it, check them out.

MySuperPC is the Best Web Site I ever Found

[BondGamer]

This artical is a joke. It has almost no details on hardware and just a couple tweeks for windows XP. If you want to build a real system from scratch, whether your a newbie or expert, check out MySuperPC.com. It has complete details on the latest tech on all computer parts and even links you to some of the best prices for each part. I always reference this site when looking for a specific part or building a computer.

What's wrong with Windows color management?

[bogie]

" Yeah, what's wrong with XP's color management exactly?"

Read the Longhorn docs on what they are planning on doing with color management in the future and then you'll see how disjointed, inaccessible, and incomplete the color management support or lack of therefore is in XP.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/col or /default.mspx

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[Mettra]

It's true; you get so much more from assembling your own computer than just money. Not only can you get the parts that you want, but you have an idea of what you're getting as a whole and the quality of your system.

RAM is always my favorite bitch in packaged systems. The memory size, I find, can mean very very little. There are 512 MB sticks that are fast, and there are 512 MB sticks that are slow. It's just that simple. The companies that make these built-for-sale systems want to spend as little money on "up-to-spec" components as they can. You can buy a stick of 512 for something like 50 bucks if you want to. But it follows that a smart self-assembling buyer will reason that more expensive RAM (100+ USD) is better and really awesome RAM is even better.

Almost every component is like that. Video cards, hard drives, cooling, audio and other PCI's; and, probably most importantly, upgradeability (ie motherboard features) are all important things that mostly are money savers in the mind of package sellers. If they can get cheaper RAM that runs OK and still charge their high prices, they WILL.

By ordering your own components, you're matching them with each other to get the performance/price balance that you REALLY want. Additionaly, you know what to expect (!) with your system. If a packaged system seems to be doing something weird (running slower than expected, pausing, not booting, making noises) you really can't know what's wrong with it until you tear it apart and experiment with the components you think may be a problem. But with a system that you arranged, you'll have a really good idea of what everything SHOULD be doing and will know much more easily what could be the problem. I wish I could express more of the many advantages of arranging your own system, but I just can't seem to grasp them right now.

Windows doesn't handle swap that well.

[khasim]

Start it up and it will soon start swapping. No matter how much RAM you have.

Since it is going to do it anyway, you'll want a nice, clean, ORGANIZED place for it to do it in.

The problem is that adding a partition usually puts that partition near the spindle which is the SLOWEST portion of the disk. But it will still cut down on fragmentation and crap.

With a Linux system, I put the swap drive down first. It gets the fastest portion of the disk. It should never use it, but just in case ...

With Windows, if you do that you'll end up installing Windows to D:\, which is fine, but you'll need to make adjustments everytime something wants to install to C:\program files.

Re:Windows doesn't handle swap that well.

[Rod Beauvex]

Not all the time. I'm sure I've seen some programs defualt to whatever the active letter is.

Re:Windows doesn't handle swap that well.

[ionpro]

Wrong, and wrong. It's very healthy for Windows to be using that swap -- the extra RAM can go to disk caching, just like it does in Linux. Also, Windows XP provides complete partition/drive letter independance -- you can assign drive letters arbitrarily, or not assign a drive letter at all. While I've not tried it, I assume you can not assign a drive letter to the first partition and still select it in virtual memory options.

Also, the physical numbering of the cylinders has very little to do with it's physical location on the disk any more. So you can put that extra partition whereever.

Re:Windows doesn't handle swap that well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP (and 2000 and 2003 Server) support mounting partitions UNIX-style, too - so you can create that first partition, then mount it on C:\swap and (I think*) tell it to bung the pagefile there.

(*) - NT4 used to insist on putting pagefile.sys in \. I'm 99% sure that 2003 Server lacks this bogosity, but I'm not so sure about 2k or XP. I use Windows rather infrequently...

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[Anonymous Coward]

"RAM is always my favorite bitch in packaged systems. The memory size, I find, can mean very very little. There are 512 MB sticks that are fast, and there are 512 MB sticks that are slow. It's just that simple. The companies that make these built-for-sale systems want to spend as little money on "up-to-spec" components as they can. You can buy a stick of 512 for something like 50 bucks if you want to. But it follows that a smart self-assembling buyer will reason that more expensive RAM (100+ USD) is better and really awesome RAM is even better."

I'll sell you 256 meg of RAM for $3000! It's super-awesome! It's so good, it'll turn your computer into solid diamond! Diamonds have the best framerate of all gemstones!

Seriously though, spending the extra $50 getting another 512 stick, or a faster processor or video card is very likely going to be more useful. The time to start thinking about premium RAM is when you already own the fastest processor on the market and have enough spare cash to max out the RAM slots on the motherboard.

Re:And while we're at it, lets add some more peopl

[stratjakt]

I agree. I was screwing with it in university back when it was still "some finnish kid's" toy project. Back when you had to bootstrap by hand.

Noone was impressed with me then, why should I be impressed when some kid sticks a knoppix CD in his xtreme blinking blue led box?

For experts only -

[FlynnMP3]

What are some of the causes of why sound starts skipping (cutting in and out), during heavy graphics operations?

Practically every computer I have worked on has acquired this problem as it got older. Yet, when the computer was purchased and for 3-4 years later, everything was just fine.

Out of any of those causes for those symptoms, are any of the solutions easily implemented without buying another graphics card/sound card*.

* I have tried this. The sound still skips on graphics intense games.

Does anyone consider that stuff 'advanced'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk about a n00b guide. I was doing half that stuff back on Windows 95 machines.

I'm not saying that stuff isnt important, but it's hardly advanced.

Re:Does anyone consider that stuff 'advanced'?

[kesuki]

I thought it was kinda a fluff piece myself, but consider the audience he's catering to. Overclocking gamers, who build custom rigs because they can't afford alienware systems every 2-3 years ;)
I thought it was basic 101 to get good ram and good PSU... a good quality PSU can last you 2-3 upgrades, especially if you you're going on a 2-year cycle, before the industry adds new fangled power connectors to muck you up and make you buy a new one.
My ram and PSU are so good, that even though I bought them 3 years ago they're still good enough to go into a gaming rig today. (although the psu lacks SATA power connectors, they do make SATA power adapters.) As for the ram, it doesn't have the memory bandwith of today's ram, but the latency Still is the lowest you can buy in a system ram module, keeping it a choice selection for gamers... (and 3 years later, you still pay the exact same price I paid for the ram new back then, how's about that for RAM holding it's dollar value)

Re:Does anyone consider that stuff 'advanced'?

[ottothecow]

I would rather RAM prices dropped over time (see my sig)

Re:Does anyone consider that stuff 'advanced'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yeah 144 pin SODIMMs didn't fall in price that much. Price watch (which is down because they got the latest ISS worm) claimed to have a $40 144 pin sodimm in teh 512 range, but usually it's a merchant who listed the wrong thing in that category... and i can't load to verify, and froogle seems co cap out with a bottom price of $75 for a 144-pin SODIMM in PC 133 speeds... Dram prices haven't dropped dramtically due to collusion in the industry spurred by fear of RAMBUS litigation. Basically, the price of DRAM stabilized because all the RAM makers had to hire suits and once they realized how much more money there was to be made, the collusion stuck, out with the old days of pressing as much as fast as you can and profits be damned, in with the era of price fixing and mucho profit!
At least they could keep pumping up the size, or improving the speed, or something... but nooo rambus had to teach those hard working tiwanese how to 5. profit!

Re:Does anyone consider that stuff 'advanced'?

[El Puerco Loco]

it's the government that's keeping ram prices high. they've been imposing draconian tariffs on most of the korean manufacturers that were selling the cheap stuff for a while now.

Re:Does anyone consider that stuff 'advanced'?

[ottothecow]

man....All I want to do is buy some 512mb sticks of an obsolete format that they should be glad to get out of stock/off of their producton lines.

Re:Does anyone consider that stuff 'advanced'?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was doing half that stuff back on Windows 95 machines.

And from the blurb:

makes recommendations such as moving the swap file and scratch disk to a separate partition.

I'm still running MS Windows 95 (I need to run MS-Windows occasionally, I refuse to give MS any more money, and I don't pirate things (well, not software, anyway), so I'm stuck with MS Windows 95), and I'm doing that now.
Putting swap space on a separate physical (not just logical!) disk on a separate IDE controller just makes sense.
It's not rocket surgery, people.

Re:Does anyone consider that stuff 'advanced'?

[unitron]

" I would rather RAM prices dropped over time..."

They did. Then they went back up. At least as far as PC100 DIMMs are concerned. 256M sticks got down to where 128M sticks are selling for now, but before I got around to getting any they shot back up. :-(

"Rig" has a long history w/ electronic gear...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

at least among ham radio operators. One's transmitter has been referred to as a "rig" since the beginning of the hobby.

My guide to computing nirvana...

[rice_burners_suck]

(snip)

The following guide will allow you to master your operating system. Learn how to take your computer from having no operating system to having a full-fledged graphical setup with all the bells and whistles. Your knowledge in these areas will make you the envy of your neighborhood...

(snip)

The guide mentioned instructs the reader on inserting the Windows XP install CD and following the on-screen prompts.

Geeksquad Customers

[stackdump]

By the way
If you read slashdot and love linux, then you are probably not our target customer. (we mostly remove spyware) What makes GS different is that we do not resort to a system restore at the first sign of trouble (GeekSquad is better Circuit City's "I.Q. Crew" imho)

Re:Geeksquad Customers

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you guys are great and all but, this kinda scares me. It's interesting to know that some of my fellow Slashdotters are uniform wearing Virus Fighters. Or somethin.
On one hand I feel like you disrespect the Geek/Tech/whatever mojo. But on the otherhand, I am oddly frightened by the prospects. Is this the future? Am I going to be swallowed by some corporate crap squad and make $15 bucks an hour to do complicated network design? Am I going to be the next Roto Router guy for System Administration.
Damn, I gotta get a degree or something.

Also, what's up with the corporate Nazism. You guys are like "I'm an Agent!!!!" Like it's something to be worshipped. Maybe the concept is good, good for business. But i bet Mikky D's employees are pretty excited about their jobs too.

I don't know, it's all so scary. Make the bad geeks go away. Mommy....

One major omission...

[nuckfuts]

is in the Explorer tweaking section. It is absolutely insane that Windows still hides file extensions by default. I never install a system without going to Tools, Folder Options, View and disabling "Hide extensions for known file types". Otherwise Explorer won't show you the difference between "clickme.txt" and "clickme.txt.exe".

Also, on the subject of drive partitioning, I would caution against any partitioning scheme that results in the drive heads doing long seeks between one partition and another. This is the slowest operation that any drive performs. For example, if you create a 50 Gb primary partition followed by a 10 Gb scratch partition, the heads could easily require 75% of an end-to-end seek just to get to the second partition. A drive with an 8.5 ms seek time refers to average seek time. Try finding the spec for an end-to-end seek - it's a LOT longer than the average.

Re:oxyidiot?

[alpha_foobar]

You mean Google run XP in their offices? Because to my knowledge they run linux with 'the cheap Apache-servers running on low-end servers' for their webservers...

Or were you being funny through contradiction?

What kind of idiot posts this?

[xenocide2]

Placing the swap file on a dedicated partition can indeed improve things. Why?

1. You don't have to go through an intermediary filesystem, with associated overhead.

2. You can give the swap partition priority or at least balance in queuing on a single disk.

3. I'm sure there's a third reason that also validates my theory, given that pretty much every linux distro I know of makes a seperate swap partition. We'll call item #3 the "appeal to authority" argument.

I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that you have indirectly insulted the engineers behind the Linux VM improvements. I realize this article was mostly about innane tweaks to windows XP, but the slander is inconsistant with my views of their work.

Re:What kind of idiot posts this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem: You say "swap file" on a different partition. A swap file necessarily needs a filesystem, because it's just a file. A swap partition is very different from a swap file. On Linux, at least, swap files used to perform poorly compared to partitions, which would explain their prevalence. Of course, it's still handy to have the partition off by itself, but then you can't change the size too easily, can you?

Re:What kind of idiot posts this?

[RapmasterT]

Considering that you acknowledge that the article and discussin were about XP, not Linux, I find it odd that you'd jump into the middle of it claiming insult to Linux programmers.

Lighten up...or at least try to stay on subject.

