I did take a look, found RAM that's like 20 bucks cheaper. I'm probably not going to bother with overclocking, at least at this stage in the game. Do you have any other recommendations for SSDs that are about the same price? I went with 64GB because I figured I was only going to install Windows 7, Pro Tools, TF2, and like...Firefox on it, which should leave me a couple GB. The jump to 120GB is a little expensive for me, even though I'd probably love working off of it. And you both mentioned you didn't like the case, aside from the loudness issue is there much of a problem with it? I actually don't mind how loud my case is (as long as it's not screaming), but my current case is basically a piece of shit, falling apart and breaking everywhere, I need something sturdy and reliable.
There's a strong possibility that you don't mind it because you've never had a quiet computer. Some people are fanatical and take it to extremes but for very little consideration and investment, you can have a computer that is almost inaudible. My computer is just barely noticeable when you turn it on. It's bliss. And all I did was buy a nice case with all 120mm, low speed fans, and got a quiet cooler for my video card. Additionally, nicer cases provide things like better cable routing, better tool-less designs, better thermal isolation... My Antec case has a completely isolated chamber for the power supply and hard drives, so that the heat from the PSU/drives and the heat from the VGA card/motherboard are not feeding each other. Plus, the case is overall just really nice. No brittle/cheap plastics, all metal or nicely molded plastic, edges are all rounded off to save your knuckles. Externally accessible filters for all of the intake fans. I don't know, it doesn't add a lot of direct value but I've had three motherboards in the case now so it's survived three computers and two moves, it's a good design to keep everything quiet and cool... You can make your own choice on whether that's important to you.
Otherwise it seems like a great case for a great price. I just usually splurge on the case when I need a new one, since a good case will usually last you a very long time.
Actually, in the time between my last post and now my budget increased a bit, so I think I'm going to go with the Antec you have binary, durability is exactly the thing I'm looking for and I can spend the extra $50 on a case that'll last. Also, I think I'm going to bump up to a 120GB SSD, what would you recommend for that?
This feels like a stupid question, but is there a way, in Windows, to keep the aspect ratio of a window when resizing it? If I'm playing emulated games in a window, I want to be able to change the size of the window without stretching and making it look all funny, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to do it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I have a confusing problem. I'm having trouble with my internet. Essentially, the only site I can load is TiB. Whenever I load any other sites I get an error message. Some background information: I have a router in my room. The router is hooked up to the dorm's network via an ethernet port. From the router I have two desktop PCs hooked up. One is running Windows 7 Professional 64bit and the other is running Windows XP. Internet is down on both computers, save for TiB. Issues on both computers have been replicated with Chrome and Firefox. The Windows 7 box has no security other than Windows Defender or whatever came with it. The XP box has Norton. Any suggestions on what I could do to try and troubleshoot my side of things?
Try restarting your firewall, then restart your laptop. If that doesn't work, set up your DNS on your computer to use Google's DNS values of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 Odds are your laptop is connecting to your network using "auto-provided values" from your firewall/router. (DHCP). Part of that information provided by your firewall are the DNS servers that your laptop should use to go look up sites. Typically, the firewall says "just ask me and I'll figure it out for you". Don't trust it, and manually enter those DNS values. It could be that your firewall is fucked, and your laptop is just using the cached values it's already looked up for TiB. Even if you're using DHCP, manually configure your DNS values for those two values.
I've got an OCZ Vertex 2 that I'm happy with but that's about all that I've used for SSDs. Really, sites like AnandTech review these kinds of drives all the time and are a bette source of information. They did a roundup: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/4421/the-2011-midrange-ssd-roundup" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.anandtech.com/show/4421/the- ... sd-roundup</a>
I'm really not wanting to turn this into the "Help the tech-illiterate SF with stuff he should be able to easily fix" thread, but I keep running into issues I can't make any sense of. My Firefox is acting up lately. Little things here and there that are annoying but trivial, except for one thing: Whenever I'm watching movies, especially DivX, I'm encountering incredibly slow buffer times. I know DivX is slower than, say, Megavideo due to the quality of the file, but it's also skipping a bit. From one a minute up to once every ten seconds, the video will skip a single second of video, usually while playing the previous or accompanying second of sound twice in a row. It doesn't make it impossible to watch videos, but it is very distracting. I'm trying to figure out why this is happening. I have up-to-date codecs and Firefox, and I'm not simultaneously running multiple videos, so I see no reason for this.
