Microsoft and Dell recently partnered up to create a super-cool custom PC in celebration of Microsoft releasing Windows Vista to manufacturing earlier this month. Our own Sean Alexander had a friend on the Windows Team forward on some pictures and information regarding the high end PC. Here are the system specs:
Screenshot: Front View | Side View
View: Windows Vista Blog via Bink
One of these PCs was raffled off at our Windows Vista Ship Party on campus November 10th.
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Processor
- 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
- 4GB RAM Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM @ 667mhz
- 1Terabyte RAID0 SATA HDDs (2x500MB)
- 48x Combo + 16x DVD+/-RW Double Layer Burner
- Dual TV Tuners (Analog)
- Dell 30\" Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor
- Full 5.1 Surround Sound
Screenshot: Front View | Side View View: Windows Vista Blog via BinkOne of these PCs was raffled off at our Windows Vista Ship Party on campus November 10th.
Tera is a thousand million bytes, or 1000GB. 1 tebibyte (TiB) is 1024GB or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
Hard Disks use the correct SI term but operating systems generally don't :/
Tera is a thousand million bytes, or 1000GB. 1 tebibyte (TiB) is 1024GB or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
Hard Disks use the correct SI term but operating systems generally don't :/
eheheheehe
2x500mb doesn't equal 1tb
typo . mb=gb
<_<
Binary environments such as operating systems don't use SI as SI is denary, therefore hard disks do NOT use the correct term. TB is not T for tera as in 10^12 (SI) Bytes but a two letter unit that happens to be pronounced the same but is 2^40. No matter what you say you will be wrong if you persist in treating base 2 systems as base 10.
Binary environments such as operating systems don't use SI as SI is denary, therefore hard disks do NOT use the correct term. TB is not T for tera as in 10^12 (SI) Bytes but a two letter unit that happens to be pronounced the same but is 2^40. No matter what you say you will be wrong if you persist in treating base 2 systems as base 10.
This issue was the sole reason for the creation of the Binary versions, e.g. MiB, GiB, TiB, etc. they are what OS's should be using (Firefox uses it, and Azures (sp?) uses it)
1. You have twice the chance that you loose all the data from Harddrive. :-) One hard drive fails, or even get disconnected like cable fails and this is it your data is lost.
2. the reading and even writing speads are slower especially when you write and read small file (the ones that are read/written during OS booting and browsing internet) This is because both hard drive need to position their head to specific cylinder and track :-)
Besically RAID-0 is the worse solution for home user.
1. You have twice the chance that you loose all the data from Harddrive. :-) One hard drive fails, or even get disconnected like cable fails and this is it your data is lost.
2. the reading and even writing speads are slower especially when you write and read small file (the ones that are read/written during OS booting and browsing internet) This is because both hard drive need to position their head to specific cylinder and track :-)
Besically RAID-0 is the worse solution for home user.
There are performance increases when using a RAID 0 setup. I've noticed a good increase when using all the same hardware.. just throwing in another drive and running a disk stripe. As for the risk of data loss... yeah, you're right. That's why it's always good to backup your data (even when only using one HDD) to DVD, or a external USB drive. You can even go with RAID 0+1, or RAID 5. Gotta love the disk stripe.
Just wondering.. have you ever used a RAID 0 setup?
2x500mb doesn't equal 1tb
typo . mb=gb
<_<
First thing I noticed.
1. You have twice the chance that you loose all the data from Harddrive. :-) One hard drive fails, or even get disconnected like cable fails and this is it your data is lost.
2. the reading and even writing speads are slower especially when you write and read small file (the ones that are read/written during OS booting and browsing internet) This is because both hard drive need to position their head to specific cylinder and track :-)
Besically RAID-0 is the worse solution for home user.
There are performance increases when using a RAID 0 setup. I've noticed a good increase when using all the same hardware.. just throwing in another drive and running a disk stripe. As for the risk of data loss... yeah, you're right. That's why it's always good to backup your data (even when only using one HDD) to DVD, or a external USB drive. You can even go with RAID 0+1, or RAID 5. Gotta love the disk stripe.
