Upgrading to Windows 7

[joshriddle 29]

Not long I will be getting a 64 bit- Windows 7 OS for my new computer. I have estimated that building one would cost $600. I want something that is commercial, big hard drive, and a Pentinum I5 Intel. I hear the best motherboard for the money would be a Gigabyte (brand) motherboard. Put my Nvidia Ge Force 8100 GS on it, have a 400 watt power supply, and someting with 220 GB of storage. At first in the way of storage I was thinking a terabyte but that would jump the cost to probably $1000, so. Perhaps 4 GB RAM, and a CD-RW drive that can play CD and DVD, and write and re-write them. I will transfer all my files and settings to the new one. Do that because of all the plugins.

I am going to get my hard drive this between tommorow and this weekend, back up the important stuff, plugins, SimCity 4, and dump all the rest of it. SC4 is the one thing that I don't want to reinstall, or mess with again. I looked at 11 bad block errors on it, our family computer expert thinks that my hard drive is going out. Looks like I have to go, my drive may be coming down to it's final hours. I will be back tommorow. Hopefully.

Now I certainly hope it won't exceed my budget of $600.

Processor: Intel Pentinum 5: $190

Motherboard: $65

220 G Hard Drive Disk: $70

4 GB RAM: $125

I allready have a PSU, case, graphics card, and monitor, so that lowers the cost. Anyway, rounded up, that comes to about $450, going for no more than $600, so I may be able to get a pretty big machine with that kind of money. Let me know what you think, or if adjustments should be made.

[s.i.X 13]

The guy who sold me my new computer a month ago (and "used" computer, but with Win7 ultimate) had a TB external drive that he got in the US (where he is from) for about a hundred bucks. At least set up a system where more hard drives can be added in the future.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Good point about a big external drive.  I have two.  If you are getting a new drive, make sure it has a fast connection.  Firewire seems to be the best.  The beauty of external drives is that they can go home at night.

[joshriddle 29]

I have officially decided that I am going to buy a 500 GB IBU drive. I may get a USB drive, in case I get into things like pictures, music, video, movies, etc, in the future. All that takes up a lot of space. But I am using a 40GB right now, and I am only taking up 35% of the space, about 15GB of storage is being used. Good thing there aren't any users sharing quotas on this tiny little thing! So I have pretty much decided wisely on the components.

500 GB IBU Hard Drive: $63.99 confirmed

4 GB RAM: $99 estimate

Intel Pentinum I5 Processor: $150-$200 estimate

PSU: allready covered

Monitor: allready covered

Mice/Keyboards: allready covered

Case: Perhaps, if so around $40

Gigabyte (brand) motherboard with Windows 7 Ultimate: $60-$70 estimate

So that tops it off. my estimated total is going to be around $444-$484 depending on if I get the new case. I will be getting the hard disk drive Saturday, so I am psyched about that. Almost ten times more storage capacity. Now I don't know about an external drive yet. I would have to learn more about them.

And I will have to be super cautious with it from now on. Just to be on the safe side whenever I am not using my computer it would be best to shut the whole thing down. I hear it making grinding noises so I will do it now before it blows or something. CYA later.

[L'orignaux inconnu 0]

Now why would anyone want to go to the lastest Mi$take.  All you get is a bundle of new bugs.  Unless you really need something that isn't available elsewhere, why not just stay on XP?

[Meastro444 1]

Originally posted by: L'orignaux inconnu

Now why would anyone want to go to the lastest Mi$take.  All you get is a bundle of new bugs.  Unless you really need something that isn't available elsewhere, why not just stay on XP?

quote>

This is the most ignorant remark I''ve heard so far. Windows 7 works perfectly fine. If you have the option to upgrade then go for it.

[-Lexus- 2]

Originally posted by: L'orignaux inconnu

Now why would anyone want to go to the lastest Mi$take.  All you get is a bundle of new bugs.  Unless you really need something that isn't available elsewhere, why not just stay on XP?

quote>

Oh wow, thats just dumb. Ive had more fatal crashes with XP then I have so far with Windows 7. Not to mention the fact its like 10 times faster then XP and looks much better. 