When you say "watching videos" - in your browser, usually the videos are streamed using a Flash window, unless you're clicking on a video and actually just watching the native video in your browser. If it is indeed going through Flash, I'd uninstall and reinstall Flash.
If it's happening in both browsers, it's got to be something common across both of them. You also might want to ensure you've got the latest Flash installed, and that hardware acceleration is enabled. It also might be your anti-virus (if you're running any) interfering with things. The other issue could be your network. If you're running on a slow network, like old wireless or shit internet, it'll stop/start as the buffer empties and struggles to re-fill. If you have the ability, try viewing the movie in a lower resolution/quality, and see how that works. (The higher the quality/resolution of the movie means more required bandwidth).
I recently had to perform a complete rebuild on my parent's home computer after their primary HD shit the bed. Since then, my dad has asked me to look into a NAS for them. They don't need anything super extravagant, but they want something reliable, and not too expensive. I told him my thoughts on this, to get a multi-drive NAS with Raid 5 set up on it, but he doesn't want to drop $700 or more on a setup like that. He's looking for something in the $100-200 range, and I'm not sure what is really good for him. He definitely wants some sort of redundancy built in, so if anyone has some good knowledge on this, I would appreciate it.
I got my Dad a Drobo : <a class="postlink" href="http://www.drobo.com/resources/this_is_drobo.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.drobo.com/resources/this_is_drobo.php</a> Spoiler It's a bit more than your budget, but I got him one of the 5-bay ones with two drives in it. Works for both his Macs and my Mom's PC laptop. They have a 4-bay one that's under $400, which might work for you. He's got 2 1.5TB drives in it right now, and can add up to 3 more as his needs grow. It's got a stupidly easy to understand "red light flashing so something's wrong" system to let him know if he's running out of space or a drive is hosed. It automatically deals with shit when you add a new drive, so you don't have to worry about RAID levels or anything.
So... what is the actual goal of all of this? A backup? RAID isn't for backup. RAID is for high availability. Yes, it's great that it protects against a single hard drive failure, but there are so many other things that can simply kill your whole array. Electrical problems, water, a fire, theft, kicking the thing, having the unfortunate luck of two drives dying close to each other, corruption in the array... Similarly, NAS isn't really for backup either. It's for central availability on a network. I mean, the Drobo is nice. It's easy to use and customer friendly and all that. It's NAS-for-n00bs. But it still isn't a backup. Unless he's generating a shitton of data every day, get him one of these online backup solutions - I use Backblaze, and am happy with it. I've not had a disaster but I've done several test recoveries to validate the process and it works well. They have an option where they'll ship you a hard drive full of your data if you don't want to download it. Everything is backed up automatically, no thinking required, and it's off-site so a fire/theft/flood/whatever doesn't affect your data. $60/year and I currently have 150gb backed up there. Then, buy him a single external USB drive for $100, set up a scheduled backup on the computer, and have him back up to that. One off-site backup, one on-site backup, and the local copy. Almost guaranteed success. MHO, of course.
Good advice. The original "requirements" aren't at all focused. It's like they want an F1 car that will haul 5 people and the dog for under $30k.
Spot on advice, Binary. Thanks. I think that what you're suggesting is a perfect solution to what his needs really are. Quick question about Backblaze, though. Can you have multiple computers under one account for the same price? They have a desktop and a laptop that would need to be backed up.
I believe they charge per-machine. For me at home, I just have an automated weekly backup that runs on my laptop, and backs the laptop stuff up to a folder on my desktop. Thus, it gets backed up to Backblaze from my desktop. I don't back much up from my laptop anyway, it's mostly just my girlfriend's grad school documents. edit: also, this would allow the laptop to be backed up to the external USB drive without actually moving the drive - you just back it up to a folder on the desktop, and when the desktop syncs to the external USB drive, the laptop stuff will move with it.