Just wondering.. have you ever used a RAID 0 setup?
I have used RAID 0 setup about two years ago (2x160GB = 320GB) and I was the lucky one to loose all my data on that setup. Currently i am using RAID 1 (2x320GV = 320GB) and one extra 320GB just for not important stuff. You might ask why do not I setup a RAID 5 with three 320 hardrives? I will answer for the same reason: performance. With RAID 1, when two proccesses are reading from hard drives they can do it in parallel, and the performance actually increases. This does not happen with RAID-0 and especially with RAID 5. Since in the later case before writing a small file it has to read from the other hard drive to compute the XOR stripe :-) So every writing of a small file also requires a reading in RAID-5 which suck...
Wrong, very wrong. Of course hard drives themselves are binary, as they can exclusively be used to store binary data - data is always binary, as it's made up of zeroes and ones. Until that changes fundamentally, measuring data with decimal units (leading to ludicrous conversions like e.g. 1000MB=1GB) is just as bloody retarded as it would be to measure decimal units (e.g. metre) in binary units and e.g. saying that 1 kilometre is 1024 metres
The absolutely only reason why media (HD, Dvd etc.) manufactures use decimal units even though it doesn't make the least sense is to deceive the average costumer into thinking he/she would get more storage than he/she actually gets
A 500GB HD still only has 465.66 actual GB (w/o the place needed for the file system and such), and a 4.7GB Dvd only has 4.38 actual GB of storage.
The absolutely only reason why media (HD, Dvd etc.) manufactures use decimal units even though it doesn't make the least sense is to deceive the average costumer into thinking he/she would get more storage than he/she actually gets
A 500GB HD still only has 465.66 actual GB (w/o the place needed for the file system and such), and a 4.7GB Dvd only has 4.38 actual GB of storage.
And no, the reason HD makers do it, is because they are right (the people who define this stuff say 1GB = 1000MB, and 1GiB = 1024MiB)
My hard drive is marked 120GB, and it's just that, 120GB, but it's also 111GiB, Windows reports the numbers correctly, just mislabels the GiB as GB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
1. You have twice the chance that you loose all the data from Harddrive. :-) One hard drive fails, or even get disconnected like cable fails and this is it your data is lost.
2. the reading and even writing speads are slower especially when you write and read small file (the ones that are read/written during OS booting and browsing internet) This is because both hard drive need to position their head to specific cylinder and track :-)
Besically RAID-0 is the worse solution for home user.
Um, no.
1) RAID 0 is more prone to drive failure, but on a home or gamer PC it's not really an issue unless you're running it a a server. If you use good quality hard drives (that would be Seagate, not Maxtor) you shouldn't have any problems. The reliability of a given RAID 0 set is equal to the average reliability of each disk divided by the number of disks in the set. That is, reliability as measured by mean time to failure (MTTF) or mean time between failures (MTBF) is roughly inversely proportional to the number of members—so a set of two disks is roughly half as reliable as a single disk. That said, I really think Microsoft should have built this system with RAID 0+1 or 10 array to have the best of RAID 0 and RAID 1 at the same time. RAID 5 is fine, but RAID 0+1 or 10 is better.
2) RAID 0 read/write speeds are always faster than non-raid or RAID 1 setups. RAID 1 mirrors (duplexes) each Read/Write operation acress all drives in the RAID 1 array. That means that the RAID 1 array is never faster than a simple 1-drive IED/SATA disk would be. On the other hand, RAID 0 splits I/O operations into equal-sized blocks and spreads them evenly across all disks in the RAID 0 array (therefore, the number of disks in a RAID 0 array must be equally divisible... no 3 disk or 5-disk RAID 0 arrays are possible). The more disks in the RAID 0 array, the more read/write operations can be had for a given instance of an I/O operation. This gives a diminishing return on increased performance as one adds more dives to a given RAID 0 array because the I/O speed doesn't increase, just the Read/Write speed. You could build a RAID 0 array is capable of doing more Read/Write operations than the I/O bus is, but at that point you've overbuilt your RAID array and wasted money. If the RAID controller is a proper hardware controller (add-in card on on-board chip) then there's no additional overhead to the CPU. If it's a software controller, then it can add a significant load onto the CPU, which is why Hardware RAID is so popular.
