Where have I been? Update...

[Travis King]

Has anyone noticed my lack of being on this newsgroup lately? Here's the
story. On Monday, I brought my computer out of standby and my master hard
drive (80GB with Windows) began to make funny grindy noises and kept acting
like it was turning off and turning on. I shut off the computer and turned
it back on. I quickly began backing up my data. (At this point, the noise
was gone.) Well, I got done backing up my files, and I walked away from the
computer for a while. When I came back, it was starting to do it again. I
was playing music in Media Player 10 and all of a sudden, everything
stopped. The hard drive died from there. It would turn on but not be
detected by the motherboard. Fortunately, I have another hard drive as you
know. (My 120GB hard drive was the survivor.) The story has only begun
however... Remember how I was talking about doing a partial rebuild of my
computer? Well, I ended up doing it, but sooner than expected and not by
choice! I got a new heatsink and CPU fan for my processor, and when I went
to remove my hold heatsink, the screwdriver slipped and stabbed my
motherboard. (I did this to it once before also.) My stupidity of using a
larger screw driver than I should. Well, you can only guess what happened.
My motherboard did not survive two stabbings in the same exact spot. The
thin film transistor was destroyed and just caused the internal speaker to
beep as if there were a memory error. So, here I am now with a new socket
754 board and a new AMD Sempron 64 2800+. I wanted to get an Athlon 64, but
I couldn't afford it. At least now I won't have to worry about AGP 4x/8x
issues because now it's AGP 8x. As for the hard drive, I installed XP on
the partition that I was going to use for Vista, and I'm going to pull the
80GB hard drive from my mom's computer when she gets her new computer that I
built in two weeks. The Sempron 64 2800+ seems considerably faster than my
Athlon XP 2400+ (at stock speeds by the way) did at least in Windows Media
Player where I can run the same visualization at a much larger size without
slow-downs. By the way, my new Sempron is running in the upper 20's to
lower 30's celcius with that $40 Zalman heatsink/CPU fan that I was going to
use for my old processor. (It's compatible with socket A CPUs or newer
sockets like 754 or 939 and compatible with equivalent Intels.) That
heatsink is huge. It's slightly larger than an 80mm case fan and spins
between 1500-2500RPM depending on where I set the fan speed since you can
adjust it. I guess my computer's a little bit more prepared for Vista now,
but it's sure not what I had in mind and what I had planned.

 

[Man-wai Chang]

heatsink is huge. It's slightly larger than an 80mm case fan and spins

between 1500-2500RPM depending on where I set the fan speed since you can
adjust it. I guess my computer's a little bit more prepared for Vista now,
but it's sure not what I had in mind and what I had planned.

There is no hurry to join the 64-bit race in my opinion. It's mainly a
calendar issue (year 2038 bug).

--
.~. Might, Courage, Vision. SINCERITY. http://www.linux-sxs.org
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (Ubuntu 5.10) Linux 2.6.16.8
^ ^ 15:01:04 up 2 days 18:44 load average: 2.26 1.41 1.19
news://news.3home.net news://news.hkpcug.org news://news.newsgroup.com.hk

 

[Travis King]

I wanted the Athlon 64 more because of its better performance, slightly
better clock speeds, and more cache, not really because it's 64-bit because
I'm also in no hurry to switch to 64-bit.

 

[t]

Well I have a Athlon 64 which I got last year when they came out. If I had
to do it again I would, so far between my P4 3200 x64 extream and my AMD
Athlon 64 3200 I would take the AMD hands down. It may only run at 2.21gigs
but it is faster.
Tony

 

[t]

I have one more thing to say I to lost an 80gig drive just last week that I
had Vista 5308 running on. This drive was only 8 months old and was running
XP pro on it from day one. I did not see it thrasing with XP as I did with
Vista. With vista the hard drive light was on all the time.
Dont tell me it is because of lack of ram 1.5gigs is not low, and an AMD
Athlon 64 3200 is not a slow cpu.
Tony

 

[Travis King]

