What kind of computer do you have?

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Main system:

Athlon64 3000 (Soon to be 3700) watercooled with a kingwin (www.kingwin.com) AWC-1 water cooler (NOT RECOMMENDED)

Gigabyte K8NSN-XP socket 754 motherboard

AGP8X 6800GT 256M made by eVGA

Using the built in sound (it is WICKED COOL)

1 120 gig IDE ATA-100 HDD
1 80 gig IDE ATA-100 HDD (Suspected 5400 RPM)

512 megs ULTRA brand DDR-3200 RAM

Antec trupower 550W power supply

Chenming full tower case
DVD player, 52x16x54 CD-RW

Upgrades left to go;
WD raptor, 1 74 gig (Not gonna do a RAID array)
1.5 GB PC4000 RAM from PNY, Kingston, Crucial, or Corsair, whichever is cheapest
4 250 gig HDDs in a RAID0+1 array for speedy storage

Also, my secondary system is a P3 500 300 something megs of RAM (one 128 stick shorts in and out after rebooting) 10 gig HDD 128 meg Radeon 9200SE SB awe32

Then a ton of other P1s, am upgrading to super socket 7 boards soon, I wanna goof around with a processor cluster, it sounds like fun..

By the way, the P3 500, my switch, my router, and my cable modem are all battery backed.

Desktop - Custom:

Dual Pentium 3 1ghz
Cheapest dual p3 motherboard ever -> ECS D6VAA
512mb SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
2x 40gb Seagate IDE ATA-100 drives (Barracuda ATA IV)
1x 120gb Seagate IDE ATA-100 drive (Barracuda 7200.7)
Pioneer 16x dvd+/-r drive
500w power supply
Antec case

Laptop - Dell Inspiron 9100:

14.1" UWXGA screen
P4 3.0ghz
512mb DDR SDRAM
40gb HD
ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 Pro
standard CDRW drive (don't remember features).


I use both regularly, but the laptop I mostly use for college and gaming.

Interesting P3, does the dual processor setup really work that well? I've never tried one out.

Dual processors are a nice setup. You need Windows 2000 or XP pro to utilize it though. If they use HT technology, you have to use XP pro.

Kitsune, how come you don't want to use RAID?

Mine is a 1998 vintage 266MHz Power PC Macintosh (last of the 'beige boxes') running MacOSX 10.2.8 (hasn't crashed in the nearly two years since its OSX upgrade), 224MB RAM, 60 GB HD, firewire and USB cards, 'typical-sized' CRT monitor, external DVD burner, DSL service, etc.

I'm still amazed that this 7 YO relic keeps on going and going and going. It isn't screamingly fast when running in OSX mode, but it still does what I want it to do with total reliability. It also screams like crazy whenever I reboot it into 'classic' (MacOS 9.2) mode. Being a Macintosh, it is also immune to most of the 'nasties' that are permeating the 'PC' side of internetland, too, something that I greatly appreciate in that I have little patience when wrestling with computers at the OS level.



Mike

I don't want to use RAID due to the increased chance of failure and data corruption, the only way to avoid that is to use RAID 0+1 (Striping and mirroring) and that requires four identical hard drives.

The nasties on the PC side are because people don't know how to use their PCs, they go to irreputable sites and are hit with them.

This home network I'm on has viruses passed around it all the time. My section of it, which is behind a secure switch, is never bothered.

Use good qualitard hard drives from a reputable manufacurer such as Western Digital and the risk of failure is minimal. I've heard nothing but good things about WD Raptors in RAID 0 array.

I've always used Windows 2000 on it, and yes I like it a lot. Although you don't really see a big speed increase, the multitasking is very nice. I like having lots and lots of programs running at once so it does it very well for me.

However, I installed Windows XP recently, because I needed to resize my c: partition (it was too small for too long), so I decided to give XP a try once again along with the resize. I've never been a fan of XP. Even though I'm still using XP on this, because I just haven't had the time to fool around with it more, I dislike it more and more by the days. During the summer I'll switch back to 2000. XP is way too sluggish on even a dual p3 1ghz when running more than say 10 tasks. Also, programs start up slower, and i get more freezes/crashes than I did with 2000.