1. You have twice the chance that you loose all the data from Harddrive. :-) One hard drive fails, or even get disconnected like cable fails and this is it your data is lost.
2. the reading and even writing speads are slower especially when you write and read small file (the ones that are read/written during OS booting and browsing internet) This is because both hard drive need to position their head to specific cylinder and track :-)
Besically RAID-0 is the worse solution for home user.
Um, no.
1) RAID 0 is more prone to drive failure, but on a home or gamer PC it's not really an issue unless you're running it a a server. If you use good quality hard drives (that would be Seagate, not Maxtor) you shouldn't have any problems. The reliability of a given RAID 0 set is equal to the average reliability of each disk divided by the number of disks in the set. That is, reliability as measured by mean time to failure (MTTF) or mean time between failures (MTBF) is roughly inversely proportional to the number of members—so a set of two disks is roughly half as reliable as a single disk. That said, I really think Microsoft should have built this system with RAID 0+1 or 10 array to have the best of RAID 0 and RAID 1 at the same time. RAID 5 is fine, but RAID 0+1 or 10 is better.
2) RAID 0 read/write speeds are always faster than non-raid or RAID 1 setups. RAID 1 mirrors (duplexes) each Read/Write operation acress all drives in the RAID 1 array. That means that the RAID 1 array is never faster than a simple 1-drive IED/SATA disk would be. On the other hand, RAID 0 splits I/O operations into equal-sized blocks and spreads them evenly across all disks in the RAID 0 array (therefore, the number of disks in a RAID 0 array must be equally divisible... no 3 disk or 5-disk RAID 0 arrays are possible). The more disks in the RAID 0 array, the more read/write operations can be had for a given instance of an I/O operation. This gives a diminishing return on increased performance as one adds more dives to a given RAID 0 array because the I/O speed doesn't increase, just the Read/Write speed. You could build a RAID 0 array is capable of doing more Read/Write operations than the I/O bus is, but at that point you've overbuilt your RAID array and wasted money. If the RAID controller is a proper hardware controller (add-in card on on-board chip) then there's no additional overhead to the CPU. If it's a software controller, then it can add a significant load onto the CPU, which is why Hardware RAID is so popular.
Solid explaination well done. I've been running RAID 0 at home and work for years and it rocks - I just buy an extra drive to do my backups to once a week (which I would do anyway) so I don't think it's particularly risky in real world terms. My RAID 0 set at home was solid for 3 years until i upgraded the drives for more capacity. Hard drive reliability (in my experience) is directly proportional to how well their cooled - make sure they stay cool and they'll stay with you for a long time..
Seems half assed to me.
Seems half assed to me.
The reason for no SLI is that at the moment nVidia can't be @rsed writing drivers that support it yet, same with the 8800 series.
The analog tuners seems like a bizarre choice too.
All others support 2 physical CPU's.
There's no limit on the number of cores in the respective physical CPU's though.
0.1
0.1
ROFL!!! yes.. then windows would deactivate its "Windows Genuine" feature and lock you out of Vista..