Seriously, Microsoft did a very good job on Windows 7. Its just to bad they first released and sold this open Beta called vista. 

[L'orignaux inconnu 0]

Interesting reaction from the choir.  I know XP cold, and I know what to expect.  Vista was such a mess that it has turned me off new Windows releases for a long, long time.  If I am going to have a BSOD, I want at least a chaance of knowing why.  If Microshaft ever guarantees in writing on pain of lashes for the programmers that there will be no more mysterious crashes, then I might consider an upgrade.  Meanwhile, I haven't had an XP crash in, let me see, over a year.

[joshriddle 29]

Originally posted by: L'orignaux inconnu

Now why would anyone want to go to the lastest Mi$take.  All you get is a bundle of new bugs.  Unless you really need something that isn't available elsewhere, why not just stay on XP?

quote>

Because of all the fancy gadgets, way better performance, and it looks way fancier. I tested Win7 and it is the most beautiful OS Microsoft ever released.

And the thing with 7 is that if I can't connect to the internet, then you click diagnose connection problems, it actually repairs it!!!! Instead of a dumb little old thing. It won't repair it or fix it.

Not to mention, as with any OS, the crashing is cause of your hard drive. The only time computer will send you the BSOD or just crash and never come back on, that is due to the OS. Mostly I do believe that is cause of the OS oveheating, or something like that. My hard drive has 16 bad blocks so I have to be extremely cautious with them.

[SC4BOY 20]

Aside from all the emo content, XP will cease support in a few months (this means no more functional or security patches).. Since the cost of W7 and XP are basically the same, you'd be cutting off your own nose to spite your face to get XP as a new OS.

[L'orignaux inconnu 0]

When XP goes out of support, there is always Linux.  X11 works pretty well now.  If you run SUSE you get a default X11 desktop that looks pretty good.  As with all Linux replacements for Windows you can try it from the CD without installing it.

I am sorry for all you guys in the choir, but the choir director has had his hands in my pocket for the last time.  With a small learning curve you can get all the milk you want and you don't have to buy the cow.  The milkman comes regularly with new fixes for new attacks that are found, too.

There is nothing on any Windows platform that I want any more.  I only do social lthings like e-mail, forums and facebook.  I don't write applications any more, and if I did, I would work very hard to keep them totally portable, needing at most to be recompiled from the source.  Getting locked in to things like Visual Studio .NET means not only the choir director but the high-priests get into your pants as well.

I grew up in the day of free software, when if you bought a computer you got all the stuff necessary to make it run and develop applications too.  Then the It Beats Me company got the idea that all that software cost a lot more than the hardware and unbundled.  Everyone followed suit because you had to keep up with Its a Big Machine.  The Free Software Foundation is doing a very good job of undoing this mess, and I am a supporter.

[joshriddle 29]

You buy a computer, sometimes, you have to install the OS yourself, especially with computers you build. And correct me if I am wrong, but the package to install the OS comes with your machine. It is either a boot disk or something. And a lot of software is free, called "freeware".

Now all I will be needing is Win7, and a new motherboard and processor. Which, if I am getting a new hard disk drive, then you have to reinstall your OS. I don't know if my board, chip, and processor can handle Win7, but if it can, that would be the OS to install.

Of course, when XP goes out of support or warranty, we rely on our computer wizard. In fact, we don't even ask the other people like Geek Squad or Computer Service Center. We ask him.

And my computer, is gonna ba a big joshriddle special, I am not buying, I am building, so each component may have its own warranty.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Except the software.  Software is completely unwarranted, which is why my French friend and I refuse to pay for something that, despite claims of testing and testimonials from satisfied customers, still has no warranty of servicability for any use or task.  I am sure we have all struggled through the legalese in the EULA the Microshaft issues.  It is chancy at best with an OEM-produced box.  With a home box like yours, you really are on your own.