My hard drive that died was a Western Digital. I've had quite a few Western
Digitals die on me lately. I'm beginning to wonder if they're going
downhill. I am starting to use more Seagates than I have in the past except
I think the HD access noise from Seagates is louder. Seagate's five-year
warranty on their hard drives is also tempting... Now for the processor, I
use AMD exclusively for all my builds even though there are a few things
that Intel could out-do AMD on. I have not been let down by them yet. I
still think AMD is a gamer's dream come true. In fact, I just got done
building two computers which both used an Athlon 64 x2 3800+. You literally
can't bog that thing down. One of the computers that I built has an NVIDIA
6600 PCI-E x16 and the other has an NVIDIA 7600GT PCI-E x16. The one with
the better card also has 2GB of RAM (dual channel) and a 250GB Seagate hard
drive. The computer with the 6600 has a 200GB WD and 1GB of RAM (dual
channel). The computer with the 6600 also has a 16x DVD burner and a video
capture card while the computer with the 7600GT has a 16x DVD burner with
lightscribe and can burn DVD RAM. I guess that's why one of them cost $800
to build and the other one costs $1200. I used an Athlon 64 3000+ in a
build a year and a half ago and it was considerably faster than this
Sempron, but like I said, I couldn't afford it right now even though it's
only $40 more.

 

[Travis King]

It's funny also because the last time I had a hard drive die on me, I was
playing music with WMP10 also. It must really like to kill hard drives lol.
(That one was also a Western Digital that I had in my spare eMachines
T1090.) It died similar to how mine died. The music stopped, it froze up,
it made grindy and clicking noises (no warnings until that moment) and then
the hard drive kept turning off and on. That was about six months ago.

 

[Tim S.]

It will be interesting once you install Vista on the new computer, how it
will rate your new hardware compared to your other set up. Mine is measly 3.
It had been a 2, but since reinstalling Vista and using the default nvida
driver,Vista reports as a 3 now.

Regards

 

[Travis King]

I would not have been surprised that it would have rated a 2 with the Athlon
XP 2400+ I had because I think you have to have an Athlon XP 2800+ to get a
3. They say that the Sempron 64 2800+ Palermo slightly outdoes an Athlon XP
3200+ Barton. (The highest Athlon XP) The factors potentially holding my
computer down below a 3 now would be the NVIDIA FX5600 or the 768MB of RAM.
(Which I will soon have 1.5GB.) The FX5600 does have 256MB of video RAM
though. Another good thing about having this motherboard is I can now get a
SATA drive if I ever want to. I believe you have to have a pretty hefty
computer to get a 5.

 

[t]

Mine on one machine is a 1 and the other is a 2
The 2 is a P4 3200 x64
and the 1 is a emachines laptop with a AMD Athlon 64 3400 it has 1.5 gig ram
and the P4 had 2gigs

 

[Yeff]

Mine on one machine is a 1 and the other is a 2
The 2 is a P4 3200 x64
and the 1 is a emachines laptop with a AMD Athlon 64 3400 it has 1.5 gig ram
and the P4 had 2gigs

What kind of video card do you have?

 

[Travis King]

I believe the rating goes by your weakest point. Whatever component has the
weakest score is the score it gives your computer I believe. I know for
sure both of those CPU's I would guess should rate at least a 3 if not a 4.
(Probably a 4) Something else has to be holding them down. Knowing that
eMachines, it probably has a bad video adapter or video card. (Most
eMachines computers come with lackluster graphics abilities out of the box
anyway) I'm not ranting eMachines though because I think they're pretty
decent computers for a cheap price, but for users who need something even
somewhat demanding, (especially graphics) then I would doubt an eMachines
would be for them or at least not without an upgrade right off the bat.

 

[John]

Has anyone noticed my lack of being on this newsgroup lately? Here's the

story. On Monday, I brought my computer out of standby and my master hard
drive (80GB with Windows) began to make funny grindy noises and kept
acting like it was turning off and turning on. I shut off the computer
and turned it back on. I quickly began backing up my data. (At this
point, the noise was gone.) Well, I got done backing up my files, and I
walked away from the computer for a while. When I came back, it was
starting to do it again. I was playing music in Media Player 10 and all
of a sudden, everything stopped.

No wonder. Thats why you should use winamp.

 

[David R. Norton MVP Shell/User]

Has anyone noticed my lack of being on this newsgroup lately?

Oh, were you gone? ;-)

Sorry, it's not often I get a straight line that good, I couldn't resist!

 

[David R. Norton MVP Shell/User]

My hard drive that died was a Western Digital. I've had quite a few Western
Digitals die on me lately.

I've got a stack of dead WD hard drives. It seems that every manufacturer
goes through quality control or some kind of problem from time to time,
years back it was Maxtor, now Maxtor's are fine and WD's are having
problems. Sooner or later (it seems about a 3-5 year cycle?) WD will fix
their problems, until then get some other brand.

 

[Jabez Gan [MVP]]

Welcome back Travis! Yeah I do remmeber your name

Well, maybe you should have different paragraphs in the future so to ease
reading.