The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Good god, the people really have spoken!
I'm quite eager to try Windows 7 when it comes out. The Alpha, according to Abuzar at least, looks promising.

 

There seems to be a debate going on that points to a dissatisfaction of Vista as a replacement for XP. I have Vista Home Premium on my laptop and one of my rigs and other than it's potential as a media center edition OS, I don't see any reason to dump XP for it. Like Sam I am hopefully anticipating the release of Windows 7. I doubt that I will spend any more money on acquiring Vista Licenses.

 

I have a few reasons why I have to use Vista, for one far better Multi-GPU support, but overall since the performance and reliability of XP are still better, it's never my main OS. Since Vista can't run at all on anything less than a desktop-grade Dual core with multiple gigabytes of RAM and a 7200rpm hard disk, it's pretty much useless in any laptop. Minimum application launch time for even something as simple as notepad is a few seconds on a Sempron 3600+ with 1GB.

 

What about a laptop with a core 2 duo processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, 2 100 GB hard drives, and a dedicated 256 Mb Nvidia 7600 graphics card?

 

Well, you'll have Aero at least, but the Core 2 Duo Mobile CPU isn't ideal...

 

I have one with a 2ghz C2D Mobile and I have to say, it's pretty snappy. It can run Left 4 Dead at least. haha Although the graphics card does hold it back.

 

Sam


The core 2 duo mobiles are really quite decent. I've used it for compressing DVD video at work using DVD Shrink and it can do an entire movie in under 15 minutes. The battery life on my laptop is horrible but then I purchased it with the intent that it would sub as a mobile desktop.

 

Windows 7 is alright, Much lower RAM usage, and the menus are a bit more user friendly. I didn't play around with it too long, the second release messed around with my Vista Ultimate Activation on another partition which was messed up. I wouldn't get too hyped up over it, it won't be better than Vista till its SP1 is out, I can guarantee that.

Apparently it will be incorporated heavily for use with tablets and touch screens (which MAC's CEO seems to think will make computing less effective). Which is true for basic use, but it will be awesoem for things like cash registers/menus and brain storming.

 

But it'll be optimised for SSDs!

 

I've been dreaming of SSDs for some time now and I can't wait for them to speed up and come down in price. Some are already hitting 500Gb in size so it's only a matter of time. MORE POWER!!!

 

Yeah, I'm only looking at them for OS usage at the moment, so I can get the OCZ 30GB Solid Series for £67, about the same price as a premium brand 750GB hard disk, just under what the cheaper 1TB drives cost.

 

Their Life span needs to improve to that of an HDD before I'm interested in one. Their Mean Time between Failures is much lower, although they have improved some recently.

Russ

 

I've not heard too many 'real world' stories about their short lifespan, and unlike Hard disks, the failure time of SSDs is measurable and absolute. It WILL fail in xxx days, rather than randomly one day stop working and lose data.

 

You mean Write or Reads, not days. But yeah "The other big knock on SSD technology is its finite lifespan. People in the know claim that SSDs can start to fail after 100,000 writes to every single cell in the chip, which is almost virtually impossible."

But it gets better:
"Samsung’s Michael Yang defends flash reliability in solid-state drives claiming that SSD’s are virtually impossible to wear out. A flash device rated at 100,000 write cycles can write 100,000 times “to every single (memory) cell within the device.” In other words, the device doesn’t write to the same cell over and over again but spreads out the writes over many different cells. This is achieved through “wear leveling” by the SSD’s controller."

 

TheftAuto,
Here's the article you quoted from on SSDs.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1342

Best Regards,
Russ

 

SSDs are a new use for an existing but emerging technolgy, and it will have to age a bit before it has truly arrived. But think about it? Which drive uses a technology that is most likely to fail when both have peaked? Moving parts with electric motors and moving heads, or stationary parts?

 

I'm intrigued by the idea of putting the OS on a flash drive.

Sam, if you do that for, let's say XP, how much write activity would you actually have? I know that XP is always making backup copies of things, and of course the registry gets added to all the time, but I would imagine that the basic core dlls remain the same, read-only. Apart from the supposed limitation on writes, SSDs can be READ an infinite amount of times, isn't that correct?

Assuming then that the lifetime would be huge, maybe 5 to 10 years given the Wear Levelling that TheftAuto mentioned, how much faster do you think it would make your system? Would you expect a direct benefit in games - increased FPS?

Rich

 

Most games don't run off the hard disk directly, the only one I know that does is Crysis, because it would break the 32-bit RAM barrier otherwise. SSDs are mainly for faster application loading and transfer speed.

 

I never left, I just keep on reading and learning, anyway, Merry Christmas to All.