Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

and if anyone gets past all of that Jaymie, there's always the bloody big tank out the back to drown them in LOL

thank you

We feel relatively safe in behind our little wall We don't need any dragonslayers

AM, you need a slightly over-teenage son who loves spam, warez, all this other dangerous (to computers) stuff, and who gives his worn-out, totally protected computers to his poor old dad to play with. He works, and is sponsored by a rich uncle who lives far, far away,, but has not yet grasped the slightest conception of the value of money, so, like his father before him, continues to cast pearls before swine (or swineherds, in this case) and I do alright for used computers.

AM... if you're buying a new system they will inevitably try to sell you at least a "vista" capable system....there's several levels of Vista products available see Comparison Chart for the offical MS blurb

IMHO, you will probably be offered a "home basic" system (if Vista pre-installed) as the hardware requirements for even "basic" are quite extensive and therefore more costly.

If you're offered a "vista-home basic" capable system with XP installed and a redeemable voucher for Vista then IMHO that's probably the way to go... and just stay with XP....

to be capable of even running a Vista Basic system will demand a Duo Core cpu, 1Gb DDR2 and pretty bloody good video card.... and even then Home Basic doesn't have the "Aero" graphics features available... or really anything else of use either

So what does Basic have over and above XP?????

Other than some improvement in security and stability (marginal at best).... absolutely nothing....

That's why I say take the system and run XP... you've at least got a pretty good XP box and you wont have any compatability problems...

For those that like to keep up to date with the applications ie Internet Explorer 7, Virus Scanners etc etc... most have been re-written to enable 64 bit execution and have a considerable system overhead even within XP... that's why Vista needs so much more cpu ummmph and memory to run properly.... unfortunately IE 7 in particular has significant memory "leakage" problems... in laymans langauge it's a dog... if you open and close several browser tabs the system doesn't reclaim the allocated memory when you close them... slowly nibbles away at you existing free memory... Service Packs for XP and Vista are imminent.

This is not doing my potential power bill any good at all -- I was actually quite happy with DOS2 until that radical DOS3 came along, and I haven't been satisfied since. I've been sucked into most of the major Windows OS's, but Vista seems to be too much of the same but hungrier, so maybe I'll just sit back for a while and struggle along with good ol' outdated XP. It seems solid right now.

What the... Vista sounds like a headache now
THe plan is/was to get a brand new pc (I have always had second hand ones) built from the ground up withat least 2G mem onboard - and I was aiming at XP too....

from what i have heard vista uses twice the processing power and twice the ram to give a basic user 10 extra steps to get to the control panel

I'm stickin with XP. I'm only running a 1400 athalon with 512 ram on xp pro. Works like a treat although dvd conversions are a little slow.

Why haven't i upgraded? Because it does what it needs to!

I was just given a P4 2.4 last night. sad really my best man came over and goes "man i was given this today from a customer, can you take it off my hands? i'm need the boot space! Such are the times that a P4 2.4 is almost put out for hard rubbish. LOL

2 Gb mem with XP ...

They'll probably try and bump you to a pre-installed Vista Home Premium system if you tell the salesman you want 2Gb of memory...

Sorry AM but IMHO Vista just doesn't really offer enough to warrant upgrading an existing system and why cripple a new system with Vista overhead... just run XP Pro (or media centre 2005 if you want to incorporate movies/pictures/tv etc) or even 2003 Server

i found that a 1400 with 512 ram runs heaps faster than a 2.4 with 256. LOL

i put it up to 700 and something and didn't really notice any difference with the apps i'm running.

I want to set up my pc so that I can capture and burn home movied from my cam corder, so 2gb mem is a must for me!

Yep, avoiding vista is what I will be doing for the near future then... will revisit the situation in 12 months then - just waiting for this PC to kak itself first (no need to spend money I cant realy afford to when I dont need to - yet!)

Very true Steve and AM ... memory is necessary if you need to have open several apps at once or if you're into heavier computational stuff like "what if" spreadsheet scenarios, video manipulation...

or if your system is just loaded up with lots of "processes"... that's my bug bear with apps like NAV/Internet Security, Trend Internet Security, HP multifunction printers, Toshiba laptops... great laptops... just so cluttered up with completely unnecessary crap....

if you can unload your graphics requirements onto a good video card then you can get away with lower system ram because most of the system overhead is taken up with the GUI interface...

That's why you notice the lag, frame shadowing when moving, closing, minimizing etc app windows on a system with minimal memory...

Additional memory wont make XP (or Vista) load faster or shut down quicker... just means you can have more windows open and move around easier...

Video manipulation, graphics, cad is a different story.... they benifit from as much memory as possible because they can load most of their requirements into memory rather than end up "disk thrashing"...

i.e the system has to dump from memory to hard disk paging file in order to load new code pages to memory, then dump to reload pages it had before but wrote out to hard disk...

and back and forth the system goes between memory and hard disk... thrashing the disk... you'll see and hear it on occassions....

Now of course if you have to load a really "bloated" piece of code.. like Vista... then you need all the memory you can get so as not to thrash the disk.... probably the slowest transfer (bus) component in the system LOL

AM... if you doing Video.... go the biggest memory/fastest GPU video card you can afford.... and the biggest fastest (scsi is good or SATA Raid) hard disk or disks that you can afford.... myself I'd go a spare scratch disk to offload pagefile or raid... or just for temp files and/or backup

SATA Raid was the way I was/am leaning... at leat 300 gb (I hate running out of space - my external drive is 300 gb, and I want to get the 500 gb one next )
We have a friend who works with PC's fpr a living, but I am open to suggestions as to makes, sizes etc as I am somewhat behind in keeping up with pc's (I fell behind round about the arrival of the P4 (I have a P4 equivilant)

yep, IE and NAV are the biggest memory users in my process tank list. unless you count emule which seems to have problem releasing memory after running for days

Yep, noticable change after having put in a nice AGP over the shared system memory video. scarry that a vid card can have the same memory as the system.

For sure the dish thrashing make the system feel slow! memony access time is what a couple of nano seconds hdd is a couple of milli seconds?

The bigger the better is true for hard disks... but remember the bigger the basket the more eggs can get broken or lost if it breaks.....

Backup... backup and then backup again... epecially if you're doing video work, cad, graphics rendering...

addtional disk or an external usb "scratch" and backup disk

Edited:

Oh and remember... the bigger the disk... the longer to scan for spyware, viruses, defrags, backups or disk checks etc...

A 300+Gb hard drive takes a long time to scan...

Which is why I want the external drive (500 GB)...
I will be able to borrow from my loan (take back what I have paid off in other words and start again ) so that could give me about $2500... starting to think I wont be able to get a flash hot system for that...