[Cobra]

Somehow my operating system's booting operations got ****ed up. First it was preceeded by a few random lockups while I was playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault. In the second mission that I played after noticing these strange lockups, the lockups started getting longer, until finally the entire computer locked up and shortly following that I got the Blue Screen of Death.

I had to freaking format and repartition my drive and reinstall Windows. So now I've lost homework, videos, projects, and Pathways material.

Well, at least I know what it feels like.

[Mefustae]

You didn't back it all up externally?

[Cobra]

Nope, too poor to afford external drives. I've got a CD/DVD drive burner but no blank DVDs.

[EDIT] And it turns out I can't find my monitor's driver CD. ****.

[Quest_techie]

external drive enclosure, you can pick up 20 gb ide's pretty cheap <like $5 some places> and the enclosure you can get on sale for $20, GET AN ALUMINUM ONE NOT PLASTIC

edit: also when you get another drive available, totally scalable

[Getter Robo G]

what's scalable mean?

Incidentally I just reinstalled all the FS2 tools cause of my crash and tentatively started work again... Damn virus kiddies and fake security programmers selling their "Protection"... KILL THEM ALL!

[Unknown Target]

I suggest AVG antivirus. It's free and very good.

[Janos]

pour coke on your keyboard

[Quest_techie]

what's scalable mean?

Incidentally I just reinstalled all the FS2 tools cause of my crash and tentatively started work again... Damn virus kiddies and fake security programmers selling their "Protection"... KILL THEM ALL!

scalable, means if you want to put a 20gb hard drive in there you can, if you want to put a 500 gb hard drive in there you can, if you want to have 50 20 gb hard drives that you swap out, you can do that too

[Cobra]

pour coke on your keyboard

I could, I have about 3 backup keyboards from previous PCs.

Anyway, I'm considering buying an external HD but i'm more concerned with getting a better video card, preferrably AGP, as once again I don't have a PCI-E motherboard.

[Centrixo]

imho i hate pci graphics in any form, its slow, causes more errors, can give you the finger then the blue screen of death, frequent lock ups. and the list goes on because you have a pci-e or pci graphics card in your machine.

im staying with AGP. less hastle and the top range AGP cards are becoming more cheap soon enough in a few months i can get rid of this ATI Radeon 9550 modded, 9600 XT Pro. in favor for ATI X1600 AGP.

i have a secondary HDD on standby online everytime. so atleast i can transferr valuble music and files over without too much disruption. and saves money too.

[Scuddie]

imho i hate pci graphics in any form, its slow, causes more errors, can give you the finger then the blue screen of death, frequent lock ups. and the list goes on because you have a pci-e or pci graphics card in your machine.

im staying with AGP. less hastle and the top range AGP cards are becoming more cheap soon enough in a few months i can get rid of this ATI Radeon 9550 modded, 9600 XT Pro. in favor for ATI X1600 AGP.

Are you serious?

[Cobra]

imho i hate pci graphics in any form, its slow, causes more errors, can give you the finger then the blue screen of death, frequent lock ups. and the list goes on because you have a pci-e or pci graphics card in your machine.

im staying with AGP. less hastle and the top range AGP cards are becoming more cheap soon enough in a few months i can get rid of this ATI Radeon 9550 modded, 9600 XT Pro. in favor for ATI X1600 AGP.

Are you serious?

I agree, are you nuts? PCI-E is the most advanced graphics driver to date. The bugs have been worked out, and AGP is slower than PCI-E.

Plus, I use a PCI card and the only trouble I've had is not being able to play the better games. You must have had a really crappy PCI-E card.

[Centrixo]

i hate pci, PEDIOD. so yes im serious 8)

[Scuddie]

You do realize that the PCIe architecture has absolutely nothing to do with PCI, do you?  AGP, however, does have to do with it.  So basically you're saying PCIe sucks because it shares the same initials.  Well done.

