On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, Bob Stia wrote:
> At risk of starting a hardware holy war, I turn to the Sluggers for
> their advice and expertise. Finally convinced my wife that the old
> computer is "old". Want to keep it under $1000 if possible.
>
> First I am going to get a big usb hardrive to start with and store all
> of my data from my present system. Looking at the Maxtor. Comments?
Unless you need mobility, I'd skip USB and go for regular old IDE. It's
less trouble, more motherboards (read: all) boot from IDE than from USB,
ATAPI drives are usually cheaper than their USB equivalents. USB drives
take up desktop space, make noise, have a power brick, and I think that
USB data transfers cause significantly more CPU load than IDE transfers
do.
> Most important. Should I go 64 bit? , remembering that this will be my
> last board for many years, and, this is where I want strong opinions.
Sorry, don't have a strong opinion. But unless the price differential is
great (say > 1.5:1), go for 64 bit. Software may be scarce now, but it
won't always be.
> Have seen lots of criticism of ASUS lately.
Anecdotally, I have a couple Asus boards. I've RMA'd one. In the
process, I dealt via email with a guy in Shanghai who obviously hadn't
read my initial statement. OTOH, once I called up some US phone number he
gave me, service was fast and courteous.
> Is heat a big problem?
Not if you have a good heat sink (despite the lousy case), or a good
case (despite the lousy heat sink). :-)
> Would prefer a board without all kinds of built in stuff like sound and
> video.
Yes. My main system's motherboard (A7V333) has built-in sound, but I
found that my previous sound card was better. I fully expect
motherboards' built-in components to be of low quality.
> PCI slots?, or what is the other? agp?
AGP is only used for video. All boards that I've heard of have only one
AGP slot. Only old boards have ISA slots (usuaaly black) instead of or
along with PCI.
> Would need plenty of USB and at least one serial port for my modem. No
> parallell ports needed.
Too bad, you're gonna get one. Even my laptop (no serial ports) has a
parallel port.
This motherboard came with a mini card that plugs into a header on
the motherboard (doesn't use a slot, just a case opening) that supplies
several more USB connectors, in case the onboard 4 aren't enough. :-)
> Want a pretty decent video card, but not one of those super(expensive)
> ones. 3D of course. (Maybe someday Linux will have games)
> Kind of afraid of the nvidia cards. Hear all of the horror stories with
> changing drivers everytime you do something to your system. (comments?)
Bah. I purposely didn't get ATI for the VCR/computer as I might one day
run Linux on it, and ATI and Linux don't get along. Especially the bit
about "display the TV tuner's output on an attached TV". ATI and nvidia
are the two biggies, AFAIK. Who is actually decent?
> Already have a 40 gig IBM hardrive that I could switch over. But it is
> almost two years old. Should I abandon that and go sata? Remember I
> will have the USB external.
Remember, what you don't spend on hard drives can be spent on CPU, or RAM,
or motherboard. I would say you have plenty of space. But I'm not you,
and we all know how junk expands to fill available space. :-)
> Would love to get a big flatscreen monitor but I am afraid that would
> break the bank.
With a $1000 budget? Probably.
> Last but not least, where would you BUY all of this stuff.
Online. Don't hesitate to spread the order across several vendors, if by
doing so you can save at least the cost of shipping. I've had good luck
at http://www.newegg.com/ http://directron.com/ and
http://computergeeks.com/ . Both my URLs for hard drive companies are
broken, so you're on your own there.
--
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