im1knight

Well...prebuild PCs comes with parts and labor warranty, so anything goes wrong, you can just send it back, and they give u a new one. If you build your own, it's much more trouble. Plus Prebuild PC have no problem with the hardware issue, and you don't have to worry about anything that don't work right, since it's impossible in prebuild PC. For the brand, i go with HP for sure. Dell sell for much more expensive price for the same spec. Plus Dell's costumer support is crap. I would never buy Dell in my life again. Hp's costumer support is the best i've seen so far. When i had a problem with dual boot issue, they actually gave me help that they are not responsible for, all of my 6 computers are HP, except for one Dell(the first one). and they work great

I'm currently using Logitech Attack 3 joystick for FSX. I know it's an "attack" joystick, but the function key are designed pretty well for FSX too. Plus it's pretty cheap compared to the others, and the black color fit into the rest of my computer pretty well. Plus it looks pretty modern. the following is my map key for the joystick : 1 brake, 2 AP disengage, 3 for center flight control, 4 for left rudder, 5 for right rudder, 6 full throttle, 7 reverse thrust, 8 spoilers, 9 gear, 10 auto throttle, 11 TOGA. and the throttle control axis is pretty good designed as well.

oh im not throwing anything away, this PC will be another one that i might use around my house after i got the new one done. Thinking of using it as a TV PC, since its got the TV cards and i can plug a projector in it to make a nice home theater lol. Plus computer read discs much better than DVD player anyway. My budget...hmm it's around $2300-2400ish. and i guess ill see what the price will be after around 4 or 5 month.

well u guys are pros lol..... You guys are 100% right. It is going to be my first 100% self build computer. I was buying prebuild PCs all the way, and upgrading parts of it. but there are just way too many things get in the way when it comes to upgrading it. Tower is not big enough, PSU not powerful enough, some hardware won't work...etc etc... Im a newbie at building computers, but i do have a very general idea of how things work and where everything go, like how to set up the motherboard etc. but when it comes down to the real detail part i have no idea...( Ex. power of PSU...lol) i7 extreme... well.. if i buy it now it's certainly not worth it. i think the price will drop a bit when next year comes around. (around Apr. or May) and that's when i'll get the money to start actually building. By then i guess the DDR3 Ram price will drop, and along with the graphic cards. More RAM never hurts, it just reduces time of hard drive being written, and therefore giving them a longer lifetime. Plus it speed things up a bit. I'll be gaming mostly, along with editing videos etc. one of the reason i'm using a lot of money on this is because i don't want to make another major upgrade in the 3 years after i buy this one. There might be minor ones, since hardware requirements are always increasing, but this build should start off a 3 year run pretty good. As you guys can see, FSX is the game i'm mainly playing right now, and it's a HUGE hardware killer. No CPU and GPU so far can get over 35-40 frame rates with everything turned on at ultra high, and this was released in 2006. You never know when microsoft will release FS's 11th release. since the 10th release is already killing most the people, id rather get ready with the 11th one. Well....I'll reconsider a couple things in there, i still have 5 month before i'm actually buying it. So i have a lot of time to change my plan lol

this is exactly why i use firefox..... (Hey, but firefrox can have a flaw too, you never know...)*hope not*

Thanks for all of your replys, as of now, i'm thinking the update will be the following:(not sure on the exact details since new hardware are always coming out) Intel core i7 extreme (the whole point of updating from Q6600), expected to do some overclocking 8Gb Ram 2x1TB hard drives ( I eat 720GB hard drive in no time....) nvidia GTX200 series card (Not sure if i'm going to do a SLI or just stick with one, which one do you guys recommend? If i'm gonna go with 2 cards, how much difference does it make on the PSU?) water cooling system (again, not sure on the detail, but how much power do they generally use) and some other necessary stuff, like DVD burner wireless card etc so um..based on those, a 750W PSU is good enough to power it up? or do i have to go for higher? I dont wanna buy one home then keep getting power failure BSOD...

