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what's your setup tiny?

heh... some of the posts here sound very familiar. At home we have two PCs, one for me and one for my wife, I maintain both of them. Both PCs are very similar in setup, run winXP pro, yet I end up reinstalling my PC about every 2-3 months or so, while my wife's pc has been up and running for more than a year (it's usually running about 16 hours a day). The difference lies in the fact that she just uses the programs that I have installed on them and never adds anything new, that keeps the OS pretty much as stable as it can be and I don't think she has had a critical failure even once in the last year.

On my own PC I'm continuously trying to keep up with new drivers and tend to install small programs that I need once or twice. Generally that means that after about 2 - 3 months the OS has become a bit sluggish, some programs might not quite work anymore due to conflicting driver issues and I end up reinstalling the OS. I reinstall because in general it takes a lot less time than trying to trouble shoot. Just last week I had downloaded a small program which also added some spyware to the PC. I spent half a day trying to get rid of that stuff, but in the end was unsuccessful, it had planted itself in all the system folders, registry and god knows where. Every time I did a scan with a spyware remover it would find and delete the same things over and over again, just to have it right back right after a reboot. In the end I had enough and did a full reinstall, which took about 3-4 hours or so. Now everything runs great again - for a month or two

what's your setup tiny?

Athlon XP2500+ - not overclocked - stock heatsink
1g Corsair RAM
DFI Lan Party mobo
Radeon 9800pro (been through the mill a bit tho)
Audigy 2
80g/160g internal IDE HD
160g external
550w PSU
DVDR/CDRW
graphire3 tablet instead of mouse
Saitek USB kb and Saitek joysticks

Air cooled with 2 ins, 1 out and a heat extractor below the gfx card

Win XP SP2 but non-updateable due to microsoft's anti piracy

It's the WIn Xp disks that get me, every time. When I have some money, I'll sort that out, but not yet!

(But I dont think the random 2nd hand bits of hardware, the lack of cooling, the highly fragmented drives with permenant low disk space conditions which make defrags nigh on impossbile, the quirky MAC spoofing set up so I can get on the net, etc, etc, help any!)




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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

It's a workhorse where XP is almost like a fluffy sofa.

I disagree. XP Home, definitely and winME, yes, but behind the "fluffy" GUI of 2k and XPpro is a very powerful OS. Take networking for example, 2k and Xp make networking fantastically easy - as you say, it'd take a moron not to be able to get a basic setup working. But, the tools are there for much more complex networking that many flavours of Linux just can't do. My house network in 2003 was a great example, the guy using linux was using a flavour with DHCP active and which couldnt be disabled. So the router and his PC DHCP bombed until the network fell down. This happened again and again on my uni corporate lan last year, where a novice Linux user, or a person using a poor flavour, was unable to disable DHCP and bombed the network, causing major connectivity issues for many people.

Just because you may never go beyond the fluffy GUI, dont assume that it's all Windows has. Another example - the found new hardware wizard. People complain about it, but it is an example of an extremely powerful feature - I have seen Linux users forced to recompile the kernal every time they wished to update drivers - a routine procedure in Windows.

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

hmm.. dfi... what model is it?

how about the ram?

Set it up properly, and you will never have a problem, and it never needs reinstalling...

OK, fess up!

I think I know who 3 of you are, but the rest, hands up please!

I am thinking of swapping over.

I'm dead sick of windows. tonight it lost my emotes, and last week it forgot how to save as jpg.


We did up an older machine for ~Sin~ a few nights ago (she hasn't got it yet, nor has she got net connection, but its a step closer!) and we put this on it [link=http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/]http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/" style="COLOR: #990000[/link]which looks rather good. Comes with openoffice and gimp and gaim built in.

Is there a better one I should use, or is this passable?

If i'm gunna go geek, I may as well do it properly.


Oh, and very important question, will the full version of Zuma deluxe work on this?

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

*cries*

At all??

not even the web version???


I'm putting XP on another partition, so that'll be ok, i can have zuma there, along with all the other gamies
Linux does suck for games

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

no, linux is GREAT for games, they just don't make any games for it

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

i have linux on one of my computers i don't really use it much though because theres no point and no games(besides the cheesy ones)but i still like it

no, linux is GREAT for games, they just don't make any games for it

No way!! Only good for dedicated servers! All but one of the Linux self-destructs I've seen have been a result of gaming!

(the other linux self-destruct was actually ubuntu, funnily enough)

Dont be fooled, Linux errors just as much as windows, it's errors are generally less easy to fix as well.

Be sure you're changing for the right reasons



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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

well, A) I would like to learn how it works, so can't really do that without changing, and B) if this windows becomes any more senile, i'm going to throttle it anyway. May as well give it a try

Yesterday, it replaced all "" emotes with the 'minimise screen' icon

Last month, it conveniently forgot how to save as jpg. I am bmp city here!

I'm definatly keeping XP, but for general surfing, office and email, I want something less cumbersome and less forgetful.
And something that GIMP won't crash.

And thankfully, I have a live-in software guy, so if things go bung, he can probably at least salvage the data if not fix the error.


EDIT: isn't there a Civilization specifically for Linux? FreeCiv or something?

Last edited by Callatya at 06-Oct-2005 22:16

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

The Zuma Deluxe box says it needs Windows to operate.

I don't know anything about Lynex.... but I do know Zuma. . haha

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"it's the neck, it creaks under the weight of too much heavy thinking."