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[Anonymous Coward]

I build because I won't buy a Dell. It's probably more expensive and time consuming to build myself now days, but so what? I run linux too. Pre-built systems scare me because I don't get to choose exactly what goes in them. I like having the semblance of choice so I always try to support the small-time local white box store. I consciously avoid bestbuy. I don't mind paying a couple bucks more to be able to avoid the one and only patented corporate trademarked copyright all you base are belong to us nightmare future where we all work for Walmart.

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[Anonymous Coward]

ZipZoomFly (.com previously known as googlegear) and others sell barebones configurations, and I remember being able to go through drop down lists on their site selecting various different compatible component options that will work with the bare system (though I was just checking prices and looking at options).

Re:And know what you want: silence, looks, or powe

[kesuki]

If it's price, then it's questionable whether you'll be able to beat a huge distributor like Dell
I can beat dell on price any day, i can get the same $10 PSU for $6 on scam watch*, i can get the same $20 case for $20, with afore mentioned $6 PSU on *=pricewatch. I can get the same $30 korean motherboard, and the same $75 budget CPU, and the same $10 DIMM, and the same $39 HD What am i up to? $174 or so? now i can go ahead and add in the same $120 flat panel and a Legit copy of windows and the 29 printer for $399 It's gonna be the same total nightmare to own, the PSU is lucky to make it through installing windows, but hell, I can build em just as cheap, using the same quality components at Dell. And if you wink right**, I might be able to save you $100 on the windows install, and include about another $600 in warez... No the difference is, I can actually take the time to make sure the components going into your system aren't total garbage that cost $6 shipped individually, and they sell in lots of 20 for $19. If I'm selling you garbage I tell you up front what I think of your attempts to 'save money' are doing to your hardware selection. Dell, claims to offer that service too, but they try to con you into overpriced systems, that are made with equally shoddy PSUs/cases etc whenever possible (maybe they have the $20 ram, or the $85 HD, possibly a $300 LCD monitor) if you're in northern wisconsin, I can even offer you in home setup and support**** ;)

Actually i usually omit the $29 printer, with the $48 ink cartridges.. I usually reccomend online printing services for casual printing anyways, as the costs associated with owning and operating inkjet printers are steep, and it's better off that you shop for a printer based on needs than have a cheap basic one crammed down your throat, but I will offer help in selecting a printer, for people in dire need.. But i usually extol the virtues of laser printers and say that 'if you're printing 2-3 times a year, why are you paying $48 a year for that privaledge? you could be paying officemax/etc $2-3 each time you print, and pick it up free, or pay another $0.50 to have them snail mail it to you.. if you're printing 100 pages a month, you're gonna be paying $50 a month in ink costs with a jet, or $100 a year in toner prices with a laser***, covering the higher cost of the laser printer in only a year or two..'

**= Okay, If you're Family ;) but 95% of my customer base is family, but then I only do about 2-3 systems a year... because I'm lazy :D
***= Most laser printer toner cartridges will last for at least 1 full ream (500 pages) and cost anywhere from $48-$150 So I'm rounding a bit ;)
****= milage fees may apply ;) and if you pay enough my range is only limited by your desire to pay me potentially exhorbinant mileage fees.

Kinda sad

[pugugly]

I consider myself decently competent - Dual-boot XP and Slackware 10, but tend to use XP with GPL'd stuff that I found out about from slackware - Gimp, OpenOffice, etc.

So it's kinda disheartening to read an article like this and realize that I already do all the 'advanced' stuff this 'expert' writes up as if it were new and advanced voodoo. Actually, I'm pretty sure he misses a few tricks.

Maybe I'm just far more 'l337' than I thought I was - .

Pug

Re:oxyidiot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, GP wasn't being funny to anyone with a sense of humor. My guess is he was just being a troll.

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[Mettra]

I'll sell you 256 meg of RAM for $3000! It's super-awesome! It's so good, it'll turn your computer into solid diamond! Diamonds have the best framerate of all gemstones!

Your point is well-taken. More money does not always = better components, but usually this is the case when you're buying seperate components. It's all about knowing the product and its maker, as with anything. Getting premium RAM is different from getting good RAM is different from getting bad RAM (forgive the mathematical-style sentence) also.