(Well that was kind of off topic, but that's my 2 cents).

I have a Toshiba Laptop Computer.

I'm sticking with 2K until linux gets good directX emulation, then it's bye bye microsoft.

Iunno, I guess I'll try a RAID 0 if I get 2 WD raptors, but probably not.

Here is my system:

AMD Barton Mobile overclocked to 2.5ghz @1.7vcore
Abit NF2 rev 2.0
Geforce FX 5900xt won’t overclock
Onbourd sound and no speakers just a headset
80GB Seagate HDD 7200rpm
DVDrw Drive and backup CDrw Drive
1GB of pc3200 Ram @ 2.0 3 3 11
JeanTech Light Fusion case
Windows 98 and XP pro in Duel Boot configuration
460W PSU

I am not sure which screen I have but its not bad. I also enjoy building computers and deciding which hardware to choose, this one was built about 6 months ago and just recently I got a new JeanTech case and did a rebuild.

Here are some pictures:
http://server2.uploadit.org/files/redone-putor3.JPG
http://server2.uploadit.org/files/redone-putor5.JPG

#1

Intel Celeron 2.3 GHz
500MB memory (DDR 266)
400 Mhz FSB
DVD-ROM + CD RW drives
HD1: 40 Gig, Linux (Fedora Core 3) booting from Grub.
HD2: 80 Gig, Win XP Home.
nVidia geforce 4 graphics (64 MB)

#2

Intel P4, 2.4 Ghz
750 MB Memory (DDR266)
400 FSB (I think)
DVD-ROM+CDRW
HD1: 80 Gig, Fedora Core 3
HD2: 80 Gig, Win XP Pro
ATI Graphics card (I think)

#3

Sun Ultra 30 Creator 3D
233 Mhz Ultra Sparc Processor
250 MB Memory
12 & 8 Gig SCSI drives (Solaris 10)

Main use for #3 is cross platform testing on 64-bit big-endian systems.
#1 is main development + game box

Planning upgrade of #1 to P4+HT & 1 Gig mem (when I can afford £900 for a decent set of parts).

These are the specs for my family's home computer: -

AMD Athlon XP 2200+

Asus A7V series motherboard

512MB of DDR 333 RAM

Two hard drives: 1) 40GB Western Digital; 2) 20GB (either seagate or a maxtor)

NVidia GForce FX TI 4400

Creative Soundblaster Audigy

On the #3, what's it run like? Any fun? Where can I grab one to experiment with/on?

I completely missed cyrix, unfortunately, either it would have given me bragging rights or something to make fun of, heh heh.

I got the Sun box from eBay for £300, including the monitor (weighs about 38 Kg).

The processor is very slick as it is not confined by the intel/pc architecture and can utilize new advances much more readily. It's a Sparc RISC processor, 2MB of cache, so it will outperform most Celeron and P4 chips.

Software is expensive but I believe a free copy of Solaris 10 can be got from Sun, I got Solaris 9 also from eBay with Oracle Enterprise Edition.

Graphics are not used much, as I'm primarily developing data processing, file handling and DB internals.

I've got a copy of Dominions 2 which will work on Solaris, so I might try that at the weekend to see what performance is like.

The only problem with the Ultra was the monitor and getting it working. You have to break out of the boot sequence and type (with a black screen and no text) a series of commands to find (by luck) the correct resolution for the screen and graphics card.

I mainly use Bourne Shell in solaris, I never use GUIs for development. All C++ debugging is done using command line debuggers (except if I'm desperate).

An Ultra 30 would cost £25000 new ($40000+) but on eBay they can be got for <£500.

Considering getting an HP box soon as I already have the HPUX install CDs, but there;s not enough room for such a big box at the moment (twice the size of a tower PC).

my computer;


P IV 3.2 gigahertz
6600 PCI ex. w/ 256 meg
2 gigabytes of DD2 533 ram
80 gigabyte HD
800 mhz bus
Lotta usb's, one floppy, one DVD/CD player, one CD burner and a joystick.

It will never see the internet, it is for rendering and CAD work. . .