id say definately less than one. you would have a 5 for memory, and a 2-4 on your processor depending on other specs (FSB, Bandwidth, etc.), but that hard drive is just TERRIBLE
oh yeah, and macs suck
http://www.shareyourscore.com/
Top Performing CPUs
Intel® Pentium® D CPU 3.73GHz 5.7
Intel® Core™2 CPU X6800 @ 2.93GHz 5.6
Intel® Core™2 CPU 6700 @ 2.66GHz 5.6
Intel® Core™2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz 5.4
Intel® Core™2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz 5.3
Dual Core AMD Opteron™ Processor 165 5.2
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ 5.0
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+ 5.0
Intel® Pentium® D CPU 3.40GHz 5.0
Intel® Core™2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86GHz 4.9
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ 4.9
Intel® Pentium® D CPU 2.66GHz 4.9
AMD Opteron™ Processor 246 4.8
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ 4.8
Genuine Intel® CPU T2600 @ 2.16GHz 4.8
Intel® Pentium® D CPU 3.00GHz 4.8
Intel® Xeon™ CPU 2.80GHz 4.8
Genuine Intel® CPU T2500 @ 2.00GHz 4.7
Intel® Pentium® D CPU 2.80GHz 4.7
Genuine Intel® CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz 4.6
What's going on with the rating?
What I meant to point out is that the order is somewhat faulty? Even overclocked, my 3800+ could kill a 4600+?
-CPU Index must be 3.0+
-Video index must be 4.0+
-Ram index must be 2.0+
Advantage to doing this, is that so many people buy PC games thinking that they work on their machine, and they don't.
They'd actually only need a single score like "3.5 or higher", and then they'd know everything would be decent according to 2006 standards at least, because if something would be worse off, one of the rating minimums would've been lower.
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Processor
512MB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX -> 8800GTX or 8800GTS
4GB RAM Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM @ 667mhz
1Terabyte RAID0 SATA HDDs (2x500GB)
1x 16x DVD+/-RW Double Layer Burner -> with light scribe prefer
Dual TV Tuners (Analog) -> Single HD TV Tuner PCI can get it really cheap
Dell 30" Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor
Onboard 5.1 Surround Sound -> most onboard sound this day are HD (Realtek or Azalia)
Rating is MINIMUM rating.
I know 1GB of RAM is recommended and 2GB preferred, but 4GB is just silly. (IMO)
(IE7+Azureus+BitComet+VS.NET2005+Photoshop)
2Gb is PLENTY.
- IE 7 takes perhaps 50-100 MB or so.
- You shouldn't use Azureus if you use BitComet or vice versa.
- BitComet takes ~70 MB?
Basically, I can only see Photoshop taking much here, and in that case if you edit some massive 32-bit picture.
But that's really the exception if you're doing programming work in VS .NET; usually it's about icons and logos at those times.
2Gb is PLENTY.
Here is my main system, which I built from scratch:
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 Motherboard (ICH8R)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Processor
1GB eVGA GeForce 7950 GX2 Video Card
4GB Corsair XMS2-6400 DDR2 Memory (800 MHz)
2 x 74GB Raptor SATA HDD @ 10,000 RPM – Mirrored (System)
2 x 320GB Seagate Perpendicular SATA HDD – Mirrored (Storage)
1 x Plextor PX-716SA SATA Dual-layer DVD burner
1 x Plextor PX-755SA SATA Dual-layer DVD burner
HP A7217A 24” CRT Monitor (2048 x 1280 @ 85 Hz)
Sound Blaster X-Fi Sound Card
Creative GigaWorks S-700 5.1 Speakers @ 560 Watts (Peak)
Antec Titan 550 Server Case w/ 550 Watt TruePower 2.0 PSU
Right now, even with 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory and only a few apps running, I only have 1.4GB of physical memory free and my pagefile usage is sitting at 934MB.
Obviously, 2GB is not "PLENTY" enough memory for me.
2Gb is PLENTY.
