Unfortunately I may be limited to just that option until early next year. Unless there is some other way that I haven't discovered yet. Maybe I should post what I'm working with you guys could give me some insight as to my alternatives.

I figured 6GB RAM just to be on the safe/future proof side (also because the price difference is small, so might as well right?)

I'm not familiar on hard drive brands so I need to read some reviews. 500GB will suffice me due my strange behavior in acquiring several large externals. Same goes for the DVD drive. I have no idea on brands. Time to read.

I figured I might as well just pony up the cash for a legit copy of Windows 7. Otherwise I'm sure I'll screw something up and have to start this whole process over again....

Go for 8. It's a nice, even number. Two 4G sticks.


So far as I can tell from reading the reviews, hard drives are like video cards. Every single manufacturer is utter crap, except for the one which isn't, and that one changes on a weekly basis.

Personally, I have a couple of Hitachis, one big Seagate, one WD Green, and one or two others that I can't recall. All of them are at least 2-3 years old at this point (some are probably in the 5 year range) and all of them still work fine.

When chronic issues arise with a certain hard drive line, it tends to be related to a particular model or family of drive as opposed to a whole manufacturer.

IBM / HGST, for instance, got a hugely bad rap in 2001 when the GXP series Deskstars started dropping like flies. IIRC, the magnetic coating was literally peeling right off of the platters. Class-action suits were filed. But most of the rest of their drives have been just stellar.

Then Seagate went through a phase where certain of their ATA drives would just utterly lose their mind. Yet at the same time, certain others of their drives were practically the industry standard for enterprise-level storage.

Prior to that, I can recall a period in which pretty much every drive that WD was building could be pretty much guaranteed to experiance a failure of the head-positioning servo within about a year of operation. And yet nowadays, they're a halo brand.


Personally, I just assume that every hard drive I own is going to fail tomorrow. As such, I have automatic nightly backups set up on all of my machines. That being the case, I haven't lost a single drive in at least a decade. The 1.8" drive in my Vaio laptop did start making some weird noises when it was about 4 years old, but it ran like that for several days while I backed it up, tracked down a replacement (not easy for such a unique dirve) and swapped it out.


Really interesting white paper on hard drive reliability, from a company that knows a thing or two about storing large volumes of data: http://static.googleusercontent.com/...k_failures.pdf



Don't sweat the DVD drive. Realistically, how often do you use CD-ROM / DVD media these days? Just buy whatever is cheapest.



XP was laughably easy to pirate.

I'm honestly not certain I've heard of anyone reliably running an illegitimate copy of 7 successfuly. But I haven't really paid attention, since I'm a 1%er and can afford to pay for my OS these days.

I game on 4g of ram. But i have expensive, high end, high timed ram... 8 should be plenty.

Take what i say here with a grain of salt. I bought a 500gb HD, i do a lot of downloading, moving files, basically my HD's get a ton of work. Segate lasted about a year. I bought a WD 500gb to replace that one. 4 years ago... Granted, i bought a black edition the second time around. I also bought a 1tb WD "refurbished" HD as a storage device, and it's been going for a year now.

Like Joe says, the good ones change weekly.

False. I have a pirated copy of win7 running right now. It's amazing. Just have to shut down auto updates, and turn off some of the other "are you sure you want to install" bullshit and it's solid. Been using it for over a year now.

Shoot me a pm.

Windows 7 is not much harder to pirate. If you are having to turn auto updates off an all to get it working you need a better version. Not that I publicly condone piracy or anything.

I'm pretty sure I haven't re-registered my illegitimate copy of Win7 on my laptop (I still have the sticker with the key, so I could if I wanted to) but I don't need to.

I can even install updates. Not sure which one I got, but I know it was from Demonoid before it went down (RIP Demonoid).

I would also go with a cheap USB Wireless dongle. Get a 6 foot USB extension cord at the same time, and then you can move it around to find the best signal. If it stops working (or stops working well), just get a new one. Much easier than an internal card.

I dont think I've ever had a mail-in or online rebate ever work.

I had 1. It was for my US Cellular HTC PPC6800. I got a $100 rebate.

Expensive, high-end timed ram does little-to-nothing. (See: Conclusion : Tom's Ultimate RAM Speed Tests )

What matters in this case is a hard limit of approximately 4gb of RAM for most traditional applications, and even certain aspects of the windows architecture (I.e., XP x64 was infamous for being unable to allocate more than near-4GB to a specific program at a time. Most programs compiled on a traditional compiler (Read: 99% of them out there) are stuck with a 4GB of RAM hard limit due to how the compiler is designed. Lots of other reasons too.).

Cliffs for Viper: My personal rule of thumb is (Program RAM limit)xPrograms+2-4GB if I spec out a PC. Or, in other words, 6-8GB is your sweet spot. RAM quality almost doesn't matter anymore except for the most extreme overclocking. I actually am at 32GB of RAM now in my development machine as a counter-example to this, but it uses programs that aren't crippled by the traditional limitations.

