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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."
Is this REALLY front page news? Must be a sloooow news day to have such a low-brow article grace the front page.
"...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.
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.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
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).
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.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
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.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
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!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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...
"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...
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.
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.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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.
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...
" 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!
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).
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.
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.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
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.
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.
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.