Recent content by man114

WD is among the last of the drives I'll buy. I'll never buy a Samsung, they never gave me an RMA on a warranty drive until after the warranty expired (and it was far from close to the warranty expiring when it failed, they just kept delaying me). I just had a Maxtor (Seagate era) die after about...

If anyone is interested in a 7200rpm laptop drive, Best Buy has these on clearance in the kit form, not just bare drives. You get an enclosure which you use to duplicate your current drive (and software to do so), then you take your old drive out of the computer and it becomes an external hard...

First pair of DDR2-667s went dead after two months not even with an overclock, just factory normal settings. They sent two more and those won't even post in the system, but my Samsungs do, why PNY? Because your chips are defective. Its not my computer, I'm on it while I'm talking to you using a...

At least with Visiontek's 2600 pro you can force the official PCIe drivers from ATI's site in XP and it will work, but you can't install the catylist control center if you try to do that. So its a tradeoff. Compatibility is good and the card works fine with every game I tried after doing this...

I recently got a HD 2600 pro AGP job with 512MB DDR2 for $25 and there are plenty of them on ebay for not much more. I put it in my girlfriend's 2ghz P4, which also uses RDRAM (running XP and only has 512MB of it at that). Depending on what you want to run, it might run and better than you...

To get an exact #s I ran the 3DMark05 on my XPS and my girlfriend's computer tonight. Her's (Dell Precision 340) scored 4107 using the 2600 HD with the below listed configuration. Given that that computer is obviously slower in the CPU department than both of these, I think you've got some...

What P4 3.0ghz is it, if it is a 3.0 and not 3.06? That would be my question. There were many many variations. I did some fooling around too. I have the x1650 pro in a PCIe as irony would have it, mainly a cheap placeholder I picked up at BB last summer for $50. The computer is as follows...

I stopped at Target yesterday after work yesterday and stumbled across a WD Essentials 500GB hard drive on clearance for $64.98. I really needed this as I had 1250GB to spare already but I guess 1750GB of hard drive space isn't too bad either. Anyway while looking for a review of the drive I...

Sounds to me like the video, my sister just got her laptop back after similar odd problems and the video on the mobo bit the dust. Still check the airflow around the video card and make sure its not getting too hot. If you push it and its not getting proper cooling it will lock up and do all...

Does the computer have to currently be in use? If so I may have the oldest computer that still sees some use... circa 1994 Packard Bell Legend 104CD Supreme originally a Pentium 60 currently running a 233MMX with a powerleap module USR Sportster Vi 14.4 modem (so old it was made in the...

I used one of those fabled PC Chips M590 boards with the fake 100mhz bus speed (was really 90mhz) to overclock a K6-2 400 to 500mhz back in the day. Thing was rock solid stable at 500 with relatively standard cooling (slighly larger than average heatsink/fan), could run games and benchmarks all...

3dfx brings back the good memories. I have a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI in an old computer, bought the card on sale somewhere cheap. In its day it was pretty darn quick. Still got the original box, shrinkwrap isn't even off it entirely, I just cut the shrink at the end and removed the card. I always...

Hit ctrl-alt-del and see what the running processes are, if any of them are taking large amounts of CPU load it can cause that to happen. Even on a good system if some sort of app is hogging the resources it can drag the thing to a halt. I'd be inclined to think this could be the case. Typically...

I'd venture to say it is a combination of both, if you have a system low on ram the computer will be writing to the hard drive for its page file, slowing down the time it takes to boot, if you want to see this happen take a few RAM sticks out of your computer and put some small chips in if...

I've got two 250GB SATA drives running in RAID0. As with anything, just back up everything of importance to some other sort of hard drive if you're worried about losing it. Externals are fairly cheap. I've got a lot of stuff backed up on an old Seagate Elite 47 SCSI drive in another...