[Centrixo]

do you mind. all card might have the same bloodlines, butthier coding tells me otherwise.

now people who come upto me and act all smart i will be hostile toward, so in a friendly tone, dont go there.
because i dont want it. and i know full well about whats in a pc and what is not, so cut the crap.

[Scuddie]

When you supply a valid argument that doesn't contradict itself, then I'll cut said crap.

AGP uses the PCI bus.  It shares its resources with other PCI cards at the chipset.  If you have an audigy that spams the PCI channel with noise, it will affect your AGP card (though not as much as if it were a PCI card).  AGP is said by experts as well as myself is far more unstable at 8x than 4x, and is the most stable when its GART functionality is disabled.  Essentially, AGP is a dedicated PCI channel, which is overclocked by splitting the voltage across the cycles.

PCIe does not use the PCI bus.  Its resources are entirely independant per channel, and PCI noise is non existant from one lane to the next.  Because of the nature of power/signaling being separated from the datapath, a device does not become more stable by using more or less PCIe lanes.  Essentially, PCIe is the successor to a strategy that is over 11 years old.

[IceFire]

imho i hate pci graphics in any form, its slow, causes more errors, can give you the finger then the blue screen of death, frequent lock ups. and the list goes on because you have a pci-e or pci graphics card in your machine.

im staying with AGP. less hastle and the top range AGP cards are becoming more cheap soon enough in a few months i can get rid of this ATI Radeon 9550 modded, 9600 XT Pro. in favor for ATI X1600 AGP.

i have a secondary HDD on standby online everytime. so atleast i can transferr valuble music and files over without too much disruption. and saves money too.

Just to support everyone else...I would suggest doing some reading about the PCI-Express technology.  Its new but becoming very mature in the motherboard lineups.  It has nothing to do with PCI at all and in comparison between AGP and PCI-E performance, PCI-E will win every time. I've built a multitude of systems now using PCI-E video cards and have had expected results (no issues).

So what exactly are you on about?

[Nix]

do you mind. all card might have the same bloodlines, butthier coding tells me otherwise.

now people who come upto me and act all smart i will be hostile toward, so in a friendly tone, dont go there.
because i dont want it. and i know full well about whats in a pc and what is not, so cut the crap.

Oh lol... oh wow.. someone's britches are too big too big for their britches..... 

Anywho, do you realize that those shiny AGP cards up there in ghe X1600+ range are all bridged, and lack the performance of thier native PCI-Express counterparts?  You're running an extra step right there at the hardware level with an advanced card that's built to PCI-Express specifications.  Tell me that's not efficient, rather than running natively at what the card's designed for.  Plus, you can expect AGP cards ro actually raise in price as PCI-E becomes the mainstream graphics port.  All it takes is a little bit of research, and a little history lesson from when PCI-E came out, watching price trends as they've progressed, and just a little bit of common sense. 

And Cobra, Start partitioning now, this way if your system goes, you can just reformat the system partition, rather than losing everything if you need to reformat.  That's only if you start saving your homework and important things to a seperate partition.

[CP5670]

I doubt formatting was a good choice there anyway. Crashes in games point to a hardware fault of some sort (often memory related) and Windows files can occasionally get corrupted on an unstable system. You haven't necessarily solved your problem yet.

The most reliable insurance against losing stuff is to make external backups (DVDs or whatever). Partitions won't do anything against hardware issues and even extra hard drives are vulnerable to power related issues if they're always plugged in.

On a related note, I found out last week that my Dell laptop's hard drive has somehow gotten hosed (bad sectors all over the place), although there was nothing important on there anyway. The warranty expires in February so I better get it replaced quickly, although I use that laptop maybe once in three months these days.

[aldo_14]

do you mind. all card might have the same bloodlines, butthier coding tells me otherwise.

now people who come upto me and act all smart i will be hostile toward, so in a friendly tone, dont go there.
because i dont want it. and i know full well about whats in a pc and what is not, so cut the crap.

To be fair, it's hard to have too high an opinion of someone who doesn't use capital letters or punctuation.