What to look for when shopping around for new pc

[Gee]

Rawfuls it kind of like auto mechanic. The last thing he want to deal with when he gets off work is another car. The last thing I want to deal with is cables or any home pc problem. I do not tell anyone I know outside of work that I know anything about computers anymore. Soon as they know that the only time you hear from theml. I got a problem with my home computer. Too bad. This is my home cable management style. The patch panels and switches at work look sweet. Very professional and tight cable management, but at home..... f it, I got other things I would much rather do. lol


Squeeze ftw. The extra mobos and some usb to sata/ide adapters. Throw in a extra ps with the green and black jumpered to power the other drives. Got a couple fans from some old ML530 servers to keep them cool when they start gettting too warm. We all know heat kill electronics.

Can't remember the last time I actually spend money on anything related to a pc. It had to of been one of the usb to ide adapter. But we had those fail at work and once I dug them out of the special trash can at work. I got them home and found it was faulty power cords. Once I found the problem I fixed any of the ones at work the were having the problems also. So far I haven't found anything larger then a 500mb hd in the garbage at work. Last time I was looking at buying a hd those tb sizes were close to 200 bucks. They are down to 80 now? That's a good price.

I got two 80gb hard drive that are used for an OS. One's on standby and the others running the show. It get's a virus or goes down the other get slapped in to take over. The rest are just storage drive for data backups, DVD movies, music, pictures, etc. Got a couple 500gb, couple 400, and couple 320s, 1 250 and the rest are 120gb drive. I do have a 4gb hard drive but haven't found a reason to hook it up yet. lol Maxtor, Seagate, and WDs make up the melting pot and they are all accessable by my account from my pc or the other two older pcs that are on my lan. One out in the garage and the other I keep up and running in the kitchen nook so people (neighbors and friends) don't ask to use this workstation. They can use it to access the net or whatever from it as a with a guest account. Oh, and this older pc is setup for two flat screen monitors and two tv's all independent from each other. Kind of a cool setup. I found the picture that is in the picture to be just a little small for my eyes. Decided to put the old tv to use. The two ATI cards I got installed in here have teh svga output jack in addition to the dvi out connections and the sound system runs through my Sony 7.1 surround sound receiver. Like the auto mechanic sometime I do mess around with the engine in my own car. Just to see if it can be done really.

I only have a 128mb and 256mb on the video cards. Does having a 512mb video card help a lot by freeing up you processors?

[rawfuls]

Originally Posted by Gee

Rawfuls it kind of like auto mechanic. The last thing he want to deal with when he gets off work is another car. The last thing I want to deal with is cables or any home pc problem. I do not tell anyone I know outside of work that I know anything about computers anymore. Soon as they know that the only time you hear from theml. I got a problem with my home computer. Too bad. This is my home cable management style. The patch panels and switches at work look sweet. Very professional and tight cable management, but at home..... f it, I got other things I would much rather do. lol

Very true, once upon a time I told someone, well, my mom did, and now everyones emailing me about computer questions.

I never answer em, why? Because I "never got it"....

[JERRY2KONE]

Originally Posted by rawfuls

Very true, once upon a time I told someone, well, my mom did, and now everyones emailing me about computer questions.

I never answer em, why? Because I "never got it"....

GEE just looking at your PC setup is stressful. Ya know if you got one of those Terrabite drives and combined everything that is important to you it would really make things much easier for you and it would only take up the space of the tower itself. Just a thought.

My best friend is an IT geek and we trade off for his PC skills and my mechanical skills. I help him out with his cars and he takes care of my computer needs. Otherwise the only people he deals with are his own family. Its a crack up watching him deal with his sisters telling them that the PC is working just fine so it must be the operator who is the problem.

[Gee]

Originally Posted by JERRY2KONE

GEE just looking at your PC setup is stressful. Ya know if you got one of those Terrabite drives and combined everything that is important to you it would really make things much easier for you and it would only take up the space of the tower itself. Just a thought.

My best friend is an IT geek and we trade off for his PC skills and my mechanical skills. I help him out with his cars and he takes care of my computer needs. Otherwise the only people he deals with are his own family. Its a crack up watching him deal with his sisters telling them that the PC is working just fine so it must be the operator who is the problem.

It's not bad the way it is. At work we have several network drives connecting to the desktop G:. H: I: N: M: W: plus maybe one or two local drives C: and/or D: it's just a matter of remember what is were. It can be thought of as having all your eggs in one basket. Everything stored on a single drive and if that drive goes so does all the data to an extent. There ways to recover it depending on what happens but the worst case is it is totally gone. I would love to have a large hard drive to back up the data I have on the smaller drive that I feel is important onto. I would still run the seperate drive even if I had one large drive. Old school I suppose. I still use DOS when ever I can to copy data through batch files.