With that big disk, you could partitiion it and multiload XP, 7, SUSE, SOLARIS, UBUNTU, and anything else you wanted to test.  If you load XP first, then Win 7 it should set you up with Microsoft's multiple boot switcher.  Then if you load a Linux product, it will set you up with the GRand United Bootloader (GRUB) which will give you a nice screen to choose what system to start.  This is called having your cake in many flavours before deciding which one you are going to decorate.

If fooling with operating systems doesn't attract you, then forget it and just load the devil you know.  I enjoy comparing systems and watching them fail.  One of my great talents is causing programs to blow up or do funny things.  It makes me very good at quality assurance testing.

[joshriddle 29]

Well, I figured out that they didn't have the disk I was wanting at Best Buy, so I wound up with one with 320 GB. My dad has one like that and hasn't begun to use a shred of it, and I only used 15 GB on my old one, so it should be plenty fine. Anyhow, my intention for it is SimCity 4. Just something powerful enough to operate over 2 gb of plugins. My game lags extremely bad, and I personally think the game just cannot process so many addons to the game like that. My game takes 7 minutes to load sometimes. I am hoping this will work better. But my computer I am going to build is going to be one that I can add more drives in the future.

I ended up with a Western Digital 320 gb desktop PATA. I may add an external drive in the future, if I need like tons of extra space.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The speed up you may get with the new disk will only work if your swap space is large and contiguous.  After you have installed Wiin 7, check around and see if you can:

1.  turn the swap file off

2.  drop it  (You'll have to boot here)

3.  take control of the swap space (you could do this on XP)

4.  Set it as large as you can, at least 4GB, with the same values for minimum and maximum

6.  Turn it on by rebooting.

It would be better if your swap file was on a big memory card or in actual memory, but that needs extra hardware.

Oh, did I ever say I do know a few things about operating systems?

[joshriddle 29]

Thanks for telling me that! My swap space, I think is going to be around 4-5 GB, and I barely use a fraction of the other ones storage. So that narrows it down a lot. Now just gotta decide what kind of processor would be best for me, and the motherboard I think I can just get anything.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Watch what you get in a mobo.  The crystal on there controls your bus clock, and you want to be certain everything you have will work on the bus.

[joshriddle 29]

Plan on getting a Gigabyte, with, meh, I got nothing........

[L'orignaux inconnu 0]

Ooops!  Wha hoppen?  Too much $$?  Check and make sure your processors have separate L1 & L2 caches and see if you can have an L3 cache or that the processors have segmentation, and not just paging.

Josh, why would anyone want an edition of 7 other than ultimate?  I just looked at the comparison chart, and for the few extra bucks, it just isn't worth going for a smaller package.  Since I am not a windows user anymore, I am completely stonkered by their reasoning, as perhaps are you?

With my Linux based system, I can custom include thousands of packages to suit my purposes.  The basic disk, after the first update to make it current, leaves you with what I would call Windows 7 Ultimate equivalent, then you can go from there.  If you have a big enough machine, you can download the media studio which includes several graphics, sound and video editors.  to run the video editors you need lots and lots and lots of machine.  I wouldn't try it with less than a quad core system.  And, of course, all of it is free of charge.

Good luck with Win 7.  I assume you are going 64-bit. 

By the way, the RISC processor that IBM uses for AIX is 128-bit and their version of UNIX thinks everything has a core address (very much like Multics of the 1950's and '60's).  The paging is so smooth you wouldn't notice it if you weren't watching the disks.

[joshriddle 29]

I recently heard Ultimate doesn't add to professional in almost any way. I may just get Professional, save a few bucks. And something, I think, you want something with a lot of L2 cache. But I still am going with an I5 and run it on all 4 processors and see how that runs. And yes, I am going with the 64bit application. And I don't know yet if they have seperate L1 and 2 caches.

[hym 358]

Originally posted by: joshriddle

I recently heard Ultimate doesn't add to professional in almost any way. I may just get Professional, save a few bucks. And something, I think, you want something with a lot of L2 cache. But I still am going with an I5 and run it on all 4 processors and see how that runs. And yes, I am going with the 64bit application. And I don't know yet if they have seperate L1 and 2 caches.quote>

Windows 7 Ultimate really only adds a couple of features over Professional.  One of those would be BitLocker, and the other is support for 35 other languages that you probably don't even know.  I would suggest going with Professional.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Probably a good point.  Ultimate gives you bragging rights, and is, what, $40 more?  Forty bucks buys other things, like hardware, or helps anyway.