Here is my main system, which I built from scratch:
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 Motherboard (ICH8R)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Processor
1GB eVGA GeForce 7950 GX2 Video Card
4GB Corsair XMS2-6400 DDR2 Memory (800 MHz)
2 x 74GB Raptor SATA HDD @ 10,000 RPM – Mirrored (System)
2 x 320GB Seagate Perpendicular SATA HDD – Mirrored (Storage)
1 x Plextor PX-716SA SATA Dual-layer DVD burner
1 x Plextor PX-755SA SATA Dual-layer DVD burner
HP A7217A 24” CRT Monitor (2048 x 1280 @ 85 Hz)
Sound Blaster X-Fi Sound Card
Creative GigaWorks S-700 5.1 Speakers @ 560 Watts (Peak)
Antec Titan 550 Server Case w/ 550 Watt TruePower 2.0 PSU
Right now, even with 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory and only a few apps running, I only have 1.4GB of physical memory free and my pagefile usage is sitting at 934MB.
Obviously, 2GB is not "PLENTY" enough memory for me.
I smell BS. What are these "few apps"? And you think 1.4GB of free memory is bad? Like I said wipe your mouth with toilet paper because it seems like your talking ****...
2Gb is PLENTY.
Here is my main system, which I built from scratch:
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 Motherboard (ICH8R)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Processor
1GB eVGA GeForce 7950 GX2 Video Card
4GB Corsair XMS2-6400 DDR2 Memory (800 MHz)
2 x 74GB Raptor SATA HDD @ 10,000 RPM – Mirrored (System)
2 x 320GB Seagate Perpendicular SATA HDD – Mirrored (Storage)
1 x Plextor PX-716SA SATA Dual-layer DVD burner
1 x Plextor PX-755SA SATA Dual-layer DVD burner
HP A7217A 24” CRT Monitor (2048 x 1280 @ 85 Hz)
Sound Blaster X-Fi Sound Card
Creative GigaWorks S-700 5.1 Speakers @ 560 Watts (Peak)
Antec Titan 550 Server Case w/ 550 Watt TruePower 2.0 PSU
Right now, even with 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory and only a few apps running, I only have 1.4GB of physical memory free and my pagefile usage is sitting at 934MB.
Obviously, 2GB is not "PLENTY" enough memory for me.
Maybe for you it's not, everyone else is talking about your average computer user. Not your hardcore power users who push everything in their system to the limit.
For your average PC user 2GB's is more than enough ram.
(IE7+Azureus+BitComet+VS.NET2005+Photoshop)
Photoshop can take them all the memory, just a few 600 or 900dpi images are enough. ;-)
I smell BS. What are these "few apps"? And you think 1.4GB of free memory is bad? Like I said wipe your mouth with toilet paper because it seems like your talking ****...
ROFLMAO!! OK, you caught me!
While my OS is Windows XP SP2, one of the "few apps" I have running is VMware Server with Windows 2003 Server Enterprise installed and running. Frankly I'm surprised that I have as much physical memory remaining as I do!
Well, there you go. I knew you guys would smell the BS in my post. I was just waiting to see who would let me have it with both barrels!
I smell BS. What are these "few apps"? And you think 1.4GB of free memory is bad? Like I said wipe your mouth with toilet paper because it seems like your talking ****...
ROFLMAO!! OK, you caught me!
While my OS is Windows XP SP2, one of the "few apps" I have running is VMware Server with Windows 2003 Server Enterprise installed and running. Frankly I'm surprised that I have as much physical memory remaining as I do!
Well, there you go. I knew you guys would smell the BS in my post. I was just waiting to see who would let me have it with both barrels!
If you're running 32bit XP then only 3GB is adressable anyway..
Where does all the extra RAM and processing power go into?
Where does all the extra RAM and processing power go into?
It's about the experience, part of that experience is how other applications work on the OS such as games and productivity applications which to me seems the whole point of an operating system. Not to look pretty and do nothing, but to let me run 5 heavy applications concurrently such as IM/Photo Editing/Web Browser/Office/etc...
Where does all the extra RAM and processing power go into?
How often do you just boot your computer and let it sit there doing nothing? The whole point is to run the OS and applications...
Hell, my PoS 2 year old junker gets 4.2 on Vista RC2, so that machine isn't THAT much more powerfull. I've seen people with scores on here of 5.8...
...It's Dell.
:p
It would have at least looked nicer...