When I first got into PC tweenty years ago. I wasn't a geek or the stereo type and people didn't relate the cowboy boots and belt buckled, beer guzzling, pool playing, always had a new joke guy as a person that worked on computers. There were the pretty girls I tried to impress and helped, several friends and co-workers I would help out just because I thought I could. So everyone puts thier time in helping out with others person pc problems just becasue hell we all like to help people out. The hardest part is getting someone to ask for help. The exception is the home computer. No challenge finding someone who will ask for help there. This thread for example lol It changes after a while. The home computer is a different beast all together vs a place that has corparate computers set up to a standard. You have the same software, setup the same way, running on the same hardware platfrom form cubicle to cubicle. Consistent from one workstation to the other. The problem on one is the same on the other and fixed in the same way. Home pcs ran the gammet from TSR80s to the 3' tall tower 386 power house that had a cdrom and a zip drive for backups. Different software, drivers, you don't know what the hell they installed or did to the pc or when it was working properly the last time. Just a pita and always took longer to fix then what you figured it would. I just found it easier to skirt around the quesitons of what I did for a living and found the person was more then happy to talk about themselves then to hear about what I actually did. The one word every loves to hear more then any other is their own name. We all like to talk about ourselve no matter how humble we are. Once I was told that I found it was easier to get laid listening intently to the female that was about to steal my heart then taking about writing code in Basic. If they did find out and ask a question about it. I would let them know I don't know what could be the problem but would check into what it might be while I was at work and offer to get the next beer.

See look how I ramble on talking about myself. Sorry, it would appear that I am in a rambling mood and should probably go find something more productive to do. lol



Taking my own advice and signing off for a while, but wanted to say thanks for the input from everyone and your willingness to help out.

Guy

[squeeforever]

Originally Posted by Gee

It's not bad the way it is. At work we have several network drives connecting to the desktop G:. H: I: N: M: W: plus maybe one or two local drives C: and/or D: it's just a matter of remember what is were. It can be thought of as having all your eggs in one basket. Everything stored on a single drive and if that drive goes so does all the data to an extent. There ways to recover it depending on what happens but the worst case is it is totally gone. I would love to have a large hard drive to back up the data I have on the smaller drive that I feel is important onto. I would still run the seperate drive even if I had one large drive. Old school I suppose. I still use DOS when ever I can to copy data through batch files.

If your worried about losing data or whatnot, I would simply have a harddrive (SATA because its clearly faster than IDE) for the OS and such, then have everything condensed onto one large drive set as a slave. Then, if your still worried about it, get two ($80x2 wouldn't be that bad for security and piece of mind) and run them in RAID1 config. Exact mirror of the first that way if one fails, you always have the second. If you go that route though, theres really no need for one for the OS and such though.

[squeeforever]

Originally Posted by rawfuls

Very true, once upon a time I told someone, well, my mom did, and now everyones emailing me about computer questions.

I never answer em, why? Because I "never got it"....

I hate it when that happens. My teachers laptop was having problems and I fixed it for her, then before I know it every teacher in the school is asking me to fix there computers.

[JERRY2KONE]

Originally Posted by squeeforever

I hate it when that happens. My teachers laptop was having problems and I fixed it for her, then before I know it every teacher in the school is asking me to fix there computers.

You just have to tell the first person that you do work for when he/she shares that information with others to tell them that you charge reasonably for your work. If there are hot teachers you can have some fun, and for those who are visually challenged money talks. In most cases people just do not know who to turn to for PC help, and for those places that do have PC servicing they charge through the nose for simple tasks, so jump on the band wagon and make yourself some side money under the table, or on the table if they look good.

[squeeforever]

Originally Posted by Gee

Last time I was looking at buying a hd those tb sizes were close to 200 bucks. They are down to 80 now? That's a good price.

Yup. Depends on which one you get, of course, but they can be bought that cheap rather easily. The Western Digital WD10EARS CaviarGP 1TB 64mb cache SATA II, yada yada would probably be my choice. Its more expensive than some 1TB drives, but well worthe the extra few $$. Its $117ish from GearXS.

http://www.gearxs.com/gearxs/product...ducts_id=12863

Originally Posted by JERRY2KONE

You just have to tell the first person that you do work for when he/she shares that information with others to tell them that you charge reasonably for your work. If there are hot teachers you can have some fun, and for those who are visually challenged money talks. In most cases people just do not know who to turn to for PC help, and for those places that do have PC servicing they charge through the nose for simple tasks, so jump on the band wagon and make yourself some side money under the table, or on the table if they look good.

VERY true. I graduated a couple years ago (and unfortunately none of the teachers were hot...), but next time a situation such as that arises, I will indeed make the most of it.