Anyway, I used the same logic as you about RAM at first. I bought two cheap sticks (512 + 512), but I found I was disappointed (they cost about 60 USD or around there) from what I expected (went from 225 MB on a laptop). My more knowledgeable friend assured me that buying one really good stick of 512 was much better than 2 cheap ones. From my experience with it, he was right. That may not hold true in all cases, however (the RAM I got was about 140 for one stick).

Windows users...

[ImaLamer]

Hey!

I've moved my swap file off onto another drive and never looked back. Really, it's about stability too. When you get into disk trashing (yes, I said thrashing) the drive is going nuts trying read and write to the swap and do something else too... usually the user reboots it because it's "frozen" and they lose data too.

I've seen kid's Win2K machines go from a one day average uptime to a month plus because an old, slow drive was added. Doesn't need to cost $150 at all! All you need is a 2gig drive that runs at 5400 RPM's.

Windows simply likes the swap file however, even with a Gigabyte of RAM it will use it now and then. The swap file is used in Windows a lot more often than you think! I mean, it's there for when you run out of physical RAM... which can be quite often for Windows users when you add up all the ways that it uses it badly.

Personally though I didn't stop at just moving the swap files. I also moved the system catalog and %TEMP locations to the second drives (4 GB minimum drive size please) because it does work. When Windows is constantly chugging away at that drive you can open documents and whatnot so much faster.

I'd even encourage IE users to move their "Temporary Internet Files" off onto a second drive.

Think about it... it's like having RAID! (ok, maybe not but it does help out)

so sad-HD Blowout, Data killed.

[Anonymous Coward]

" It's sort of a badge of honor to have a drive go bad - you're not a real geek if it hasn't happened to you yet."

That kind of badge I could do without. Had a WD, lasted several years past warrenty. IBM DeathStars, we all know how that went. Maxtors older ones SMART errors, Newer two went out simutaneously, after turning off machine. Blew MB. Presently a mix of IBM and Maxtor, still iffy. Plan eventually to move to two SATA's with five year warrenties.

Absolutely pathetic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. That's a really pretentious intro for such a remarkably content-free article.

A more appropriate title would have been "A list of my TweakUI settings."

There's nothing advanced about any of that stuff!!!

Real-time Virus Checking recommended??

[Urusai]

No thank you! I practice safe computing and don't need it. Safe practices and the occasional checkup is all you need. A real-time virus checker is like giving yourself the plague to help protect against Ebola. A wiser practice is to simply avoid eating the monkey brains when invited to dinner in a remote African village. If he were doing a "corporate" buildup for clueless Joe User, sure. But your own hot gaming rig? Hell no.

What? No duct tape?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh this is just wrong. what about zip ties? fooey!

So D:\ automatically is on a different drive thanC

[r_jensen11]

hmm, I could've sworn D:\ was just a name for a partition, not a drive. Stupid Windows users, not knowing the difference between things like hda1, hda2, and hdb1.... I wonder if that guy works as a BestBuy GeekSquad....

Re:And know what you want: silence, looks, or powe

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumbass, you forgot to explain the single asterisk, ie scam watch. It's also the sign of a poor writer who can't convey ideas properly when they need to use so many footnotes when it's not an academic paper. It's not tongue in cheek either; it's annoying.

Another Geek Squad Peon speaks his mind

[ktwombley]

This guy sounds like one of Geek Squad's best customers. The guy who thinks he's a pro.

Working in the Geek Squad I find that most customers are pretty clueless; they don't know how to set up internet, or if they do, they've got a million popups. Pretty run of the mill.

The other 5% of customers I see are just like this guy. They go to best buy (cause that's where all the pros buy stuff) for some shiny new gadget for their machine, go home and spend all night shoehorning it in, and it doesn't work. Next day they show up at my bench and I've got to fix this idiot's computer and install his new hard drive. $50 well earned.

Most computer professionals can laugh in the face of geek squad all they want. Geek Squad simply isn't for people like us. In other words, if you build cars for a living, you don't go to jiffy lube, and if you build computers for a living, you don't go to geek squad. No need to be dismissive or rude about it; you're simply not the target market. Be pleased that you don't need to spend $120 every couple of months to get your machine de-spywared and move on with your life.

