buying a new PC in England - any sensible suggestions?

RAM, loads of it...

and Grayhaze or Fuzzy should have a clue on a local shop or person if not one of them

Oh yeah, Hiya feline !!

good seeing you

IPlural - RAM, loads of it...

unless i can find a solution to win98 not working with more than 512meg, i was only going to get 512meg.

i am planning on a win98 / winXP dual boot, so i have somewhere to experiment and play the games that winXP just doesnt seem to like.

as for advice on a local shop, i hope so

/me has fond hopes of feeling upto being here more once i finally get a fast working machine
this whole experience has been really rather depressing *sigh*

For the last year I've use and Advent. It's worked flawlessly. The only problem I've had is what I did myself..(serves you right!). Highly recommended.

I'm embarrassed to say I bought it from PC World

DO NOT BUY A DELL! Although the customer service is great, you can PROBABLY build a system cheaper than you could buy one, but don't quote me on that.

I think at this stage cost or consumer service is irrelevant. What is, is reliability. At the end of the day, you want your pc to work and not let you down.

Well Fuzzy in that case I recommend Feline that you either:

A: Build your own PC (saves money, and YOU know what YOU put in the machine so if something goes wrong YOU can track it down easy)
B: Buy a mac - Never let you down!

512 is enough memory - Corsair

I've always stuck with AMD (maybe drop the stock cooling?).
Asus A7N8X Mobo

A price limit would be nice.

Feline....I think there is a proggy or method where-by Win98 can cope with too much ram.....but certainly with VM Ware you can run 98, 95, or even 3.11 under XP with a gig of ram and no problems....

If you're doing nothing more than playing pc games, using the proggies here and the likes, 512 will definitely suffice and more. You should use the extra money towards better components like your video card or CPU.

But yeah, like Jafo mentioned you can get around that Win98 issue.
[Message Edited]

/me only pops in to say hello to kitty kat
(hello feline)

Jafo, yep you can run more than 512 with 98...

feline, here is something I used to make use of and forgot about until Jafo mentioned it and it got me to digging around, I would use option 3 it always worked for me when configuring system for Autocad and such a few years back...


It transpires that Win ME, Win98 and Win95 cannot deal with main memory sizes in excess of 512MB.

This problem may occur more readily with Advanced Graphics Port (AGP) video adapters because the AGP aperture is also mapped to addresses in the system arena.

For example, if Vcache is using a maximum cache size of 800MB and an AGP video adapter has a 128MB aperture mapped, there is very little address space remaining for the other system code and data that must occupy this range of virtual addresses."

And here are the three suggested workarounds:

1-Physically remove any memory in excess of 512MB [!]

2-Use the System Configuration utility to limit the amount of memory that Windows uses to 512MB or less.

------------------------------------------
3-Use the MaxFileCache setting in the System.ini file to reduce the maximum amount of memory that Vcache uses to 512MB (524,288 KB) or less. in your WIndows 98 System.ini file that is"
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4-And the unspoken fourth solution: upgrade to Windows 2000.

what they neglect to tell you is they are also speaking of the Dos upper memory region and the system region for ROMBIOS (hardware addresses). WIndows XP, NT and 2000 have the same issue, so when they claim there isn't any Dos in those OS'es they are full of crap and playing at word games, they just wrote the code into the NT kernal, XP 64 bit is a total re-write from what I've read and what I've been sent in the mail...

I can show you a store or two here that does fine computers!

some good points here

re mac - all my software is for the PC, so i have no urge to switch

re build yourself - my "current" machine was build from bits, all the bits seem fine, and if it runs for 1 hour in winXP without a hard lock or spontanious reboot then it is a miracle. i have no interest in going over all of this again, after 4.5 months i have decided it is unfixable.

reliability is the prime requirement, with price (not to expensive) as the secondary requirement.

VM for win98 sounds interesting. i play some games, but i am mainly prone to serious multi-tasking, including running visual studio, so 1 gig of ram is probably a good idea.

Jafo, the basic reason i have a dual boot (seperate partitions) is it is easy to set up, and safe, so if something i install makes a mess of win98 it doesnt mess up winXP.

i was never able to get Rogue Squadron to work reliably under winXP, and installing civilisation3 on winXP left me needing a system restore

so, i mainly use the win98 partition for these two

how seperate and stable is VM?

IPlural - I would use option 3 it always worked for me when configuring system for Autocad and such a few years back...

ah! i have heard of this, but i dont think i have ever seen the flag listed anywhere. can you install win98 on a machine with 1 gig of ram? going to be hard to edit system.ini until i have win98 installed

Fuzzy Logic - For the last year I've use and Advent. I'm embarrassed to say I bought it from PC World

noted i am planning a visit to PC World this weekend. at least they are a shop i can go and shout at if there are any problems.



[Message Edited]

DO NOT BUY A DELL! Although the customer service is great, you can PROBABLY build a system cheaper than you could buy one, but don't quote me on that

Nonsense! I have a new Dell system and I was very happy with the price I paid for it, plus, the build quality is exceptional. Dell have some very attractive deals at the moment.

