(no subject)

[theweaselking]

An interesting dillemma of design:

The "boot disk" for Windows XP SP2 is 8MB in size.

EDIT: For extra further consideration, a 98SE boot disk fits on a single floppy and allows you to run the NT installer, even if it can't run the XP setup.exe wtih all the pretty pictures. Ah, if only the documentation actually told me this instead of suggesting the six-disk monstrosity.

Comments

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

Ideally? Lay out money for this once, upgrade again in five years or so.

Yeah, so totally opposite to mine, which is relatively small amounts every year or so at most.

I'm thinking of cannibalising it again - lay out the $250-300 (Canadian) for a new MB, chip, RAM, power, and case, then toss over the video card, the 80GB HDD, and all the spiffy peripherals.

250-300 CAD sounds slightly optimistic for decent cpu/mb/ram/case+power, although you can certainly do it if you compromise a bit on the 'decent'. If you go for an Asrock (Asus' budget arm) combo rather than asus, frex, you save 40-50. Still, a gig of DDR memory will eat up well over 100 CAD all by itself, you're not going to get *any* case+power under 50 CAD, and that'll be a pretty crappy one, leaving at most 100-150 for motherboard and CPU. That's just about doable, but I'd spend a teensy bit more and go a bit further up the price/performance curve knee for the processor and get a good Asus Deluxe motherboard (which'll be over 100 by itself). My policy of only buying Asus motherboards (or sometimes Abit, Gigabyte, or MSI), and for my own PC only getting fancy ones, has paid major dividends over the years. They just work a lot better and can do more.

It was my experiences with two Pentium 1/K6-2 PC-Chips motherboards that caused me to swear a holy vow to never ever have anything produced by those people in my house ever again, though (I believe these are the people that, among others, do ECS/Elitegroup), and so far I've kept that vow.

The old machine would still have onboard video (and I've actually got the last pre-ugrade 64 MB graphics card still) and a 40 GB drive, and could be turned into a server easily enough.

But do you want a server? Most people don't really need one, and if they do, they mostly need one as a storage server, which a 40 gig drive effectively can't do.

This isn't my primary game-toy PC. This is my old PC, given to torrain, and the most complicated stuff it runs is photoshop and the like. Image editing is relatively memory-intensive, but should *not* be taxing even a machine this old.

Photoshop is among the heavier applications, especially if you want to respond snappily. It takes a lot of memory, yes (and my D-SLR wielding friend has 2 gigs for that), but it also takes a fair amount of CPU. Many filters (on highres digital photos) take dozens of seconds or even minutes on a brand new 3 GHz+ machine. Of course, some of them are also fairly easy to handle even for a 500 MHz machine, but I wouldn't in any way want to have a machine that slow for image editing duties.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

> 250-300 CAD sounds slightly optimistic for decent cpu/mb/ram/case+power,

Local store where I know the workers and tend to pick up a discount has most of what I want for about $350. I was guessing low on my ideal price range.

I'm still considering it, regardless. I don't *do* hardware often enough to stay abreast of what's good.

> But do you want a server? Most people don't really need one

I don't need one either. "Need" is not important, here, not nearly as much as "I've never done it and it interests me".

> I wouldn't in any way want to have a machine that slow for image editing
> duties.

Consider that she's been running a P166 with 128 MB of RAM to do everything she wants to do, for years, I doubt it's going to be that big a deal.

This is, of course, The Catch(tm): We're not discussing using this machine for anything approaching modern high-end computing. That's what my machine is for, and, frankly, mine falls short for the heavy workhorse applications. It's a great *game* machine and can do anything adequately.