I have this question in my mind for a while now, but i'm still not sure how power supply actually works...(sounds newbie..but yea) If my power supply is 1000W, does it use 1000W of power all the time? Or does it means the max power can be drawn from the PSU is 1000W? and it only supply enough power for what the computer needs to run. I'm thinking of getting a nice upgrade next year, and i'm looking at GTX260 or 280. Both of them say minimum power requirement is 550W, so if i buy a 1000W PSU, and it constantly draw 1000W of power, then my electric bill is sure gonna go up by a lot.....That's like having my microwave running all the time.

hmm....i'm not sure if i remembered it correctly. But the first time you plug in the ipod, itunes is supposed to be running. Then Itunes will tell you about it found an ipod, enter the owner's name etc... and then you can do whatever you want with it

i'm kind of surprised that people don't turn off their computers when they sleep. RS actually require lots of CPU for some reason. It uses 24% of my Q6600 when everything is at maximum. So if your computer is brought over 4 years ago, then that's where your problem is. Computers 4 years ago happen to run stuff very slowly due to all the updates to the OS, much more resource demanding software running. I have an IMB laptop from 2002, and i can't stand it. It takes over 4 minutes to boot up XP, not to mention for it to finish processing stuff... and it was the best configuration available back in 2002. Also had a Dell desktop from 2005, and it's about to go in the garbage. P4 HT @3.0Ghz, 1.5G Ram is simply not enough at all for games of any sort. Even thorough RS is one of the rather low end games, but it eats up over 60% of the CPU on that Dell computer. When you said the loading speed is slow, check if your hard drive light is on all the time during loading, and open task manager to see how much CPU is it using. It sounds to me like a slow computer problem rather than internet. Mainly because of hard drive and if you really think your internet is slow, then you have no other way out but to get a better ISP.

well...u can open them after windows successfully boot up....that's just a more efficient way to use the computer. just disable any process that don't have "microsoft windows" included in their name. well...except for anti virus and firewall... you can always turn those process on when u need them, no need 2 kill ur computer at start up. disable ALL automatic updates process on start up, those things are completely useless(like real player one, and quicktime), and whatever ones that's from the manufacture, in this case TOSHIBA.( I'm using HP and some stuff like HP update, HP wireless guide, those kind of stuff only eats ur speed for nothing, you can still connect wirelessly without the program running) they will update anyways if you open the program someday. My start up is clean and fast: All microsoft core items AVG Zonealarm MSN speedfan Tea timer(spybot search&destroy) windows sidebar Thats it:) it shouldn't take very long to boot up 6 extra items, and u have everything going nicely. My computer have about 78process running normally, max i reached was 95, cuz i was running like 3 setups at once. Idk why java is taking up so much CPU... but sometimes i do have a downloading client like Thunder 5 or bitcomet, or flashget that eats up to 50% of the CPU all by it's own. and it's solved after a reboot...(random...and idk why that happens..)

Well...my computer is HP prebuild, m9150f. The 8500GT they included in there just killed it...... GTA IV just came out, but i found i'm only able to play it in about 7-10 frame rates.... Some people say it's the game's problem, the 8500 should at least give you 15 to 20. However that's not my case. Idk what's wrong here, i run the benchmark test on GTA IV. My CPU usage was only 39% when people say CPU usage goes up to 100% during play. my memory used are the exact same thing with other people.... So..hmm....no idea.. but for an action game, 7-10 frame rate is like impossible to play. So, if it's really the graphic card's problem, i want to know if i can upgrade it WITHOUT upgrading my PSU. That would be just a big pain, and it's gonna cost a lot more. Well...my computer specs are follows: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @2.4Ghz 3GB Ram ( 2x1GB, 2x512MB) Nvidia 8500GT ( getting rid of of course...) 720GB hard drive( 2x360GB) @7200rpm 1 DVD burner + 1 HD DVD ROM PSU is 350Watts. so if i upgrade the 8500 to a 8800, first of all, does it help a lot on performance? and second, can my PSU handle it without crashing or burning it out or anything? people say that a good PSU that's 350W might handle it, well according to the label, mine is from HIPRO. Not sure if that's a good quality one... and the model is HP-D3537F3R

any info on the hard drive, and misc items? but that CPU is kinda slow to me, and that graphic card is definitely not good for high end gaming but hey~ what can you expect from a laptop? mine is even worse, ( brought 2 years ago, stopped using) Amd Turionx2 @1.6ghz 1Gm Ram Nvidia 6150Go XP MCE now i can't even run that laptop anymore... takes so long to start up. good thing is my desktop is still good for most of the games heh~ and planning on getting a brand new desktop again next year

hm..i made it work now somehow.... For some reason i have to pick the boot drive as C, even my XP is installed at J.....weird...but works fine. still have no idea how that happened..i guess it's magic lol :shock:

ok um..i reinstalled windows XP, since it's just 2 much trouble expanding on the existing one. I created the new OS with 120GB HD partition. However for some reason i'm having trouble getting it on the bootloader screen.... no matter which program i use, they only show windows vista and "windows recovery"(original form HP) are the 2 installed OS, and they don't detect XP...... So i basically cannot boot up windows XP, and when i tried adding the entry in, it just simply won't work on startup. So any ideas on how 2 fix this?

