The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Ah see, I stopped short of assigning names like those to my disks. I considered that the equivalent of assigning names to your baby's limbs, as well as the child itself.

I'm sure you could have done better than Ursula for U:/
The naming system for my 2TB drives is actually on reserve, for when they may eventually become external backups in a few years' time. Right now, they are simply named according to their contents.

I approve of what's in your V:/ drive
Need to start watching Voyager again actually, I only got as far as Season 3 ish and I do really enjoy it. TV3, or Harmony, currently stores all the star trek TV (not the films) on my server, all 678GB of it.

TV4's currently a bit of a mess, as the nice alphabetic order proved problematic for very large incoming directories, so a lot of stuff has been displaced to it, awaiting a re-organisation. I'm planning to soon buy a huge pile of those translucent disk protectors you use, and grab another couple of 2TB drives now they're even cheaper, and alphabetise my backup collection, rather than the consecutive-storage system they currently use, which means everything is everywhere.

 

I always use V: for my virtual drive(s) too. I use R: for my recorder and elevate my card reader drives above my hdd's leaving room for flash drives to share consecutive drive letters just above the hdd's. So you have an hdd named after everyone in your family sweet.

CoolMaster, I haven't played with your tower but I've had several PS's from them and won't use CoolMaster anymore. They definitely have quality issues with their products and although their support will get back to you promptly they are of no help and can just frustrate you further. I use to primarily buy their power supplies, no more though.

 

Yeah coolermaster cases are quite nice aside from the build quality, but their PSUs leave a lot to be desired.

 

Yah, Ursula reminds me of the seawitch. So I changed it. It is now Ulani. Meaning Cheerful. Because I'm not, and I wish to be

 

For the record both my front eSATA and front USBs work perfectly. Though I will mention that they are obviously not grounded properly. If I don't ground myself first, plugging into the front USB restarts the PC. Though just by poking something metal as I'm plugging in, I've never actually had any issues with the function. Though I will mention the most I plug into the front is a USB 2.5" laptop drive and my Xbox controller.

 

I've had that happen a few times. With the USB ports anyway. I was afraid to last night, while formatting Tamara LOL! But I did. I run all sorts of things to them. Optical drives, flash drives, Mouse dongle.

The eSATA port is the most trouble I've had in a while thankfully. I need to get in there and check it out next time I open it up Thanks for your input guys

 

Sam,

I've been using the Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus RS-500-PCAR-A3-US 500W ATX12V v2.3 Power Supply for all my basic customer builds for a couple of years now. I've never had a DOA or a Failure under the two year warranty period yet! They are not the most efficient PSU out there at >70%, or have that many features, but for the same money you could do far worse! It's a decent quality PSU that won't burn down the house, either! The original one I bought for my E4300 and E6750 runs 24/4, get's shut down Thursday at 5PM and turned back on again on Monday 9AM. After more than 4 years, it still works perfectly!

Russ

 

I will support Russ on this. I keep hearing nothing but good things about Cooler Master units, and from what I can tell they make a good PSU. There may be naysayers but Cooler Master have proven themselves a decent brand. Would personally use a Cooler Master PSU.

 

Never had one, Can't comment. I have had a Coolmax. Total junk!!! But then, I only owned one :S

 

I can second that, Russ helped me with my build a couple of years ago, Cooler master case that came with that PSU, my kids use that pc downstairs, it's never off, runs 24/7, never a problem.

 

Thank you Omegaman your right it wasn't CoolMaster it was Coolmax, am I bad! I've had a couple of those go down and it was just after the warranty, like within weeks. Tried to work with their support team but they were not the best, not the worst either. I've bought cheaper supplies and had much better luck so I stay clear of Coolmax now.

CoolMaster makes 80 Plus PSU's I haven't put them under load to see how efficient they really are but I would think they are OK?

When I was building thousands of computers/servers a week a few years ago we had to stop using Thermaltake PSU's as they had a compatibility issue with some MB's, Intel was one, and their pricy PSU's.

 

I bought a 430W thermaltake. One of my first actually. It resides in an older system now. Seems pretty dependable. So far, I have nothing against thermaltake. I like their name too. Which is beside the point

 

Yeah Coolmax are far worse than coolermaster, no doubt. Coolermaster's PSUs aren't inherently bad like the bottom-tier brands of coolmax and the likes, but they do produce a lot of relatively low quality units that fall out of spec in tests, and their reliability is moderate, but not perfect (I've seen several CM units fail after about 3 years, but fail safely nonetheless). A lot of it's down to the OEMs used, and coolermaster use some relatively mediocre OEMs like Acbel.

I'm not a thermaltake fan at all. Their products are minimum-quality spec, nothing more. Enough to work, but that's it. Their fans are terrible, their cases are poorly made and designed, and in their best PSUs, the good OEMs are somewhat ruined by the little external touches thermaltake make to finish it off. You can buy a thermaltake version of pretty much anything, and it will be the cheap knockoff of what the product should have been.

 

My thermaltake devices are offended by your post. Grrr. LOL! Nah, To each his/her own. We all have our own opinions of course.

 

I don't mean to interrupt the PSU thread but I repaired a machine this weekend. she was intent on wiping the hard drive and starting over from scratch cause her kids keep getting virus on it and the main PC repair in our little town keep stringing her along. Really not their fault because repair shop cant keep Limewire, Ares, and every online game that installs its own toolbars and such off of a clients machine...anyway she had all the discs so it made my job easy
TO THE POINT All the software that came with it was Vista and I didnt know 64bit Home premium took 30GB just to install! The hardware was good enough to run Fista, and after making an .iso of the install disc (didnt have this rare bird in my collection), i reset everything and the only thing i installed is Microsoft Office student 2007. I know MS is a resource hog but an OS + the 4 basic office programs should not=30GB. I'm glad enough people yelled about this Fista sh*te to make the supplier quickly move past it.

 

I believe windows 7 64bit install on my secondary(recently), was only 14Gb. I have not installed anything else yet. It's a build for a friend. I think 14Gb is within reason for what the OS offers.

 

I think you are confused with 32bit install, 64bit's easily run in the 20's to 30's GB size from all of the many installs I've done. They bloat after that of course so I typically make my C: partitions around 60GB's or better, if space allows.

 

It's 64bit. Fresh install. I'm sure it will bloat though

 

It's already bloating. The only thing I've installed thus far is the Graphics driver.

 

Windows doesn't use that much space by itself. The standard install size for an x64 install of Vista is around 15GB. However, 30GB can easily be attained through the page file and the hibernation file, the sum of which equaled 12GB on one of my machines.