PC Tech Thread

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I was playing with ebuyer last night. I kept getting red exclamation marks...
Is it fair to aim for £100 per component?

Just playing tho.

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.

Apparently in real world performance for most things it's as fast as an SSD.

You just have to give it a little while to learn what you access the most.

I was playing with ebuyer last night. I kept getting red exclamation marks...
Is it fair to aim for £100 per component?

Just playing tho.

Depends what you want it to do. You don't need to spend that much on memory or a motherboard, but you'd be better off spending more on a processor.

Back in October I spent £60 on memory (16Gb of fast DDR3), £60 on a motherboard and £160 on a processor because I wanted a decent one.

You don't need to spend that much on a power supply either, although I did because I wanted the most efficient one I could get.

I buy from wherever's cheapest basically, unless they seem dodgy. There are plenty of sites who are now big and have good prices but you've probably never heard of (e.g. Ballicom). Never had a problem.

I'm about to buy two 1TB+ SATA III drives for a NAS.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to brand reliability etc?

I just always buy Western Digital Green editions nowadays. Yet to have one fail on me.

^ this. I have four 2tb wd greens in my raid array and they're quiet, efficient and haven't failed.

I just always buy Western Digital Green editions nowadays. Yet to have one fail on me.

^ this. I have four 2tb wd greens in my raid array and they're quiet, efficient and haven't failed.

Thanks for this. Will purchase.

I am looking at upgrading the RAM in my laptop, help give it a new lease of life.
Apparently my computer takes DDR3.
also a quick internets comes up telling me i can only use 4gb (something about 32bit windoze?)
Now, will any 4gb DDR3 fit/ work? or is there something more i need to find out?

It depends what version of Windoze you are running.
XP will only be able to deal with 4GB
7 will be able to deal with plenty more
Vista I'm not even going to mention because its a POS

What model of laptop do you have?

It's windows 7 on a Toshiba L500-1XL, a good few years old now.
its got 2gb (stock) in it
edit: im running the 64bit windows, it seems

It doesn't say on Toshiba's site what the memory config is, whether its 1 x 2GB or 2 x 1GB.
The easiest way to find this out without opening the thing up is using a little thing called WMI, now this sounds harder than it is, but I use this all the time to find out memory configs without having to open laptops up.

Open a command prompt as administrator and type 'wmic' the prompt should change to something lie 'wmic:root\cli>' then type 'memorychip' and hit enter, it should tell you what chips you have in what slots and how many slots you have

you can have a look at this link for more details http://www.walkernews.net/2009/11/21/use-wmi-to-find-out-ram-slot-in-used-and-memory-size-of-each-slot/

Once you know what you have onboard you can buy accordingly, make sure you get 1066Mhz speed DDR3 ram and you should be good to go. From what I can see 4GB is the max your machine will take, which is limited by the motherboard. So you'll want to get 2 x 2GB sticks to put in there.
I usually buy my memory from Crucial, it's cheap and reliable.
Here's an useful page for your laptop
http://www.crucial.com/uk/upgrade/Toshiba-memory/Satellite+L500+Series/Satellite+L500-1XL-upgrades.html

Hope that helps.

cheers! will look at 2x2gb

Or, use crucial's thing to find the spec, then buy it from ebuyer, novatech, scan.co.uk...

You don't need to spend that much on a power supply either, although I did because I wanted the most efficient one I could get.

I think this is false economy. A cheap PSU can fry a motherboard, memory, graphics card or processor if it blows.

Get a 'known name' unit that is at least bronze efficiency. It might seem expensive to start with but you can keep using when you upgrade the current computer.

If you're not fussed about the gaming side and want Intel, something prebuilt like this could work:

http://www.ebuyer.com/395297-zoostorm-desktop-pc-7873-0436

Plenty of storage and computing power to do what you need. Tower is nowhere near as ugly either :)

Hi Soul ,
With regards to this PC deal. To whom do I go if there are issues with the PC ? Who honours the gurantee in this instance. I think this is as good a deal as I've seen and the 2TB memory makes it perfect for my FLAC's and scanned photo's.

Yes never, never, never scrimp on a power supply. If that goes wrong your whole set up could be f--ked.

dicki - you'd speak to ebuyer direct. They are great with returns - I've spent a lot of money over the years with them and they've always helped- even when I've had to return things to the manufactures direct they've done the chasing for me.

Get a 'known name' unit that is at least bronze efficiency. It might seem expensive to start with but you can keep using when you upgrade the current computer.

Gold efficiency is really not that hard to get affordably. These also tend to be the quiet ones. >>>>> http://www.silentpcreview.com/

ah right so it is in effect a shop and not a front for a range of computer shop / sellers

I was saying he didn't need to spend a hundred quid on a power supply (which is what I spent).

For that though I got a Seasonic X-460 fanless PSU which is over 90% efficient.

Point is most people don't need that level of power supply, I just wanted something as quiet and efficient as possible.

dicki - you'd speak to ebuyer direct. They are great with returns - I've spent a lot of money over the years with them and they've always helped- even when I've had to return things to the manufactures direct they've done the chasing for me.

^ This.

They're really excellent with returns and very helpful. That being said, you are very unlikely to have any issues. Failure rate on modern components are minuscule in the extreme.

and tech support. if my RAM conflicts with my ROM's and I need PC advise do they also have a helpline for stuff like that ?