but the problem of where i can't see the XP part of the hard drive still exists...i want to make the part visible to vista first than adding more space to it. I could just reinstall XP since it install in less than 20 min anyway. I'm not even sure if i can delete the XP partition since vista is not seeing this partition at all.

ok...burning everything to a disc, ive been backing up for every 4GB of files i collected anyway hehe

i would never buy AMD CPUs.... AMD CPU all seem to have heat problems, while intel have none. I actually own a laptop with AMD Turionx2, and another one with Intel Core2 Duo, and the one with AMD, temperature can go up to 98C during gaming, while the Intel Core 2 Duo only go up to 70C at max. ( All temp reading according to speedfan) I'm currently using Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 on my desktop where i play FSX at, FSX make my CPU run at 100% almost all times(it's a BIGGGGG CPU hug game). But the highest temperature it ever got to was like 64C on one core, while the rest are in the high 50s and maybe 60. I also like Nvidia better than ATI, probably it's just that i'm more used to nvidia products, since only my old PCs have ATI graphic card installed.

ok, new problem..... well i tried that, but it didn't work, vista simply won't let anything change it's disk volume..... and for some reason i can't see my XP partition anymore from vista, even thorough XP is still bootable. Now i want to reinstall XP since extending the drive is impossible, but i'm having trouble formatting it due to the fact that it's no longer visible from vista. When i go to computer management and try to format it from there, it give me an error... hmmm....... any ideas on how to get it visible again in vista?

but how about the XP problem? It have enough space to expand( i believe i have 165 GB space left in the hard drive), but as shown on the pic it won't let me do it.... Oh, and also, does it hurt in anyways if i installing XP programs into the vista portion? like in a folder that's named XP program with all the XP programs installed in there instead of in the default program files folder in the XP part of the drive. When i'm not interfering with any vista applications, or it's best that i don't do it and download the program burn it to ISO and cut the vista drive?

ZD soft screen recorder is the best free recorder i ever used. better than fraps, and record sound as well

My computer is a HP prebuild, and it came with vista. The computer is shipped with 2 hard drives, 360GB each. Currently i have installed XP on the second hard drive and is using dual-boot. But after a while, i realized i run into a problem, there's not enough space to put all my programs in the 50GB space i cut out. So i wanted to make the XP partion bigger by eating up more space on the second hard drive. However, i cannot do it in vista, even tho it came with the ability to change the volume of the drive, it cannot change the drive with OS installed. Everytime i click add space to the XP drive, it gave me the warning saying if i do it, XP might not be bootable again. Other people say i can use partition magic, so i did. However, when i'm using it, i run into problem... the program marked the second hard drive as "BAD" for some reason, so i cannot modify it at all. But the first one where vista is installed works perfectly.....what might be causing this? cuz clearly there is no problem found with my second hard drive. thank you for helping:) and picture follows: If there is any other way of doing it, then please share it with me. The whole reason i'm doing this is cuz i dont wanna reinstall XP again.... and also, for some reason vista refuse me to shrink the part of the drive with vista installed. It says the maxium space i can shrink is 37MB, when i have 255GB free space left.....

Nvm, i managed to fix it somehow... i dont even know what i did lol. but it worked so yah!~ xD anyways thank you for helping:)

nope...not near vista at any time

OK, i spoke to HP support again, and they told me how to put a RAID driver into XP disc, and now i can dual boot my XP and vista normally under RAID. I reinstalled FSX on the new XP part of the drive, but however, the XP system seems to be having trouble remembering my configuration in FSX... everytime i restart the computer and start the game, everything is back to default, like i just installed the game..

well...i got a good news and a bad news... the good news is : I finally got XP installed ! the bad news is: Well....for some reason i don't know.. Vista can only seem to boot under RAID mode, and XP can only boot under IDE mode...so everytime i wanna switch OS, i have to change the Bios setting....If i dont, it will just give me a BSOD and thats the end of it... Is there any ways to fix this?