Fedora Core is decent for desktop use, IMO

I'm definately going with some flavor of BSD (probably FreeBSD) on my server when I set it up

BTW, Chromium ROCKS!!! (game that comes with a couple flavors of linux...play it sometime )

And yea, partitioning the drive and dualbooting is great...I need to get around to doing that sometime again

Have fun

If you use common sense and set up your machine properly, windows runs as stable as a rock. Mine only froze 1 time in the 5 years it was running constantly (i literally mean constantly, it was only shut down for upgrades and cleaning) and it was due to a hardware failure, not windows. get the fan running on my video card again (siezed up, so the GPU overheated) and it's still as stable as it ever was...

I don't know what happens to it tim, I get 1 good year, and then it makes like a Ford.

this is the 3rd time it has forgotten jpg files.

I haven't had it crash (save the time Gimp and XP had a disagreement) i'm just not happy with the niggly problems.

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

i totally agree with the waffle, dual boot the system, i'm doing that on my main pc, except i'm a tri boot. i'm running windows 2k, linux and also playing with Windows Vista, yes Vista.

mainly i use 2k for gaming, linux for everything else. vista i'm still testing everything

Fish tanks are an expensive addiction

How did you get Vista?? They are still flogging XP here

From what I've seen, Vista looks good, but I want to see how chunky it is before I swap over.

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

I work with people who received the beta 1 release. its very nice, but dont try it on anything under a 1.5g cpu.

alot easier to install, the vista specifi drivers arent out for it yet. but the xp drivers work for it.

Fish tanks are an expensive addiction

tim, you can't base the entire history of windows xp on your one system that has had good luck the whole time. every single system is entirely different than every other system. even if your specs EXACTLY match calla's you still can't say how windows will run on the other machine.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

hey man, don't blame me if i know how to run a computer.

you got lucky with yours is all i'm sayin

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

yea, because windows varies so much from CD to CD...

I haven't had a problem with my new computer yet either, that's been a few months. Lucky again?

Windows doesn't vary CD to CD, but considering all applications are likely to be different and all hardware is likely to be different, it may as well.

I dunno, I just wanna see if the grass is actually greener, without leaving home. Dualboot sounds like the ideal solution really

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

exactly like Callatya said, i run 4 totally different pcs in my place, totally different hardware, only things the same is the OS. and they all run totally different, some run perfect, some crash all the time. its all in the applications your running, some conflict, some maynot

Fish tanks are an expensive addiction

I'm not running Linux currently but I did have my PC dual booted with Win. XP Pro and Redhat 9 for a while. I can't comment on other dist. packages because I haven't really used them much. I wasn't really a fan of RH 9 specifically although the Linux experience itself was great. It can be a bit user intensive, a lot of things may require a bit of messing around with code and hair pulling to get working but in the end I love Linux. You just don't get the bogged down sticky Windows feeling with it, everything runs quickly and efficiently and best of all it's opensource.

XP doesn't crash on me either but Linux just runs faster and smoother, doesn't hiccup. If you're looking for ease of use (point and click!!!), software compatability, gaming, whatever and don't have that many brain cells and/or are afraid of fiddling with code from time to time then I would stick to Windows. Linux will probably require you to venture beyond the GUI occasionally. Dual booting is a great option if you want to try it out without much commitment.

I'm no expert and not extremely proficient with computers in general, I just liked Linux when I was running it. It gave me the impression of a very efficient and powerful well-oiled machine that did what it was supposed to do without a lot of boggy garbage thrown in for consumer appeal. Once I got it doing what I wanted it to do, it always ran perfectly. It's best to have someone that knows a lot more about it than you do around in case you get really stuck or confused, though.

windows needs reinstalling about every 3 months, fine, and every windows user should acknowledge this fact and live with it. All I'm saying is that Linux, from what i've seen and I've seen a fair bit of it, is no better, and is worse in some respects.

he can probably at least salvage the data

meh - dont ever put data in a position where it NEEDS to be salvaged - multipartition and never, ever, ever save data to the system partition.

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

best thing to avoid having to "save data", no multi partition, i've lost hard disks that had partitions and cant recall anything. best thing is mutliple hard disks. i have 2 in my server and 3 in my main pc. so if i have to reformat, i dont have to hunt down my files

Fish tanks are an expensive addiction

I want to know what you people do in order to get fed up with windows...

I've never had a problem with windows that made me want to kill it...

except when I tried to open up safari and it crashed... no wait.. that was Mac OS....

maybe it was when my dad tried to install it and it fried the whole motherboard..... no wait... that was linux....

Seriously though. I want to know what you people do to make windows crash on you so much.

I gotta disagree with that Fallout.

Maybe if you dont game, maybe if you have very expensive hardware, typical input devices and keep your processor lovely and cool then yeah, but i've set windows up perfectly time and time again, and it will fail gradually as the hardware is put under stress.

If you only want to word process, if your puter is nothing but a glorified typrewriter, if you can afford to spend lots of money on every piece of hardware in your box, if you have immaculate HDDS, if you keep it below 30C, then yeah.

But for a user like me who thrashes the cheap end of high end hardware, I doubt I could maintain a stable Windows OR Linux install on my system. Time and again it fails, but i'm not about to change the way I use it, and I cant afford to change the hardware

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

well, all i have to say to that is: if you're using linux and you don't know how to use the networking features, that you should either stick to windows or buy a mac. there really are some bad flavors out there, but for the most part, those bad flavors are based on good ones, and they just added some stuff that you don't really need.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

DFI Lan Party Ultra B (sckt A obviously) - but XP probs have been apparent on every mobo I've ever used!

Corsair (TWINX1024-3200C2PT) 1024MB (2 x 512MB Matched Pair), DDR400 / PC3200, non-ECC, Unbuffered, CL2, Lifetime Warranty, Silver Heat Spreader

is the RAM I got

Last edited by tiny_clanger at 11-Oct-2005 17:16

Last edited by tiny_clanger at 11-Oct-2005 17:17

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions