Hello Peeps!
I have finally had enough!!
Having struggled with my PC and ISP for the past six months I am looking for some advice from the dead men.
Firstly my PC was a mistake from day one I took a chance and invested in SLI technology but towards the lower end of the scale and I have had many many driver problems and crashes so I will be doing a new install in the New Year.
Question 1.
Is there any point investing in Vista?
Question 2.
If I took my PC to bits and sprayed it down with those air cans then rebuilt - would it help?
Question 3.
How much difference does power supply really make? And what does a heavy duty machine take these days?
Question 4.
Do I really need 4 different apps to keep my PC safe? Or Is there a lot of scare mongering going on? I dont want Norton or Mcafee.
What PC protection do you guys suggest?
Now on to my ISP!
I am on AOL!! Don't say it I have been with them for 8 years and although slow and expensive upto this year I have never had a problem I always liked the stability and unlimited downloads.
I am convinced though, that I am now being throtted I can get 4.8mbs at my distance from the exchange there is no way I am getting that. Also they dont support SMTP and having just brought a web domain/host this is no good.
ATM. I pay £20 for (Supposedly) upto 8mb and ulimited Downloads
I need a good speed and the Ulimited Downloads is important.
Soooooooooooooo
Question 5.
What ISP do you Use?/Suggest?
thanks
V
Question 1.
Is there any point investing in Vista?
No, I don't think so :)
Question 2.
If I took my PC to bits and sprayed it down with those air cans then rebuilt - would it help?
It might stop fans failing, are you have problems with heat?
Question 3.
How much difference does power supply really make? And what does a heavy duty machine take these days?
Whats your machines spec? its not just about power, but also noise, efficiency and reliability. For example, I read somewhere that PSU are most efficient when running at about 50% of the psu.
Question 4.
Do I really need 4 different apps to keep my PC safe? Or Is there a lot of scare mongering going on? I dont want Norton or Mcafee.
What PC protection do you guys suggest?
I use AVG and rely on my routers firewall. I've never had any problems that weren't caused by my own stupidity.
Question 5.
What ISP do you Use?/Suggest?
I use eclipse, have had no problems, very good pings on dMw and most servers in general. Download speeds seem fine but I'm not a big downloader.
Quote from: Venom;215862Is there any point investing in Vista?
Absolutely not. *Maybe* if you have a DirectX 10 graphics card and a system that is capable of running stuff like Crysis with all the bells and whistles turned on it'd be worth dual booting XP and Vista, so you can see the DX10 shinies under Vista with games that support it, but other than that most definately not.
QuoteIf I took my PC to bits and sprayed it down with those air cans then rebuilt - would it help?
Depends. Is there a particularly large amount of fluff in there? If you've recently started to have stability issues that could be linked to overheating, and you've previously had no issues and haven't turned up your central heating or sat the PC next to a radiator or whatever then it might help, but chances are it'll make little difference.
QuoteHow much difference does power supply really make? And what does a heavy duty machine take these days?
A lot. In the past i've had a cheapo £20 550W PSU and had issues with the disks not being able to spin up after going into standby cos the PSU didn't have enough gumph (as a cheapo one, it only had 1x 12V rail). I 'upgraded' to an Antec Truepower 430W (about £70 at the time), and all my troubles went away. As to what a heavy duty machine takes these days, i'm not sure i'm afraid. I find it safer to overspec, but I was looking at something along the lines of a 720W or 850W Enermax PSU to power my next system (planning on Quad Core, high end GeForce 8 or 9 [due out in Feb if rumours are to be believed], 3 hard disks, as the main power draining bits).
QuoteDo I really need 4 different apps to keep my PC safe? Or Is there a lot of scare mongering going on? I dont want Norton or Mcafee.
What PC protection do you guys suggest?
4!? What are you running? I'll let other people mutter about this one, as my choices are a bit unorthodox ;)
EDIT: Or, in fact, exactly the same as Jamoes :P
QuoteWhat ISP do you Use?/Suggest?
I use Force9 (now PlusNet). I'd be lying if I said i'd never had probs with them in the past, but they seem to be good and stable now, and they have improved their customer service a lot lately (In my experience, anyways). I've also heard good things from work colleagues about both Xen and Eclipse, though you pay a bit more for those two. I'm on a 20GB/month peak time limit, which only causes my connection speed to drop and then stuff like P2P, rather than web or game traffic, to be dropped if I go over it, and I very rarely go over it. Costs me just under £20 a month, cos i've referred friends to them and thus got a discount on my monthly bill (hint hint :norty:). *Very* few ISPs will give you a fully unlimited service these days.
Question 1.
Is there any point investing in Vista?
I use it, I didn't want to be on a DX10 card and not be able to use it when games came out using it. But that and it's built in TV tuner software are the only real reasons I use it. If you're not on DX10 or don't have a tv tuner I wouldn't worry.
Question 2.
If I took my PC to bits and sprayed it down with those air cans then rebuilt - would it help?
I've personally never done it. I take mine apart ever not and again an clean it by hand. You can also get a non-conductive liquid from computer shops that disolves grease and dust to improve your system. The spray air seems to me like a tool for removing crumbs from the keyboard, rather than the main computer.
Question 3.
How much difference does power supply really make? And what does a heavy duty machine take these days?
Power supplies are the key to everything. I use a 730watt Hiper one and it's great. But the power you need depends on the number of hard-drives optical drives, cpu and graphics you're running. A decent 500watt should run 2 HDD 2 Optical drives and a mid-range cpu and graphics without worrying too much. The key is NEVER go cheap on a PSU and if you're planning of keeping it at the next upgrade spend a little more again.
Question 4.
Do I really need 4 different apps to keep my PC safe? Or Is there a lot of scare mongering going on? I dont want Norton or Mcafee.
What PC protection do you guys suggest?
I just use Nod32, no firewall, spyware detector etc. If my computer slows down I run Adware or similar to detect problems.
Question 5.
What ISP do you Use?/Suggest?
I'm on 20mb Virgin Cable Broadband, and it's ok, never got more than 17mb in tests and thats off peak, and can drop to around 6mb peak times. If you're in a cable area it's worth looking into. I'm not sure who's best if you're not.
Thanks for all the advice guys - Im going to stick with XP but do a fresh install once I have purchased a beefy power unit :)
As, for an ISP I will need to do some searcherization
Q1: Nope. Unless you really, really want to play something in DX10.
Q2: Never tried those. I have vacuumed my PC sometimes carefully. Especialy those fans.
Q3: If you get random crashes which especially seem to happen when you play, it could be too low powered psu or faulty one. (well, it could be faulty gfx card or driver issue too). Heavy duty...mmm..for SLI system you sure need bit beefier psu.
Q4: If you never surf suspicious sites like porn sites :norty: ...you should be relatively safe with just anti virus software and firewall. I don't really use much more than Avast and ZoneAlarm.
ISP: Not a faintest idea about GB ISPs :g:
Well if you're interested in Zen internet as an ISP, I can recommend them.
Great customer service, no download limits, speed is perfectly acceptable. Not the cheapest, but then you get what you pay for more often than not.
http://www.zen.co.uk/
Got several friends on Zen, so I checked the unlimited claim as only one of them has it, but he only has a 256k line:
http://www.zen.co.uk/Broadband/athome.aspx
You can get unlimited downloads, but only on a 256k line. If you want any of their up to 8mb services you have download limits, you just pay more for a higher limit.