Geek Squad is for the unwashed masses out there. The truely clueless (or even worse, the clueless who think they're clueful). And it does just fine a job at that.

Best disk failure

[putaro]

The best disk failure ever was on my high school's PDP 11/70 (back about 1985). The disk drive for the machine was a 60 MB (yes, megabyte) RM03 which is a removable pack drive. That is, you can open up the lid and take the actual platters out and swap in a different set. This thing is about the size of a washing machine. While not nearly of the tolerances of today's disk drives, it is still a precision piece of macinery and had a lot of filters to remove dust.

The student operator decided that he wanted to show his girlfriend how the disk worked so he spun down the disk, popped the lid and then held down the lid closed detector and spun the disk back up again. The result, of course, was an immediate head crash as soon as the heads tried to load. Oh, the joys of restoring from 9 track tape!

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[evilviper]

There is no longer any real cost savings here

Where do you get your info? I can still build a system from parts for a good 50% less than what it costs for a complete system.

I really don't know why the price difference is so big, but it certainly still is.

Point me to the best spec, cheapest system you can find, and I'll be happy to match or surpass it for less money...

Skills

[Anonymous Coward]

Girls only want guys with skills.
Like, nun-chuck skills
or, Xtremely 733t System building skills.

PS- people who have ground effects on their computers (or on their cars for that matter) should be shot. Krylon! Flat! Black!

how to setup swap file

[Poppageorgio]

One of the good things about XP is if you have two physical drives, you can span the swap file across the two. This works no matter what the size of the drives are. Put them on seprate IDE channels, and you'll be amazed at the difference. Granted, there is no substitute for RAM, but if you have a spare hard drive floating around, try it. It'll blow your mind at the performance difference. The BLOG: HTTP:\\poppageorgio.blogspot.com

Attn: "Frell" is not a word.

[Anonymous Coward]

You may now stab at me from your parents' basement in Wyoming.

Sad state of geeks these days?

[lwriemen]

This guy would have been totally lost trying to get a working PC system back in 1978 when I started. Yes PC was used before Wintel came along. [For the totally clueless.] Commodore, Apple, Atari, CP/M, booting off of cassette, ...

Go by the warrenty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go by the warrenty, its a great way to help gauge how long a harddrive is going to last. And have backups.

I have had every model of drive fail on me before. I found matrox's 6 years ago to be real bad. I have a large box fill of failed matroxs. Never brought them in large numbers since, they are proberly a lot better now.

Western digitals only give 1 year warrenty on most of their drives, and they often fail soon after that. I only buy the western digitals which have 5 year warrenty. Once had a bad day with 6 WD failures in one morning (Different computers, it was a hot summer day).

Samsungs are reasonbly good value for money and reliablity. I only get a failure once every month or so with them. They give 3 year warrent, which is good.

Segates are better now than they use to be 10 years ago. Some of there drives come with 5 year warrentys. Only one failure so far this year.

Re:Why build? An alternative view.

[Vince Mo'aluka]

Yes, that's the number one reason to build your own computer: quality components, hand-picked by yourself, that are more stable and last longer. But here's another good reason to build: it's a great hobby and you learn a lot from it. I've gotten into the silent thing recently, and it really is addicting. Check out the forums at silentpcreview.com if you're interested.

Unless you bought the broken line from IBM

[Hackeron]

A while ago, all IBM drives sold in the UK were either broken out of box, or would break within a few months because of a manufacturing failure. (I had a replacement sent 3 times before giving up)

The line was called back, but only after several tens of thousands were sent out to retailers.

Shows some bad QA from IBM, so I avoid their drives (well, except their SCSI drives).

Personally, I now just buy the most silent drives available. I noticed the speed difference between the jetplane sounding maxtor and virtually dead silent seagate is a few MB/sec and seek is about the same. However the Seagate is cooler, and silent - works for me!

As for Western Digital, I have a 20Gb drive I got about 6 years ago that still works great, thats quite impressive. But I now avoid their drives for their sheer volume which is unbearable in a bedroom at night.

No need to reinstall

[50m31sl4sh.]

Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time.