Wut? You have a really crappy pirated copy then. Just get a stock copy of any Win7 edition, then find the crack that installs the OEM certificates. BAM, Windows thinks it's an OEM copy, and Microsoft has no way of fixing it unless they invalidate all of their OEM certificates (And as a result, invalidate all of the OEM copies out there).

Or just get a USB optical drive. That's what I swear by now.

7 is even easier than XP. 7 allows for installation of OEM certificates, which is lulzy-as-shit since Microsoft can't fix it.

Easier. And you have something horribly, terribly wrong if you have to turn auto-updates off or do anything in general with it other than treat it like it's a legit copy.

All the MIR's I've ever used at the 'Egg have always worked perfect. I'm something like 1/250 or something ridiculous outside of the 'Egg.

I beg to differ about the ram. I've had my share of crap ram before. Don't get me wrong, there is no replacement for displacement. But higher timed, better cooled ram is better for my application.

If i wanted to run 94 word documents at once, i would have bought an intel, and 32gb of ram.

Wow, I actually understood some of that. Yay me.

This is what I am using for wireless at the moment:

However, I am using a range extender instead of a second unit with an Ethernet port. It's been super reliable for the past 4 years.

I may be able to avoid having to do wireless all together, actually....

Does "your application" involve overlocking?


One area in which I've found 8 GB of RAM to be really nice (assuming a system which can utilize it, such as Win7-64) is that I no longer have to be stingy about how many browser tabs I have open at once. I know it sounds like an odd thing to take note of, but at any given time I've probably 20+ tabs open in Chrome, and a VMWare machine open in the background, and I can still fire up Steam and play some TF2 without having to shut anything down.

Avoiding wireless is ALWAYS a good thing. It is a fantastic technology, but if you aren't going anywhere (and a desktop isn't) then running some ethernet (when possible) is always better. I've never used those "ethernet over power wires" thing, but I have heard good things about them, so if it already works for you, that is the way to go.

A LOOOOOONG time ago I had the other adapter that used a second Ethernet cable, but I switched it to the wireless adapter when I got my new (now old) laptop. If I can find the old adapter, then I will have Ethernet access. Or I'll just buy a new one, lol.

Yes, the whole 9 yards.

I have 24 tabs right now, on firefox (personal preference). I could at any minute hop into any videogame and not have a problem. I'd probably use all 4g of my ram, but it would be speedy and quick. I wouldn't see slowdowns.

We are the 1%

Unless you are doing something crazy, like ln2 cooled stuff, I would be very surprised if you got anything more than a couple percent out of modern high-end RAM. Due to the commonly available multiplier unlocked chips, and modern DDR3 design, it's really unnecessary.

I remember the golden (silver?) days of the DDR bh5 RAM, but that was the last time I am aware of which RAM could make a huge difference. DDR2, and DDR3's later design really gutted the performance you could eke out of RAM. And with the unlocked multipliers now commonly available, the primary reason for DDR2's high-speed RAM disappeared (I do not miss that mess of having to find RAM compatible with a specific motherboard at specific speeds to raise the FSB to overclock. I do not miss those days at all).

Anyways, just my 2c. I started overclocking back when it was necessary to hardware mod in order to OC (EDO RAM users REPRESENT!!) and I quit early-to-midway in the DDR2 era. No real point when you could just cheaply get something multiplier-unlocked.

Well, that explains it.

For those of us not concerned with overclocking (eg: those who prefer a stable, reliable computer) the speed / timing ratings of the memory tend to be highly unimportant.

Yeah, i remember "overclocking" one of my GPU's with pencil lead (granite). haha.

But we're getting off the point here.

I've been overclocking all my computers for over a decade, and recently including my phones and have always had dead-nuts reliable operation.

Similar to custom cars, it's all in the tune.

Alright guys, been doing a ton of research and even subcribed to Reddit - Build a PC, lol. Learned a lot from there so far.

The more I read, the more this deal became appealing Newegg.com - Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, LED LCD TV, Digital Cameras and more!

That is such a good deal and will be hard to pass up. But, no mention of HMDI or DVI ports for the motherboard. Now, I am not sure if there is anyway around this or if I am missing some detail in the description. I am hoping that you guys can shine some light here.

I will jump on that deal if there is some way to work around the HDMI/DVI issues.

That combo looks nice except for a few things. First I would be a bit weary of the power supply. If it is a no name 500watt then it will most likely need to be replaced. Secondly there is no built in video card so you will need to purchase one. Third it does not have wifi built in so that is another thing to add. The last thing is you will need some sort of dvd drive added to it. Other then those things it looks like a decent deal.

Edit: Here is a review of the power supply. I would definitely be replacing it.