Hi everyone!, new to this fourm, but been watching Tom's videos on youtube a while.
I look forward to being part of the community, instead of just quietly stalking you guys and reading all of your input into the fourm.
A little history about me and my PC's.
I'm almost 40, so I was alive before the internet and PC as we know it today.
As a young boy, my older sister, worked on some of the first computers (AKA: comodore64), most of the buisnesses around here had them and and she knew how to use them for work related things of the times but never really understood the software side.
Seeing the need for people to learn the software side she pushed me take computer classes in jounior high.
I loved the mystery of the machines and understood the programing,but hated spending hours typing code, just for very basic, highly pointless and useless outcomes for a young boy.I never really did anything with computers outside school.
In my early teens I spent a summer with my sister, when she was building one of her very first computers( i think it was one of the 886 intels before the pentiums) . Once again she pushed me towards learning the thing. I found it even more boring and pointless, I could just pop a cartrage in my Atari 2600 and play a few quick games on a bigger screen before the thing even booted up.
The following summer she built her first Pentium based system. Aside from it being S----L---O---W-------A---S------A---L---L------H---E---L---L---!---! it ran some version of windows and I kinda saw alittle more in it, and played a few very basic games on it and learned alittle spanish on it, but never got my own machine.
In my teens thru mid 20's I got heavy into radio controled cars and home theater, and of course I would have to have the latest console and games of the times, but would get bored with them very quickly. I decided I'm not really much of a console gamer, I just liked tech that came with each new generation.
Sometime in 2000, I decided I wanted to take my radio controled hobby into the air, but due to limited space, I decided to take on the way more complex RC helicopers. In reading up on them I learned you needed to know how to fly them to set them up properly and it was very hard to learn to fly them without them being set up properly. With no one in my small town to help out I decided at it alone.
I learned this could get very expensive, crashing a $1000 machine doing hundreds of dollars in damage for a couple seconds of flight time, spending weeks getting parts and scratching my head trying to figure out a plan on what to do differently next attempt.
In one of my monthly RC heli magazines(you know those things we used to learn from
) they had a article about a new RC flight simulator, in wich you could use on a windows based PC and get extremly realistic flight peformance, from both planes and helis.
I had to have this $200 tool couse I could fly hecopters into the ground all night long and with one keystoke I could instantly have a new heli that flew just like before I wrecked it, I just needed a computer to run it.
One day I decided to take the magazine into the newly opened Gateway store(remember those) in my town. I walked in looked around and found a machine with the same specs as the program minimum requirements and one at the recomennded specs.
Pentium 300 or above
windows 95/98
graphics and sound card compatible with Microsoft direct x
30 MB avalible hardrive space
24 MB of ram
16x CD-ROM drive
super VGA monitor
3d accereated video card with at least 8MB of video ram
The salesman said the most basic machines would run that but is already outdated and I would get more use out of a much newer machine and walked me over to the brand new Performance series Pentium 3's. They had a 630somethingMhz machine , a 800Mhz and a 930something machine and saide that soon they would be getting 1000MHz machines in!!!
I didn't really know what I was buying but with 6 months free financing I felt OK walking out with the newest middle line $2000, 800Mhz P3,on windows ME, 14 gig HD , 16x CD , floppy, 256MB RAM , visiontech graphics card, soundblaster live, and US Robotics modem, 14 inch tube monitor and boston acustics digital PC speakers.
For the first time I found the PC useful, I had tons of information on it, you could chat with people around the world, and learn to fly rc helicopters and planes.
A few years went by and windows started getting unstable, new programs came out, that was pushing my machine, and hardware was overflowing my 4 usb 1.0 ports, and my PCI slots.
I decideded I needed an upgrade. I looked on line to see what was avalible, only to be swamped with a new world of specs and confusing opinions(mostly from fanboys).
In 2005 P4 were pushing 3.6Ghz , AMDs were beating them at 2Ghz, WTF???
I had to know why, and what was going on so I decided to build my own machine.