Even if you forget the Administrator password, there's no need to reinstall. Use this Linux-based bootdisk.
Allows to reset the password for any user, enable disabled accounts, even do some basic registry editing -- everything that might be required to get back into the system.
And, unlike some commercial rip-offs, it's GPL'ed stuff.

Re:No need to reinstall

[angle_slam]

Irony--whenever the editors post a story twice, /. goes ballistic, screaming "DUPE". But 4 people responded to my post with the exact same link. I mean, thanks and all, I burned a new CD just in case I forget it again, but did I really need 4 links to the same site?

Bang/Buck and case options

[gosand]

First figure out what you want in your custom-built system. After all, that's why you are building your own instead of buying from Dell.

Exactly. I want what is more important to me. I want a good power supply. I want whatever case I feel like getting. I don't need a keyboard, monitor, or mouse. I don't need a free crappy printer.

Usually, I buy CPUs that are not the latest (better bang/buck) but couple them with the new motherboards, decent (but not overextravagant) memory, and a nice video/TV card like the ATI All-in-wonder series.

Heh, me too. you can get a CPU that is a year old, or even older, for peanuts. I don't fall into that "CPU Envy" trap. Get a really good heatsink, like a Zalman. I did go with the ATI AIW card, and at the time it was the most expensive part of my system. You can also get better CD/DVD burners than Dell will give you.

Building your own also lets you try out the better cases, so there's less Apple envy.

Or you can re-use an existing case. I actually built my last PC in a free case. They were getting rid of an old dual-Pentium Compaq server. Huge honking tower case, weighed about 80 lbs. But I get these things:

Cooling - lots of air capacity, room for big fans.

Quiet - it is thick steel, not tinny aluminum

Working space - plenty of room inside (but I did have to buy longer cables)

Drive trays - It had SCSI drive trays that slide in the front of the case. I just removed the backplane, mounted my drives in the trays, and now I can easily take out drives. When I moved, I just popped them out, wrapped them up in a separate box, and popped them back in after unpacking.

Of course, there are some downsides.

I had to do some modding to get some things to fit, like the PSU and the motherboard. But it wasn't that difficult.

The thing is NOT portable. It is a monster. But portability was not one of my requirements. It sits about 3 feet high, but it gives me somewhere to set my X-Arcade controller. :-)

It is like buying a car. You could put neon lights under it, buy a bunch of stickers, and put a coffee can on the exhaust. Or you could invest in some quality parts that will make it a much more reliable long-term investment.

I'm sorry,

[2names]

but I will continue to go on my personal experience. Thanks for the info, though.

Re:I'm sorry,

[meatspray]

Indeed I'd hope you would :) No stealing my personal experience!!!!

Frigging in the Rigging by the Sex Pistols

[funkify]

Ahoy scurvies!

It was on the good ship Venus
By Christ, ya shoulda seen us
The figurehead was a whore in bed
And the mast, a mammoth p*nis

The captain of this lugger
He was a dirty bugger
He wasn't fit to shovel sh*t
From one place to another

Chorus:
Friggin' in the riggin'
Friggin' in the riggin'
Friggin' in the riggin'
There was f*ck all else to do

The captains name was Morgan
By Christ, he was a gorgon
Ten times a day he'd stop and play
With his f*ckin' organ

The first mate's name was Cooper
By Christ he was a trooper.
He jerked and jerked until he worked
Himself into a stupor

Chorus

The second mate was Andy
By Christ, he had a dandy
Till they crushed his c*ck on a jagged rock
For c*mming in the brandy

The cabin boy was Flipper
He was a f*ckin' nipper
He stuffed his *ss with broken glass
And circumcised the skipper

Chorus

The Captain's wife was Mabel
To f*ck she was not able
So the dirty sh*ts, they nailed her t*ts
Across the barroom table

The Captain had a daughter
Who fell in deep sea water
And by her squeals we knew the eels
Had found 'er sexual quarters

Repeat Chorus to Fade

HA!

[2names]

Good one. :)

Ahem...

[KlaymenDK]

Really Slick screen savers (Windows-only...gah.) The fireworks one is fun though, smoke and delayed crackles and what have you.

Re:So D:\ automatically is on a different drive th

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid Linux users, not knowing anything about Windows and yet making stupid jokes about it at the same time...