The (new) Official PC building thread!

creaky, LOCO,

everything else with my ISP is working great. I'm getting emails from other places/ppl as usual. I don't understand what's going on with aD. no notification emails period. this really sux!

 

Creaky, you're from the UK aren't you? I've no idea why but that seems to be the only correlation I can think of so far.

 

Mort81,

It has to be your e-mail, as Hotmail is working fine for me! I'm getting all the notifications from AD. I occasionally have problems sending to my buddy's Yahoo Mail. He just doesn't seem to get them for some reason!

Best Regards
Russ

 

Wow, that's not something you hear every day!

But yeah, no problems with Google Mail UK.

 

Russ,

I'm getting email (tigerdirect, newegg, meritline, supermediastore, etc) so I know my email is working as usual. I set the firewall to always allow aD. we'll see if that does anything. I doubt it tho. I'm just not getting sent notifications. I haven't changed a thing to cause the problem.

well I'm getting off topic. if you don't see any posts from me at least you know why. aD doesn't like me anymore.

 

Hello again,
How long would it take you guys to build a PC, if you had one full day to work on it nonstop?? Would it take longer than one day??

 

My newest purchases...
CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF -
Retail Item #: N82E16820145197 $139.00 ($109 with $30 rebate)

HP Officejet 5610 Q7311A Up to 20 ppm Up to 4800 x 1200 dpi InkJet MFC / All-In-One Color Printer -
Retail Item #: N82E16828104393 $99.99 ($69.99 with promo code)

PALiT NE/880TSXT302 GeForce 8800GT SONIC 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card -
Retail Item #: N82E16814261012 $169.99 ($149.99 with $20 rebate)

Subtotal $408.98
Tax $27.48
UPS Ground $0.00
Promo code -$30.00
Order Total $406.46 ($356.46 after $50 in rebates)

Not Bad...
especially since I just bought that same printer last week for $118 at Target...I wiil take mine back to Target tonight...

@mrk44...
It all depends on the specific combination of components that you are using...but a full day for 1...is certainly possible...
Its the loading of all the programs that take the longest...
Generally I would want a week with a computer...to really know...if its really all right...

 

mrk44,

It's all strictly speaking, just assembly. Installing the CPU, CPU Cooler, Power Supply, Memory, Video Card and drives. From that point on it should run, at least at stock speeds with the default settings! It should take less than an hour! The software takes far longer! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

man i screwed up then. its taken me 3 months to get mine built??????

just playing. heck even for me doing it for the very first time i think i had it all together in 2 hours. but i was being super carefull and not 100% sure of what i was doing. but now after haveing it all apart 20+ times shoot i think i can get it up to post in a hour if not less....yes thats me braggin on myself... i know the guru's here can do it faster. and no im not taken jabs at you guys. without you gurus i would still be trying to install the cooler without the CPU under it..lol

 

Rob, that's because you had really bad luck!

Seriously, if we are only talking about building, I can do it in less than half an hour. Usuallyu I watch a movie at the same time so it takes me about an hour. Installing software DOES take much longer.

If you are talking building from scratch and not doing anything specia(and you know what you want to buy) it should take you 2-3 days to get parts from newegg, and then one more day to build and test(if you OC, then stress testing, etc).

 

@boozer

I bet it looks like you took a 1/2 hour too...LOL...
Youth...Hell...it can take me a couple hours for wiring alone on a build...but...I guarantee it looks tight...when its done...
I bought the 8800GT 1GB...like you had...man I hope its a good card...I just couldn't pass on the price...

 

The actual construction of a PC, if done thoroughly I tend to find takes between 40 minutes and an hour and a quarter, depending on the complexity of the build - if you're going for an absolute tidy cable approach it might take an hour and a half. Installing software usually takes as long if not longer.

Question for you guys,

Firefox crashes more than half the time when I close it - the window remains in place, unclickable, and firefox.exe increases its memory usage by about 50MB/s until it reaches a few hundred meg, and then i get a 'not responding' box with an end now button on it. Any ideas why this might be? Happens with all release candidates of firefox 3, and the full released version. Not tried rolling back to 2 yet, but I was using 3 RC1 before I reinstalled windows with no problems... Firefox can also randomly crash while I'm using it, though not so often.

 

sammorris,

I experienced all sorts of problems with Firefox 3! Random crashes, constant error messages where Firefox needed to close suddenly because it encountered an error. It was far more a PITA to get completely rid of 3, as I had to clean out the registry manually. Then I installed Firefox 2 and all was well again! I do notice that Mozilla is no longer haunting you to download 3! They know there are problems with it, so they're no longer pushing 3 very hard!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Hmm, interesting. I didn't have much of a problem with it before, but hearing that I'll certainly roll back. I don't really see any advantages to having version 3 anyway.

Thanks Russ

LOL I installed the latest build of 2, and now firefox doesn't open any more - the second the window appears "Mozilla firefox has encountered a problem and needs to close"...

Ok, did a full uninstall and reinstall with version 2, and now it seems to be working - I also uninstalled Flash - for some reason when I install Adobe Flash now, half my programs seem to stop working. Are there any alternative programs that render flash animations?

 

sam FF3 i just installed and its perfect, much quicker at loading pages than before, esp with 20+ tabs

and for building, it takes me 2hours (not inc software BIOS etc)

this is because i cable manage like a chef with 10 pots cooking.

 

Well this is it, it worked fine on my old dog-slow XP install, but since reformatting on my raptor, it's been nothing but a pain in the backside. FF2 is now working fine on it, haven't had the guts to reinstall flash yet though - I've already had to uninstall/reinstall it more times than I can remember as I use an online gameclient Garena - if I try to run a game via it with flash installed, it disables DirectX until I restart, so I can't run any games... :S