If anyone's awake, I could use some advice on buying a fan for the processor.
This isn't a fancy computer. It's just a cheapie bare bones for my mother to replace the old one. I'm using the old parts from my mother's PC that still work and are compatible. The case, power supply, board, RAM, and processor are new.
I will be playing some WoW on this machine.
What should I be looking for in a fan - or does it not really matter? I'd like to keep it to the cheaper side. $20 max if you guys say it's important, but would rather keep it under $10. I've always bought motherboards with the processor and fan already installed >.<
P.S. A socket 775 fan is needed, right? So newb at this
Might wanna get some thermal grease while you're at it, depending on whether the fan comes with it pre-applied. If you do have to apply the thermal grease yourself, remember the aim is to have a good heat contact, not fill the entire case with grey slime.
I didn't know that about the Pentium D.
The fan I chose seems to support it and a lot of the reviews had it running on a Pentium D without any problems.
Now that I know a little more, I think the thermal grease was bad on my laptop and that's why it would overheat horribly. Too late for that now, but I'm glad to be more educated.
Ok, so far I like Vista - but it isn't working for some of the older programs I use. Specifically the one to backup dvds.
Anyway - I put in another hard drive and want to dual boot xp/vista. When I went to install xp, for some reason it got rid of my vista information, even though I'm positive I chose to install xp on the right hard drive. Is there something tricky I have to do to dual boot xp/vista or what?
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If you installed XP after Vista, it will overwrite the Vista boot information. You just have to toss your Vista CD back in and tell it to fix things up. After that, you may want to tinker with VistaBootPro (google it) to add in the XP system if it doesn't come up automagically.
I want to build a quad core PC so bad, but im waiting until the initial wave is done and any bugs or problems are worked out. Im pretty much pushing the 4 to 5 year upgrade rule with my computer.
Just built a new PC again: 64-bit P4 3.00GHz ,1gig RAM ,vista ultimate, 1 80g HD-IDE, 2 Sata 200g HD's, NVIDIA Geforce 8600GT.
Problem so far that I'm having is that my SATA drives arent showing up at all, even after BIOS updates and checking the BIOS settings.
Any suggestions?
What motherboard? I'm guessing you've been over all the BIOS settings and made sure the SATA controllers aren't disabled or anything silly like that?
When you say "don't show up", do you mean in the Vista installer? Your mobo may require you to load a driver or something to get them to work there? If you mean at the boot screen (detecting HDD0 etc.) then things are a little more serious.
This is actually a pretty common problem when setting up a PC from scratch because in many cases SATA controller drivers aren't included with the OS. Often the BIOS will have "ATA" and "SATA" modes, for compatibility versus performance. Those settings can be counterintuitive because setting them to "SATA" mode is what causes the problem. Usually you can address the issue either of two ways. The simplest thing to do is to set your BIOS to "ATA" or "compatible" mode for the controller. This will disable certain fancy things like native command queuing but will usually get you up and running from a vanilla OS install.
The better solution is to locate the drivers for your SATA controller and create an "F6 floppy". (Alternatively, you can slipstream the driver into your OS install, but that's a fair bit more work and I can't really offer advice on slipstreaming Vista, as my experience setting up that OS is limited to trying out the beta) Once you have the drivers on a floppy disk (I keep a USB floppy drive handy expressly for this purpose) you can load them just as Windows setup is starting when it asks you to press F6 to load any extra drivers. After that the SATA drives should become visible.
Ddrak wrote:What motherboard? I'm guessing you've been over all the BIOS settings and made sure the SATA controllers aren't disabled or anything silly like that?
When you say "don't show up", do you mean in the Vista installer? Your mobo may require you to load a driver or something to get them to work there? If you mean at the boot screen (detecting HDD0 etc.) then things are a little more serious.
Dd
actually i found out what the problem was: faulty power connector. the disks were showing up in the BIOS but when i said they werent showing up it was under "my computer" where it lists all the drives you have connected.
on a side note. the guy at the computer store i bought my parts from was trying to dissuade me from buying a quad core chipset, claiming that theres no real advantage as far as gaming goes for doing so. he claims that quad would be good for those who have multiple instances of processes running.
is there any truth to this or was he talkin out his ass?
Most games do not take full advantage of a quad core system. They are getting better about it though, especially since the PS3/360 require it, so in the future you should see more support.
Bahd Zoolander wrote:Most games do not take full advantage of a quad core system. They are getting better about it though, especially since the PS3/360 require it, so in the future you should see more support.
QFE. I've not seen many games properly use 2 cores yet, let alone 4. It does make alt-tabbing a lot smoother though!
