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cycovision - pc help thread |
lamont
Joined: Mar 27, 2005
Posts: > 500
From: Manchester, UK
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orite kewl, thanks very much for the advise, il check it out. thanks again
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masseur
Joined: Jan 03, 2003
Posts: > 500
From: Sydney, London
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Quote:
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On 2006-08-30 15:52:13, Cycovision wrote:
@masseur
The only trick I've had any success with is to place a 100ohm resistor accross the battery terminals to completely discharge the battery and then directly wire up an ordinary 12v battery charger to try and force current into the battery. Having said that, the battery died again soon afterwards and it's a bit of a dangerous procedure so I wouldn't really recommend it!
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thanks, I think I'll send it to Sony as they may decide to replace it, what with all the recent battery problems etc...
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mustafabay
Joined: Sep 27, 2004
Posts: > 500
From: Egypt
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I have a few questions.
- Can any computer boot from a USB device or do I have to check the bios to see if booting from a USB device is supported.
- Does the USB port be on the motherboard? As opposed to a PCI USB card. All my motherboard's ports are USB 1.1.
- Booting from any USB device is the same? Meeing the PC won't mind if its a thumb drive or a USB HDD?
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Cycovision
Joined: Nov 30, 2003
Posts: > 500
From: England
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1. No, not all computers can boot from USB. As you said, you need to check BIOS to make sure that external devices show up as an option in the Boot order menu.
2. Yes, you should be able to boot from a device attached to a PCI USB card since a compatible BIOS generally treats them as a standard USB bridge (it treats them the same as the ports that are already on the motherboard).
3. Technically yes, but generally no! It depends on the specific hardware as to whether or not Windows setup will see a USB pen drive or Card reader and allow you to install to it but the point is that you really shouldn't install an operating system on a flash memory device. There's two main reasons for this. One is that these devices are much, much slower than hard drives and the other is that they have a much lower lifespan in terms of read / write operations than a hard drive which makes them totally unsuitable for using as a system drive.
Bear in mind that even if you use a USB 2.0 or firewire external hard drive to install the OS on, it will still be considerably slower than using an internal IDE or sata drive. I really don't recommend it even though it is technically possible on many newer computers.
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[ This Message was edited by: Cycovision on 2006-09-14 23:51 ] |
mustafabay
Joined: Sep 27, 2004
Posts: > 500
From: Egypt
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Thanks man.
I was asking because I wanted to give Linux a spin and didn't want to go through the hassle of partitioning my quite full HDD.
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Cycovision
Joined: Nov 30, 2003
Posts: > 500
From: England
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Ah right! Have you tried any of the distributions that run from a CD yet? If you haven't, they're not brilliant but they'll give you an idea of what Linux is like to use 
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blu_6779
Joined: Aug 27, 2004
Posts: 193
From: U.N.C.L.E.
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@mustafa have you tried parallels? I'm using it right now with Suse on XP. No more partitioning for me  . And it's safe too.
http://www.parallels.com/
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[ This Message was edited by: blu_6779 on 2006-09-16 02:05 ] |
leeboy13
Joined: Sep 28, 2005
Posts: > 500
From: Brissle - dodgy accients
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@Cycovision,
Hye mate, i was wondering if you'd lend me a lil advise (and anyone else pos) - basically i'm looking to build a new base unit as mines getting a lil bit old now and sometimes strugles..
Im looking at a dualcore AMD system (or pos a single core 64bit or soemthing).. can you recommend and any good motherboards and chips? Theres so many different ones now taht im a bit worried i'll hit compatibility issues if i do it all myelf... looking to install either 1 gig or 2 gig of ram.... Not sure whether to go for SLI or standard pci express or even to keep my existing G6600GT for a while longer (which is agp x8 - incase i need a board that backwardss compat with agp  ...
as you can prob tell im a tad lost with this lol... i always build my own and have built a fair few - its just all changed a lil bit since my last build lol...
also id like to have soem sort of raid setup with HDD's.. can i use raid and normal setup ie - have 4 Hdd's attached?
oh one last thing - i usually use www.ebuyer.co.uk for buying parts if that helps
Cheers matey
lee
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Cycovision
Joined: Nov 30, 2003
Posts: > 500
From: England
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No probs, but before we start blurting out model numbers what's the most that are you looking to spend on this build? It makes it much easier if I have an idea, say a maximum of £700, £1000, £1500 etc. otherwise we'll end up filling pages and pages with different mobos and chips!
