P.S. I can't recommend buying OCZ. As much as I hate to admit it (as an AMD fan), Intel is hands down the best SSD manufacturer. Even though they are no longer the performance leader, their QA/QC and reliability is far superior.
An SSD will make your boot times and application load times much faster. It will also reduce the impact of background processes like Windows logging/prefetching/indexing, virus scanning, searching, etc. that can have a huge performance problem with a spinner.
For specific applications, you're...
Not just failure rates, but compatability issues. Intel just does a lot better job with QA/QC.
Nothing like buying a $350 Vertex (2 years ago) that isn't even a good paperweight!
I'd prefer they release a firmware that makes mine work without suffering from fatal data corruption, because even "normal" speed is better than non-working.
(I've RMAd it twice and they refuse to refund my money despite the drive not working in several machines and all other drives...
Your CPU is many orders of magnitude faster than any SSD on the Market (see difference between horse draw carriage and a scramjet). In a typical desktop setup, CPUs spend the majority of their cycles waiting for data to process -- even when all the data is cached in RAM. This is why SSDs are...
It's not "bad" to clone, but I've always preferred a clean install for several reasons:
* Cleaning general cruft
* Getting rid of malware (espeically potential rootkits) that is not being detected (malware scans are only about 80% effective as it relies on 100% knowledge of all malware in...
Are there any viable add on cards that provide SATA III support. By viable I mean
1.) Provide genuine SATA III performance/reliability
2.) no more than $50
I'm looking to possibly upgrade my SSD to a SF-2xxx or a G3 drive but don't want to replace my motherboard.
The only way to recover overwritten data is to send the drive to a data recovery company. They remount the platters and scan the drive with an electron microscope.
Unless his emails are with more than 5 figures, he's just SOL.
The only thing that concerns me with wear on my SSD is my browser. I stream Netflix and that seems to dump large amounts of data into the browser cache (After watching one film I'll easily have 300MB+ of cache).
However (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but the wear issue seems to be moot...
The only reason to move the swap to the second HDD drive is to save wear on the SSD.
You will definitely notice a difference if your machine is actually using swap space.
Intel just released a 120GB SSD for around $230 and there's an upcoming new generation from pretty much all makers -- which means the current gen lower capacity drives will be dropping in price soon (months?).
A use case that demonstrates very "real world" SSD performance gains that are huge.
As a software developer most of the tools I use are very disk I/O bound. A modern development environment will be constantly indexing files and performing endless small read/writes. My main dev machine is an i7...
Ideally, your SSD stores your OS, applications and working scratch space. I only put large mostly static content like media files (videos, mp3s, etc.) on a spinner.
The CRT manufacturers were saying similar things. "LCDs will never have comparable refresh rates" and "LCDs will never be cheap enough".
Like most "revolutions" in technology, SSDs will take a while to reach critical mass, but once they do HDDs will go the way of the dinos. Just like CRTs.
Right now I have an original OCZ Vertex 120GB, which while it has shown me the light in respect to SSD speed, it's reliability has been utter crap. I've already had to RMA it twice in 18 months, so it's time for a change -- and that change will likely be to use Intel G2 which I have read are the...
Re: UAC vs Sudo
Sudo on Linux/Unix is by a far a more secure security implementation simply because the needs to use it is much less. With UAC popping up constantly the user quickly becomes conditioned to just click yes to get back to what they were doing. The UAC alerts that pop up all the...
If you have the money, it's money well spent even at $200.
My Windows 7 rig boots in ~9 seconds from the initial windows screen to a fully functional desktop. Most programs open so fast I can't tell the difference between them being opened and just focusing them from the background. I'm so...
While I am babbling. I am in a similar position with RAM and OS needs. I just put together a machine with 6GB of RAM but only have a 32 bit XP Pro. Tonight I am going to download the Win 7 RC and give it a shot because, like you, I don't want to buy or use Vista. It's something you might...
Oh sorry, I was unclear. Yeah you can always upgrade to a 64 bit OS later and use all the RAM. I just meant that with 32 bit XP you wouldn't get any benefit from upgrading the amount of RAM you have since you'd already be maxed out.
If you are OK with that limitation, it's probably OK to...
64 bit OSs can run 32 bit apps (just not 32 bit drivers). More importantly, there really isn't a performance increase for most apps by going to 64 bit (Photoshop might benefit given it's manipulating large amounts of data, though I couldn't say for sure).
The reason you need a 64 bit OS is to...
Your best overall performance boost for WoW will be an SSD drive.
An E8400 + 4GB of RAM + a GeForce 260 (core 216) or equiv GPU will be more than enough horse power to multi task with WoW
A similarly priced AMD would be fine too.
My previous rig was an E6750 + 2GB + 7800GT and I was able...
Do you do anything that requires an upgrade? Can't run a game you want to play? CS4 take too long to run?
We all like shiny new hardware, but why waste money?
Overall I recommend the Dell. Unless you enjoy building your own box, there's nothing in your usage that warrants the hassle of a DIY rig. Just make sure they are giving you a 64 bit OS because if Photoshop is something you use a lot, a great performance boost for the future will be more RAM...
The only reason left to build your own box is to make sure you have exactly what you want and to do after market mods like silent computing, over clocking, etc. Dell, HP eta l can absolutely destroy custom builders on price because they buy components in bulk. Plus, they often use bargin bin...
I've never bothered with a separate OS and Apps drive/partition. Seems mostly pointless except perhaps for games. However, I don't tend to care about losing save games (and more and more I play games which are either saved on a server (MMO) or are mostly multilayer oriented (RTS) so even that's...
So, I heard a while back that nVidia driver support in Vista was incredibly bad. Have the issues been resolved and is the situation looking better for Windows 7?
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