Having said that: Feline, if you want a cheap system that isn't from one of the major players, I suggest you get "Micro Mart" magazine, it's the best place for reasonably priced computers.

I also saw a "Tiny" computer in "The Sun" newspaper yesterday, it was £499 and seemed pretty good to me, even came with a printer!

OK....here's QNX [the OS] running in Win 98 s/e [the OS] running in a VM window in Win XP Pro [the OS] with LiteSTEP [the shell]......with a gig of ram you can do all sorts of things....

My upgraded comp will include....

P4 3.06 gig 512 cache 800fsb cpu

Asus p4p800 deluxe i865 800fsb mobo

2 x 512 meg pc3200 ddr 400mhz ram

Existing box.....Lian Li with 400w psu.....and all the 'usual bits'...

BTW.....since the days of a p100 being 'hot stuff', I've 'rolled my own' when it comes to computers.....it's ultimately economical....

Jafo your P4 will be outdated in 3 months when AMD releases it's new chip.

That said, Feline get a AMD based system.

feline if it comes down to it, you can remove 512, install win98 and edit the system.ini.
If the maxvcache setting is not in there you can add it and win98 will deal with it.

VM is the way to go, or some product like it because you run a Virtual Machine (computer) a lot like
DesqVIEW of old, OS/2, and (flavours of) UNIX do. If a Virtual Computer goes dink it should not destablize
the whole system either.

As far as running games under XP goes, there are a couple of options in that respect. Windows 2000 sp3
is one of them. Also running the application under compatibility mode as a seperate process which is
close to what VM and the others allow but not exactly. I have Metacreations Painter 3D which does not
like XP or the other way around, in the least. Blue screens when I attempted to just load and go, so I
had to run it under Win98 compat and it works fine.

The games might need some patches and there are always work arounds for them on gaming sites.

Building your system can cost less which gives you the extra to buy closer to what you want.

If you've a budget of say $1200.00 you could pretty much put together what many OEM boxes sell for
$1500.00 - $2000.00 or even a bit higher.

The new Egghead online store has some good pricing and reputation.
TCWO.com has some also for their sales
Crucial online sells ram for some fantastic prices.
(I up dated my T22 laptop from 128 meg of ram to 512 meg of ram for $130.00... IBM wanted to soak me.
The thing is, I bought IBM ram from Crucial )

On Video, and ATI sounds right but I do not know that I would go out and spend $300.00 and up for the latest
and greatest when I can get almost the same thing from last years latest and greatest ATI for $150.00 and down.

If I was putting together an Animated Movie, maybe, but then again I would go totally SGI at that point. Or if I was really heavy into games the newest would be used then also probably.

Hard Drive space makes a difference also. Swap disk space for graphics apps and the OS are always a plus.

feline, here's good choices of Full systems. I shop here quite alot and really recommend their stuff such a big range.

Good choice you went ATI.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Full_Systems_43.html

#19 by Kona0197 - 10/22/2003 10:14:10 AM Jafo your P4 will be outdated in 3 months when AMD releases it's new chip.That said, Feline get a AMD based system.

/me pokes Kona with a big stick

Kona certain models for those "extreme gamers" that will require cutting edge speed to their P4's but to general people for 1.3Ghz upwards will do them just fine. Dont forget there are many models of P4 and if you mean the new AMD64, it certainly is not cheap especially Athlon 64 FX, latest P4 3.2 is cheaper.

Personally (being a AMD user)if your doing lots of graphics multitasking rendering video editing or whatever go Intel based system, as for gaming Intel & AMD are very close in speed just i think Intel has that slight edge over AthlonXP's due to Hyper Threading. We'll soon see as AMD 64's mature over time

Hum, I recently upgraded my RAM from 512 to 1 Gig at work. And frankly, I see no difference.
I often have many apps opened at the same time. Typically: Outlook, Word, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Quark XPress.
And frankly, while there is a lag sometimes, it seems to be caused by something else than lack of RAM since it didn't change a bit.

I think 512 Megs is plenty.

You started something here with that question, all you are going to get is opposing views.

All you need do is buy what you think you need! depending on what you intend to do with the computer and forget all the opposing advice

The new Athhon FX51 beats out P4 in every benchmark except content creation.

AMD is better bang for your buck; overclocking.

The new Athhon FX51 beats out P4 in every benchmark except content creation.

The new FX51 is also $800 for just the chip...

I wouldn't recommend the new Athalon's until Jan/Feb-04. Currently the Athalon64 3200+ requires registered memory which is expensive...AMD will be releasing the new line of chips that use unregistered mem, much cheaper. Also, Microsoft will be releasing WindowsXP 64-bit edition around that time, so yes the AMD is faster and yes they are better...but wait...it will be worth it in the end. Just incase you were looking at them...

If you want a plain-jane reliable workhorse PC, I recommend buying one from a top company. Dell, Gateway, etc. You should compare prices and features of PC's within that type, it is your best bet. Overall cost will be cheaper and you have warranties and tech support if needed.