I ended up buying a Aspire X navigatior aluminum case, followed by an Asus P5WD2 all the reviewers and overclockers were using at the time, a 640 pentium CPU (mostly budget reasons, wanted a 840 or extreme dual core), followed buy a antec true blue 480watt PSU , 2 74 gig WD rator drives and than after much research on memory and graphics cards I ordered a gig of corsair 5400UL sticks and the newly released BFG Geforce 7800GTX OC edition!!
After spending over $2500 on parts I was instantly hooked as it posted into the BIOS, the very first time. After a few days trying to get Windows XP to load on the raptors in RAID 0, I finally was rewarded with a 20 second boot into windows, I never looked back, upper grade PC parts that you piced out and installed was the way to go!!!!!!
Sadly I only had a few months to enjoy my super fast machine(X-Navigator I called him) when huricane Katrina hit!
( I was pretty much at ground zero)
I lived in a first story apartment that had a foot of water in it. I lost almost everything! I put the X-Navigator on top the clothes dryer before I left figuring if the water got that high everything was lost anyway. The town was claimed a disaster area and it was weeks before I was able to get back to see what stuff from my life I could salvage.
The roof of the apartment above let go leaking water into mine causing the roof to fall in my apartment but to my suprise my X-navigator was untouched!!
It went into storage with the rest of the stuff I saved for over a year, while I rebuilt my life. When I could I took it out and It works great, put it online and been using it since.
I had it OC with the stock cooler to 3.6Ghz until a fin broke off the fan cleaning it recently, so I modded my case to hold a H-60, which let me push it to 3.8Ghz but I got the bug and wanted 4Ghz.
New Egg had a refubished 945D for $51 and some Kingston 4Gig DDR2 800Mhz kits for $52 With a BIOS Flash this pushes the limits of my MB 4.255Ghz with a 1Ghz FB , 833 DDR2 at 4-4-4-12. It woks but its time to put it out to pasture as a internet browsing second machine , when I build me a new machine.
I have been slowly collecting parts, and doing what I did before, which is how I stumbled on to here.
sorry for the long post, typos, and gramma errors!! more of a hardware wantta be gammer type.
I look forward to being part of the community, instead of just quietly stalking you guys and reading all of your input into the fourm.
A little history about me and my PC's.
I'm almost 40, so I was alive before the internet and PC as we know it today.
As a young boy, my older sister, worked on some of the first computers (AKA: comodore64), most of the buisnesses around here had them and and she knew how to use them for work related things of the times but never really understood the software side.
Seeing the need for people to learn the software side she pushed me take computer classes in jounior high.
I loved the mystery of the machines and understood the programing,but hated spending hours typing code, just for very basic, highly pointless and useless outcomes for a young boy.I never really did anything with computers outside school.
In my early teens I spent a summer with my sister, when she was building one of her very first computers( i think it was one of the 886 intels before the pentiums) . Once again she pushed me towards learning the thing. I found it even more boring and pointless, I could just pop a cartrage in my Atari 2600 and play a few quick games on a bigger screen before the thing even booted up.
The following summer she built her first Pentium based system. Aside from it being S----L---O---W-------A---S------A---L---L------H---E---L---L---!---! it ran some version of windows and I kinda saw alittle more in it, and played a few very basic games on it and learned alittle spanish on it, but never got my own machine.
In my teens thru mid 20's I got heavy into radio controled cars and home theater, and of course I would have to have the latest console and games of the times, but would get bored with them very quickly. I decided I'm not really much of a console gamer, I just liked tech that came with each new generation.
Sometime in 2000, I decided I wanted to take my radio controled hobby into the air, but due to limited space, I decided to take on the way more complex RC helicopers. In reading up on them I learned you needed to know how to fly them to set them up properly and it was very hard to learn to fly them without them being set up properly. With no one in my small town to help out I decided at it alone.
I learned this could get very expensive, crashing a $1000 machine doing hundreds of dollars in damage for a couple seconds of flight time, spending weeks getting parts and scratching my head trying to figure out a plan on what to do differently next attempt.
