The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Well no, because chipsets can only come from one of a very small number of manufacturers, and the reason people use either brand is specification, not quality.
Motherboard manufacturers are obliged to offer a range of boards covering all chipsets and specification levels.

The component quality issue we're talking about here is the stuff that doesn't need to vary, i.e. capacitor manufacturers, PCB production materials/methods, and so on.

If the chipset is the problem, the chipset manufacturer gets the blame. If the board is the problem, the board manufacturer gets the blame. In Russ' case, it's the chipset manufacturer getting the blame. In the case of say, the Asus Striker boards, it's both the chipset manufacturer and the board manufacturer getting the blame, since both are responsible for the board being bad.

With stuff like P5Q and P5E boards going bad, it's the board manufacturer only, as no other manufacturer would have problems when using the same chipset.

 

I agree with sam. Dual boot on separate drives just seems more logical/intelligent. IF it must be done...

There's only one thing that bothers me about windows 7. It has to refresh the network too often. Windows XP was simply always ready. Why does "7" have to refresh itself so often? It causes problems when it has to refresh. And some programs don't like loading files over the network. Never had that problem with XP Do you here this M$?

 

Thanks creaky. I'll try that later. My secondary is in pieces right now anyway. Once I have it hooked back up to the network, I'll give it a go

 

Rob,
The thing with the P5N-E is it could have easily become a legendary motherboard. It had so much going for it. It was SLI, it was inexpensive, and it overclocked the E4300 like crazy. Every review site on the planet was getting a 100% or better overclock out of the 1.8GHz E4300. Some even reached 4GHz with theirs! That was unheard of performance back then, and the demand for them was spectacular. Everybody wanted one! Almost immediately after it's release, it no longer performed as well. It became a struggle to get the E4300 much over 3GHz with one. The most surprising thing to me is that had Asus not tampered with it and left it alone, it probably would have put the much hated Gigabyte out of business for good!

Instead, the 965P-DS3, DS3L and the DS3R became the darling of Intel motherboards, and saved GigaByte from going Bankrupt. Prior to the 965P, the Government over there had ordered a merger between the two companies. All the papers were signed and agreements were reached, but when the time came, both companies refused to honor the merger. They just hated each other too much. The result of all of this was that the P5N-E became one of the worst motherboards ever, while the the 965P-DS3 series went on to legendary status. When GigaByte followed up that success with the equally successful P35-DS3 series, GigaByte was back in business for good, and people started buying GigaByte motherboards in droves!

The big mystery is why Asus decided that they needed to make more money out of the P5N-E, but didn't want to raise the price, so they cheapened the quality of the most basic components on the motherboard, and totally ruined what should have been one of the most successful motherboards in history. It was that good! The deepest mystery is that Asus could have gone back to higher quality board level components, and made a success out of the P5N-E, but they never did! It wasn't a chipset, where Asus would have had to wait for it's manufacturer to catch up, but rather an conscious decision on Asus part to try and get more profits out of an extremely solid, but low cost motherboard, which if it just had been left alone, probably would have outsold every other motherboard on the market!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

and to think they've been ruining well-designed boards that way ever since...

 

Sam,
I know! From a business standpoint, it makes no sense at all! You would think that if they looked at their shrinking market share, someone at Asus would be smart enough to do something about it. For over 15 years, I never owned anything but an Asus motherboard. Now I won't go near one!

Russ

 

Oman7,
I don't think you can do Dual Boot with Win 7 that way. You have to do it on the boot partition for the first OS, and create a new partition within it for the Win 7 files. I did have it on two different drives with the free version, and selected which drive to boot from with the boot manager, but you have to be very careful, or you will blow up everything. You also cannot access anything on the other OS's drive partition. The instructions for Win 7 also say that the other OS has to be installed first in order to enable Dual boot!

Russ

 

I dunno. I had XP installed, installed windows 7 on another drive, and it was gorgeous. It gives the option of which OS to load. Couldn't be simpler. Did the same thing for my brother about a year ago. Never tried installing XP after the fact though...
I'll take your word on that

 

We're not talking about partitions Russ, we're talking about separate physical hard drives. Do it this way and there is no dual booting, let the BIOS do it for you.

 

Here's a good question. If I disconnect all drives but one, can I install linux on said drive, and then hook everything back up, and have the bios acknowledge each OS like XP and "7"? Will the "7" drive be ok with this? Creaky?

Mmm... I may have to change boot priority...

 

Can be done with any OS this way. Using the BIOS to switch drives is completely indiscriminate.

 

Sounds good

Here's a building question.
If you were to build a secondary tower, keeping only a single optical drive in mind, with as many hard drives as possible...what tower would be the most ideal? Basically, I want to build a hard drive array/secondary system. It will essentially be a storage/file server.
These are currently what the EGG has to offer. Or at least what I'm looking at.

 

My file server doesn't have any optical drives.
I use one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811146051
Heavy, and only 9 bays versus those cases' 10, but very quiet, and not too expensive. I use 13 drives with the use of a 4x3.5->3x5.25 box, more specifically this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811999163
Though newegg don't stock them any more.

 

Sam,
I realize that, but there are problems associated with drive access from one boot drive to the other. Unless the production Win 7 changed something, some files and folders on the XP drive can not be accessed by Win 7 and vice versa. It also didn't recognize certain file folders, and storing anything from one boot drive to the other renders the file useless with the other OS. I had mine on two separate drives with the original free Win 7, and selected which one to use with the boot manager. In fact the default was XP and the boot manager was used to select Win 7. It worked fine, but you had to be careful not to put files on the wrong boot drive accidentally. There was also a warning about that in the Dual Boot setup instructions.

Russ

 

If you create a file with a security attachment (Some programs and some documents selected at random by Windows) you will need to force ownership in order to be able to access them. I'd recommend you simply copy everything that will be subject to that so it's on both drives.
This issue will still occur with a dual boot on a single-drive, so you're not losing anything here.

 

I don't recall any problems with the dual boot. No matter. I can't see myself rolling back to XP. Windows 7's bling is good (LOL), the overall software is smooth, everything I need to be compatible is. XP is dead... at least to me it is. No offense.

Thanks sam. You've given me some ideas.

 

Oman7,
Unfortunately for me, some of the programs I like and use for video work, will not run with Win 7, and since the XP mode only exists in the highest price Win 7's, I'll continue to use it. The 32 bit is no faster than XP, so there's not a whole lot of reasons for me to use Win 7 other than as Future proofing! Like I said to Creaky, there's the right way, the wrong way and the Micro$oft way. Win 7 is very heavy on the Micro$oft way! I'm less than pleased that Win 7 can do things without my knowing it, when it isn't even turned on!

Russ

 

XP Mode doesn't give you anything more than Virtualbox will run for free. The only thing you need is virtualisation support on the CPU. I'd recommend you try Virtualbox Russ, if the programs you use are relatively basic.

 

What video program? I use several on "7" without hitch :/