Lemme guess, you have a prebuilt pc ? :p
I concur with your disagreement. And, no, I don't have a prebuilt PC.
What's that gaudy misshapen clear panel for?
It would have at least looked nicer...
I also think that this tower is quite ugly - wouldn't want to put something like that into my living room.
Lemme guess, you have a prebuilt pc ? :p
ha ha. No, here is my case, nice and clean looking, best case I have ever owned. It's the Lian Li PC-62 Extended Aluminum Case.
It would have at least looked nicer...
ha..I just built a new machine about a month ago, and I have almost the same case, it doesnt have the front door, but it has fins on the sides, its a badass case
oh, and my machine tops out at 5.2, only because of the HD
I have an E6600 core2duo, 3gb of DDR2 800mhz, dual plextor dvd burners, 512mb 7950 GT OC Video card, 250gb SATA Maxtor HD (boot), 300gb SATA Maxtor (secondary) and then two additional 320 SATA 16mb cache Seagates
I concur with your disagreement. And, no, I don't have a prebuilt PC.
What's that gaudy misshapen clear panel for?
Windows are for people who have components that look nice under UV light and they wish to display this...I guess people who don't mod or build pcs for play AND show won't be interested in modders cases...
Then again, many neowin forumites aren't into the modding scene anyway, they prefer plain/bland
I concur with your disagreement. And, no, I don't have a prebuilt PC.
What's that gaudy misshapen clear panel for?
Windows are for people who have components that look nice under UV light and they wish to display this...I guess people who don't mod or build pcs for play AND show won't be interested in modders cases...
Then again, many neowin forumites aren't into the modding scene anyway, they prefer plain/bland
Show who? Your mom? Does your mother care that you have RAM that lights up? Or fans with LEDs. Please.
I concur with your disagreement. And, no, I don't have a prebuilt PC.
What's that gaudy misshapen clear panel for?
Windows are for people who have components that look nice under UV light and they wish to display this...I guess people who don't mod or build pcs for play AND show won't be interested in modders cases...
Then again, many neowin forumites aren't into the modding scene anyway, they prefer plain/bland
Show who? Your mom? Does your mother care that you have RAM that lights up? Or fans with LEDs. Please.
Not quite, some people spend well on their cars, others on their bikes. I spend well on my car and my pc as well as my home entertainment and computer systems...I also have friends and family round and if you had any friends you'd know that things that look nice attract allot of attention and positive comments.
Besides that it's more for personal preference, someone who has something nice looking and powerful will feel mentally better and more confident than the next guy who has something flash and you don't.
Besides THAT, people who do not have the means to do something like that will often complain when someone posts theirs if they have acceptance issues.
Whenever someone can't do something for themselves they want to tell you you can't do it.
FYI I do not have led ram or led fans, my ide cable is UV and I have one UV tube. I like things minimal and I like my setups to be kept in their best way possible.
Just to annoy you though here's one I did earlier
I await your next smartass comment about my "mom" (is that an American insult? pretty typical if you ask me)
http://www.overclockercafe.com/Reviews/cases/NZXT_Zero/
Show who? Your mom? Does your mother care that you have RAM that lights up? Or fans with LEDs. Please.
Wow, chill the hell out. It's just a case. He likes mod cases, fine. You like vanilla, fine. People like anonized aluminum cases with an apple logo on them, fine. (I could be wrong about the material) The heck is with moms caring about how the hell a PC looks like.
Coming from a modder's POV (not that I am one anyway) maybe they want to show off the tidy work they did in strapping and hiding their cables.
@mrk: Damn you and your room. You caused quite a stir last time with that rasterbation thread a while back.
http://www.overclockercafe.com/Reviews/cases/NZXT_Zero/
oh wait, you were serious?
First thing I'd do if I was being given this system is reinstall XP x64.
First thing I'd do if I was being given this system is reinstall XP x64.