In one of my monthly RC heli magazines(you know those things we used to learn from
I had to have this $200 tool couse I could fly hecopters into the ground all night long and with one keystoke I could instantly have a new heli that flew just like before I wrecked it, I just needed a computer to run it.
One day I decided to take the magazine into the newly opened Gateway store(remember those) in my town. I walked in looked around and found a machine with the same specs as the program minimum requirements and one at the recomennded specs.
Pentium 300 or above
windows 95/98
graphics and sound card compatible with Microsoft direct x
30 MB avalible hardrive space
24 MB of ram
16x CD-ROM drive
super VGA monitor
3d accereated video card with at least 8MB of video ram
The salesman said the most basic machines would run that but is already outdated and I would get more use out of a much newer machine and walked me over to the brand new Performance series Pentium 3's. They had a 630somethingMhz machine , a 800Mhz and a 930something machine and saide that soon they would be getting 1000MHz machines in!!!
I didn't really know what I was buying but with 6 months free financing I felt OK walking out with the newest middle line $2000, 800Mhz P3,on windows ME, 14 gig HD , 16x CD , floppy, 256MB RAM , visiontech graphics card, soundblaster live, and US Robotics modem, 14 inch tube monitor and boston acustics digital PC speakers.
For the first time I found the PC useful, I had tons of information on it, you could chat with people around the world, and learn to fly rc helicopters and planes.
A few years went by and windows started getting unstable, new programs came out, that was pushing my machine, and hardware was overflowing my 4 usb 1.0 ports, and my PCI slots.
I decideded I needed an upgrade. I looked on line to see what was avalible, only to be swamped with a new world of specs and confusing opinions(mostly from fanboys).
In 2005 P4 were pushing 3.6Ghz , AMDs were beating them at 2Ghz, WTF???
I ended up buying a Aspire X navigatior aluminum case, followed by an Asus P5WD2 all the reviewers and overclockers were using at the time, a 640 pentium CPU (mostly budget reasons, wanted a 840 or extreme dual core), followed buy a antec true blue 480watt PSU , 2 74 gig WD rator drives and than after much research on memory and graphics cards I ordered a gig of corsair 5400UL sticks and the newly released BFG Geforce 7800GTX OC edition!!
After spending over $2500 on parts I was instantly hooked as it posted into the BIOS, the very first time. After a few days trying to get Windows XP to load on the raptors in RAID 0, I finally was rewarded with a 20 second boot into windows, I never looked back, upper grade PC parts that you piced out and installed was the way to go!!!!!!
Sadly I only had a few months to enjoy my super fast machine(X-Navigator I called him) when huricane Katrina hit!
I lived in a first story apartment that had a foot of water in it. I lost almost everything! I put the X-Navigator on top the clothes dryer before I left figuring if the water got that high everything was lost anyway. The town was claimed a disaster area and it was weeks before I was able to get back to see what stuff from my life I could salvage.
The roof of the apartment above let go leaking water into mine causing the roof to fall in my apartment but to my suprise my X-navigator was untouched!!
It went into storage with the rest of the stuff I saved for over a year, while I rebuilt my life. When I could I took it out and It works great, put it online and been using it since.
I had it OC with the stock cooler to 3.6Ghz until a fin broke off the fan cleaning it recently, so I modded my case to hold a H-60, which let me push it to 3.8Ghz but I got the bug and wanted 4Ghz.
New Egg had a refubished 945D for $51 and some Kingston 4Gig DDR2 800Mhz kits for $52 With a BIOS Flash this pushes the limits of my MB 4.255Ghz with a 1Ghz FB , 833 DDR2 at 4-4-4-12. It woks but its time to put it out to pasture as a internet browsing second machine , when I build me a new machine.
I have been slowly collecting parts, and doing what I did before, which is how I stumbled on to here.
sorry for the long post, typos, and gramma errors!! more of a hardware wantta be gammer type.