[joshriddle 29]

Indeed. And If there is a foreign language in the internet I come across to, then I can always translate it. And now, what is BitLocker?

A Nonny Moose: I would bet I could use that $40 bucks to add 6 USB Ports. I have a lot of hardware. I am using 5/6 on mine.

And I think I allready have enough hardware.

Mouse

Keyboard

Wireless Internet Adaptor

Printer

Speakers

Occasionally the camera, if I take a picture and want to transfer it to my computer.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Last time I bought a USB add-on card it had five ports and was $12.  Canadian.  Worked just fine.

You have two choices with the wi-fi board.  Password and encrypt it, or scrap it.  You don't want any freeloaders sitting outside your house with their laptop using up your bandwidth.

[joshriddle 29]

To me securing it would make sense, but would encrypting it help the speed of the connection?

I don't even know if we could anyway, our whole family uses one network that we set up, so I don't know. But our family computer wizard, my uncle has probably would just set it back the next time he comes over and get on to us (or me) about it.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If you have a whole mob of people, encryption is probably out.  Compared to the speed of the net, encryption is so fast in the computer it might as well be free.  It is just a nuisance for the guy trying to listen to what you are sending out.  Passwording the WiFi for a small group of users isn't all that hard.  I think everyone can have his own password, and it definitely keeps interlopers off your bandwidth.  Try that out on your geek uncle.

I am having a wild time trying to get gmax to run with Linux/wine.  I got it loaded, got it up, entered the license key, it came up, so I shut it down.  Now when I try to get it up it complains that the .dll's won't initiate, and dies.  I am da..ed well going to solve this, and so I have signed up with winehq to become the maintainer for the wine/gmax interface.  There is lots of helpful discussion down there but nobody was looking after that one. 

After I solve this, I am going back to makinig wierd BAT buildings that are not square.  I like rounded corners and edges, domes, cylinders, etc.  I have had it with Bauhaus designs.  If you want to see some of my early work, they are on the STEX registered to my old ID of N_O_Body.  There are four, one water cheat, one power cheat that removes all pollution, a regular commercial building (The Moose Factory Bar), and an education cheat.  I don't have any compunctions about giving funny attributes to my BAT stuff.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If you have a whole mob of people, encryption is probably out.  Compared to the speed of the net, encryption is so fast in the computer it might as well be free.  It is just a nuisance for the guy trying to listen to what you are sending out.  Passwording the WiFi for a small group of users isn't all that hard.  I think everyone can have his own password, and it definitely keeps interlopers off your bandwidth.  Try that out on your geek uncle.

I am having a wild time trying to get gmax to run with Linux/wine.  I got it loaded, got it up, entered the license key, it came up, so I shut it down.  Now when I try to get it up it complains that the .dll's won't initiate, and dies.  I am da..ed well going to solve this, and so I have signed up with winehq to become the maintainer for the wine/gmax interface.  There is lots of helpful discussion down there but nobody was looking after that one. 

After I solve this, I am going back to makinig wierd BAT buildings that are not square.  I like rounded corners and edges, domes, cylinders, etc.  I have had it with Bauhaus designs.  If you want to see some of my early work, they are on the STEX registered to my old ID of N_O_Body.  There are four, one water cheat, one power cheat that removes all pollution, a regular commercial building (The Moose Factory Bar), and an education cheat.  I don't have any compunctions about giving funny attributes to my BAT stuff.

[nathanthemayor 1,261]

My dad says that he will upgrade our windows vista to a windows 7 because he says that vista has toooo many problems=(

[nathanthemayor 1,261]

My dad says that he will upgrade our windows vista to a windows 7 because he says that vista has toooo many problems=(

[Ocram's Razr 963]

Windows 7 64 bit works great for me.