I just don't see the gain with XP 64 over XP 32. On less you have over 4GB of ram. Which in most cases you don't. For some reason a lot of people feel XP 64 is better than 32. I've tested both. I see no difference beside the problem of getting drivers. I could see how everyone would. Here you are on your 32bit version and you install a fresh copy of 64bit. Wow this is much faster. Ah yea! it's a fresh install. Do a fresh install of 32bit and I bet it'll be faster than 64bit.
_dandy_:
This isn't a direct comment. I just don't see the gain of it. In fact I'm waiting for someone to show me that 64bit is really some way better than 32bit. So that I can upgrade. The only type of computer users that may see a gain is someone that's sql or some type of database programmer.
Last edited by zey on 22 Nov 2006 - 16:27
First thing I'd do if I was being given this system is reinstall XP x64.
I just don't see the gain with XP 64 over XP 32. On less you have over 4GB of ram. Which in most cases you don't. For some reason a lot of people feel XP 64 is better than 32. I've tested both. I see no difference beside the problem of getting drivers. I could see how everyone would. Here you are on your 32bit version and you install a fresh copy of 64bit. Wow this is much faster. Ah yea! it's a fresh install. Do a fresh install of 32bit and I bet it'll be faster than 64bit.
_dandy_:
This isn't a direct comment. I just don't see the gain of it. In fact I'm waiting for someone to show me that 64bit is really some way better than 32bit. So that I can upgrade. The only type of computer users that may see a gain is someone that's sql or some type of database programmer.
The thing you have to factor in is that I'm already using XP x64, so I wouldn't remove Vista from that Dell box to install XP 32-bit. I'd stick with what I already have, and see no reason to "go back".
I wasn't planning on getting into this, but what the heck, you brought it up and I don't mind...Of course, YMMV.
For one thing, my biggest pet peeve, and the behavior I'm *always* seeing on *all* the XP (x86) machines I use on a regular basis, is that as soon as your handle count (see Task Manager's Performance tab) totals around 20,000, things start to break. The exact threshold varies, but at one point menus will stop being repainted correctly (being replaced by empty white space), dialog boxes won't come up or come up with missing elements, hell, once I get there I can't even launch Notepad. Shut down a few applications to bring down the handle count a little, and things start working normally again, until you go over that threshold again. I can do this on at least 6 machines I use regularly (at home and the office). This reminds me of the old "run out of resources even though you still have plenty of memory available" problem of 16-bit Windows. As a result, I cannot keep any of my XP x86 machines up for more than a week at a time; it's gotta be rebooted to clean up the crud. Anything that pretends to be a modern, resilient OS should be able to stay up for far longer than that.
I've never had that problem on XP 64-bit.
I'm a developer and VS2005 + SQL2005 will eat up a lot of resources--XP x64 manages them a lot more efficiently than the 32-bit counterpart. I also just find it a lot more resilient to abuse.
Browsing in 64-bit kicks ass, if for the simple fact that a lot of crapware out there is 32-bit and can't even be hosted by IE 64-bit. Same with rootkits--they won't work unless specifically written for 64-bit (and very few will bother to write them, since it's such a small percentage of the machines out there). Of course that doesn't automatically make me hackproof, but it does make me a significantly smaller target.
Also, being built off the Windows 2003 tree, the code is inherently a lot less (needlessly) permissive by default and has been through a lot more security checks when it was being built than XP. 2003 32-bit is more reliable than XP 32-bit, so being built off of it, it only got better.
I don't have any significant problem with drivers. Whatever works, works fine; if there's no driver, I leave that hardware hooked up to my older machines. HP's 500MB worth of crappy drivers don't work on XP 64-bit? To me that's a plus. Keep this shyte off my main box.
I won't make the claim that it's any faster. If you mentioned ..."here you are on your fresh copy of 64-bit; this is much faster", with "you" as in myself, personally, then I'll let you know I'm under no illusion--this OS's last been reinstalled well over a year ago and I use it daily. I've been considered by some as abusive towards my systems--I'll throw anything at them and expect them to keep going. So far I haven't been disappointed by XP 64-bit. I can't say the same about the 32-bit version.