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leeboy13
Joined: Sep 28, 2005
Posts: > 500
From: Brissle - dodgy accients
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good point... im hoping to keep it under £500... the cheaper teh better -hence why im thinking maybe i could hang on to my current Gefore 6600GT as it aint that mauch a bad card for now and it'll save me a shed load lol..... but id like to have teh option to maybe upgrade the graphics card soon to either a SLI setup (if ya think its worth it) or a pci express setup....
So i need the mo board to be compatible with agp 8.... (there aint many but there is one to two on teh ebuyer site i linked to)
cheers again cyco for finding time to help me out - much appreciated
living the dream! |
leeboy13
Joined: Sep 28, 2005
Posts: > 500
From: Brissle - dodgy accients
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should of mentioned before.....
basically im looking at buying
motherbaord,
processor,
ram,
hard drives,
maybe dvd-r and dvd....
im hoping under £500 should be ok for this - it hasnt gotta be jaw dropping by any means..
no monitor (as my 19inch tft widescreen arrived on saturday (thank you lamont for finding that baby at £105)
just better tahn my current setup which is -
2200XP, 512 ram, 200gig hdd, geforce 6600GT.
and a new case (but tahts not at all important for this now)
living the dream! |
leeboy13
Joined: Sep 28, 2005
Posts: > 500
From: Brissle - dodgy accients
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in sayiogn what i said about a graphics card - how does this one look?
http://www.ebuyer.com/custome[....]3Jldmlld3M=&product_uid=101827
much of an improvment from a gefore 6600GT? |
Cycovision
Joined: Nov 30, 2003
Posts: > 500
From: England
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I don't think you can get motherboards with both AGP and PCI-E, so I think you'll be looking at getting a new card. Ebuyer do radeon x1600 cards for about £100, they're a good mid-range card and they perform quite well. I'd suggest you spend about £100 on the graphics cards becuse you'll probably be disappointed with anything less.
For the motherboard, it really ought to be a socket 939 if you're going for AMD. This Asus board looks reasonable for the money, has RAID built in and it supports crossfire (ATI's version of SLI): http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/101177
Processor: AMD X2 3800+ (dual core) http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/101177
Which leaves you about £200 for the memory and hard drives. Kingston do matched pair 1Gb DDR dual core sets for about £75. 1 Gig is generally fine for running just about anything under XP, you can of course add more later if you decide to upgrade to Vista. http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/49296
And with whatever you have left, just get a pair of the biggest SATA hard drives you can afford! I tend to use Maxtor or seagate drives, just steer clear of any that seem too cheap to be true! Like the memory, you can add more drives later if you need to but two will get you started with raid. Just remember that they have to be identical, same manufacturer and exactly the same capacity and model number.
So if I've got my sums right, you should have a pretty decent system there for about £500 . If you spend more time on Ebuyer and other sites you'll probably find equal or slightly better speced stuff for a bit less money, but this will hopefully give you an idea of the kind of components you should be looking for.
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leeboy13
Joined: Sep 28, 2005
Posts: > 500
From: Brissle - dodgy accients
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you are a true star matey....
is it easy to setup the raid hdd's? im guessing that is where windows will be installed? if so, is it simple to setup? |
Cycovision
Joined: Nov 30, 2003
Posts: > 500
From: England
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Yeah, it's not too bad to set up. The motherboard will either have a built-in utility (rather like your BIOS setup screen) that you use to set up the raid array or it will come with a bootable CD (usually the same one as the driver CD) that contains the setup program.
Just make sure that you read the instructions for setting up raid carefully since the exact procedure does vary between different motherboard manufacturers. For example, some of them require you to make a driver floppy disk for windows setup to use via the raid utility whilst others don't.
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Posted: 2006-08-30 16:58
