PC Tech Thread

^ not required but certainly a good idea.

Well he did say he'd like to play the odd game and budget is £500.

I agree but i'm not sure he's talking about the next Crysis etc. Also, if he only has a CRT at home, most modern graphics cards have forgone the VGA cable.

I had to have one of these for my Graphics card (second screen is VGA)

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?hl=en&q=dvi+to+vga&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.1357700187,d.d2k&biw=1209&bih=420&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=7504742066661884170&sa=X&ei=3NPuUPGJMPCX0QWUp4CoCg&ved=0CE0Q8wIwAA

Same here. It's not VGA I'm just too lazy to find a proper cable..

yeah the pc i've got at home was poo-pooed by fred flinstone
he said it wasn't up to scratch as it had only one dinosaur running the processor inside it
even his had a twin dinosaur processor

my gaming is all PS3 related

Ok if you don't want the graphics card on Souls recommendation spend the extra on an SSD and More RAM or another HDD - you'll soon fill it with FLAC.

How old is your old one dicki?

from around 2000 and even when i got it is was a few years old ... and had been sitting on the street for a few days

it struggles to start up !

I have an old Dell 8100 desktop from similar era that you can fight wiganwill for.
It needs a hard drive.

i've seen wigan will ... he's built like the proverbial outhouse, he's lithe and wiry
i wouldn't win that fight

and funnily enough i do have a hard drive sitting on my desk at home

I smell blood...

dicki, for what you've described make sure you get an external hard drive like the Western Digital book things.

Basically... if this is the store of your music and photos that will take days and weeks to scan and rip... have a backup. You never want to do this work again, it's very labour intensive and if you ever lost it you know you'll wished that you had a backup.

upgradable .. would that be something i should look at to add extra memory / speed to the processor ?

I doubt you'll upgrade anything but the memory and storage if your port of call on PC specs is here... You'd ask elsewhere if you were on the Gamers' 12-month CPU/GPU/Motherboard upgrade cycle

is there somewhere i can get an idiots guide to what is inside a pc
what does what
what does what mean
i like the idea of building a pc but i really wouldn't know my ARP's from my ... nope that isn't gonna work, can't find a computer based term similar to elbow
ah well

i don't really know to much about all the parts
that might be a good place to start then see what options i have

CPU central processing unit but what the heck does it do ?
ram memory how does that differ from hard drive memory
what the heck is a DDR
how many bits should i have

you know the kind of questions a person from the 1950's would ask if they time travelled to today and started a Computer Science course

dicki, for what you've described make sure you get an external hard drive like the Western Digital book things.

Basically... if this is the store of your music and photos that will take days and weeks to scan and rip... have a backup. You never want to do this work again, it's very labour intensive and if you ever lost it you know you'll wished that you had a backup.

i do have an external storage device bought again around 2002 not sure the size but i think i might upgrade that for the music and photo collection

Logic Pro has left my 128gb ssd with only 50gb left and I'm already keeping my iTunes library on an external drive. First world problems.

It's a slow (by ssd standards) apple oem toshiba with an ancient sandforce controller so I have a continuous time machine back up.

Looking at the 256 gb Samsung 840 pro as an eventual replacement but would rather 512, they're just so damn expensive at that size though. I'd also like to leave it as long as possible to let the firmware mature and the price to come down.

Have you considered a Seagate Momentus XT?

I'm thinking about getting one of these.

Does anyone know how to get different versions of Windows to play nicely together?

I have Windows 8 on one side of a HD and Mountain Lion on another (it's a Hackintosh).

It was all working perfectly until I installed Windows 7 on a different disk. Now I get the Windows boot manager and when I try to run 8 it crashes.

This is despite the fact that when I installed Windows 7 onto the other disk I had the original disk unplugged, because I have had problems with multiple Windows installations before being 'co-dependent' - for ages my parents PC wouldn't start without the old HD in. To get round this I had to take that disc out and reinstall Windows with just the new drive in.

So as I had it unplugged it should be exactly the same, but it's not! And boot manager gives me a choice of Windows 7 or 8, even though 7 isn't plugged in.

How do Microsoft manage to be this shit? It's actually quite impressive.

Does anyone understand this crap?

is there somewhere i can get an idiots guide to what is inside a pc
what does what
what does what mean
i like the idea of building a pc but i really wouldn't know my ARP's from my ... nope that isn't gonna work, can't find a computer based term similar to elbow
ah well

i don't really know to much about all the parts
that might be a good place to start then see what options i have

There you go...

Seriously, I built my first one after reading this. Great advice.

thanks mr sworld i look forward to reading this over the weekend when i have some free time

Have you considered a Seagate Momentus XT?

I'm thinking about getting one of these.

Eugh, no way. I'm done with mechanical storage other than external drives... Even then.

The momentus xt is pretty quick though, so in a desktop it'd make a nice second drive.

Where do you guys order online for good prices for computer components?

Ebuyer.com is probably the easiest place to shop with good delivery. Dabs are okay as well although i dont use them often.