If you don't have any issue with XP 32-bit, then great, stick with it, but as for myself, after a year of use, you won't take the 64-bit version away from me.
Last edited by _dandy_ on 22 Nov 2006 - 18:59
Here's the fix for the "thread count problem" you are reporting. It's actually the desktop heap you are running out of, and it is a known problem with the envelope-pushing uber XP users. I believe this number has been increased by default in Vista.
"One of the responses in the thread mentions a registry setting that increases the size of the desktop heap. According to a somewhat dated but still relevant MS KB article, “this static value is used to prevent ill- behaved applications from consuming too many resources”. Well, apparently it IE meets the “ill-behaved” criteria, because it seemed to cause Windows to bump into this limit, and Windows wasn’t handling it very gracefully. Anyway, to make a long story longer, when I bumped up the desktop heap size (from its default of 3MB up to 8MB), bingo, all of the problems magically disappeared. Whew, what a relief.
To make this change, navigate regedit to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerSubSystems. The “Windows” value contains a big honkin’ string, and one part of it is “SharedSection=xxxx,yyyy,zzzz”. The second number (yyyy) is the one that you want to increase. Standard registry editing disclaimers apply, YMMV."
All credit to this link http://weblogs.asp.net/kdente/archive/2004/06/04/148145.aspx
It made all the difference on my uber tricked out XP main machine. I hope it helps you and others.
Here's the fix for the "thread count problem" you are reporting.
OMFG, that just might do it...I never could find the right Google keywords to come up with relevant results...
As a sidenote, I'm still not gonna move back to XP x86 even if *that's* solved. :-p
It would be nice if some of these people http://www.futuremark.com/community/halloffame/ would show a real screaming score on Windows Experience Index.
Last edited by Xsabin on 22 Nov 2006 - 15:08
LOL...the best backup program in the world doesn't make it so it makes sense to intentionally double your risk of losing your live data due to one drive out of a pair failing.
Besides, most home users who need 1TB worth of storage space will use it to dump video on. Codecs already compress the sh*t out of videos, so they don't compress much further...so you still *do* need another TB to back it up to.
Recently? That thing looks like it's from 1998.
Only thing decent (for an official partnership PC)
is the speedy processor and 30" LCD. No w00t.
painting the side of the case with win logo? are they really serious?
By "out of place" I mean it's this huge Vista flag covering the whole side and has too much color going on when the rest is completely black.
I secretly want an over priced, bloated OS that includes such neat features as embedded DRM & WGA? Wow, you know me well.
Meanwhile you can order this system with a huge Windows icon on it so you can... what... be reminded of work?
Why not order a machine in the shape of a penguin or a red apple?
Something to take your bitterness away. What's Windows done to you lately anyway?
I would hate to see what the ECC rates are on those 500 GByte Drives, it would probably turn the rest of my hair white.
I imagine the data density is very high and the ECC is constantly in play just to keep the drives working at all.
You would be better off going for smaller drives and more of them to get to 1 TByte, if that is really want you want to do.
Frankly I can't see the point of all that storage, especially as a RAID 0 array.
Why not go for 4 x 250 GByte Drives and forget about the RAID nonsense?
Just make proper backups and you should be fine.
Oh, and ditch the combo drives, the CD-RW / DVD-ROM drives are a waste of time; they do neither task very well.
Just one good DVD-RW which does DVD+R9 and something fancy like LightScribe would be better
Regards
Simon
Seriously though, looking at that PC reminded me of those PC cases coming from MDG (anyone from Canada might know just how shoddy those PCs might be, and their annoying marketing tactics), sans Vista logo.
AMD Athlon 4200+ x2
dual channel 1gig DDR400
sata2 160gig
ati radeon x1300pro 256 DDR2 with shader 3 600/400 mhz version
i got rating 4.9 1 point shy from 5.0.
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