where is the wish list? Kristen wanted dad to put something on it for his birthday/father's day. He needs some new sweatshirts to wear around the house--Most of his are pretty ratty--even for around the house--he loves his civil war one best. I know this has nothing to do with the post I am commenting on--just don't know how to start a new one--nor do I care to learn!!HA Ha He also needs a shop/vac-he can't find his old one. Mom
GJ said 1 day later
Hey Mom--for new posts, just click the New Post words in the upper right of this screen. Ez-peasy.
Don't blame it on me Blame Site5. :) But yes, it's down for the time being.
Geoff said 2 days later
Hey Mom...I have your Shop/vac :) among a few other items I'm sure. I'll bring it back Memorial Day....just remind me :)
Geoff said 4 days later
Ok I setup my Wii yesterday and added GJ in....here is my Wii #:
8083-4843-0943-8078
GJ said 5 days later
No Mario Kart Wii yet??
Geoff said 5 days later
Not yet :)
GJ said 5 days later
You're missing out, man. Mario Kart online is the BOMB.
GJ said 5 days later
Oh, and I'm writing this from my new Core 2 Quad system, running Winxp 64bit. Woohoo!
Geoff said 6 days later
No Vista for you either I see....
GJ said 6 days later
NO FREAKING WAY. NOT EVER. :)
GJ said 6 days later
See, the problem is, XP works pretty well. Vista--not so much.
Geoff said 6 days later
It is an amazing feat for Microsoft....they should be oh so proud.
Marc said 6 days later
You'll be happy to know that after SP1 for Vista came out, I have seen Windows Explorer crash several times DAILY. Other than that it's a terrible OS. I have nothing but bad things to say about it.
GJ said 6 days later
Meanwhile, 64-bit XP is humming along very nicely. Only things that crash are 32-bit driver install programs that don't check to see what OS you're running (PNY, I'm looking at you!). Even better, PNY *did* have the right driver on the install disc (and it was up to date!) but their Flash-based install was written to be more slick than effective. Contrast that with Gigabytes's driver install disc for the motherboard--man oh man that was sweet.
Got HL2 and FarCry set up to run in 64-bit mode. Haven't played FarCry yet, but HL2 rocks. However, the install of HL2 seems a bit messed up--every level it loads, it has to rebuild some kind of map. Takes all of about 1.5 seconds each time, so no big deal, but the game doesn't pause while this is occurring.
So far, so good...and stable as a rock. Something that I rarely ever got in the AMD world, unfortunately. :)
Steve said 7 days later
You had stability issues with AMD? I ran an 1800 XP+ for years with no issues, and am running a 4000 XP+ now, still without issue.
GJ said 7 days later
Did you build it yourself? I doubt it. Production systems are tested for stability, whereas when you build your own, you're dependent on your research and a bit o' luck.
AMD systems and their chipsets, especially those made by SiS, often end up being a pain in the butt. I have been running AMD since, oh, say 1995, so I do have a clue what I'm talking about here.
My first AMD was 486x120, and it outperformed the Pentium 90's of the day in almost every test, except those that used the instruction sets build specifically into the Pentium (MMX, I believe it was called). That system saw the use of three different mobos, and was only unstable on one of them due to some bad capacitors.
Next up was the Athlon 600 in 2000. This was a brand new architecture, and I ran Asus' highly-regarded (at the time) K7M mobo. Yep, it had SiS chipsets, but it stayed stable once I upgraded the bios twice and got new SiS drivers.
Problems started when we went to the Athlon Tbird 1200s. I mounted them on four different mobos during their life--they ran best on Abit's KT7A boards, but were still pretty picky. They got along with ATI video cards, but they definitely disliked Nvidia. Often, I had to run three different driver configurations (between mobo drivers, video drivers, and sound drivers) in order to run various games. This was a real pain, to say the least.
Finally, we went to XP2000+ chips, and it went to hell in a handbasket. I was able to get them to function with ATI video, but never with the more powerful Nvidia hardware I had lying around. After more than a year of playing with it, I finally fried one of CPUs and mobos in one of my two machines, and decided to build a new one from scratch.
I honestly looked at AMD, but frankly at this point Intel is price-competitive with them and had a sweet quad-core offering at the 2.4 GHz level. I found a great solid capacitor modo from Gigabyte, too, and found a PNY 8800 GT card that meshed nicely with it. And franky, wow--this system flies, it's easy to overclock (and stable so far), and was a total, total bargain. Didn't do anything different as far a researching which parts played nicely with each other, but I've never had an AMD system this solid other than the Athlon 600.
Geoff said 7 days later
I believe Steve built his too.
Steve said 8 days later
Yes, I build all of my computers. It's so easy, even a mechanical engineer can do it.
Steve said 8 days later
I ran the XP1800+ on ATI and Nvidia Gforce2 GTS+ video cards. Only problem I ran into was choppiness while playing a game, due to the power supply not being strong enough. Upgraded the power supply, problem gone. I'm now running a later model ATI video card with my XP4000+ without issue. My systems have been very stable. In fact, other than the one gaming issue, I don't think I've ever had a crash since going to XP. I have had hard drives flake out, but can't blame AMD for that.
Maybe I've just been lucky. I went to AMD for the cost advantage over similar performing Intel chips. If the price is more competitive now, I wouldn't be opposed to trying Intel out next time I upgrade. My current setup uses older memory (PC3200), so next time I upgrade, I'll have to do just about everything (MB, memory, CPU, video card). That won't be for a few years, unless something forces me to upgrade.
GJ said 8 days later
It's not so much an AMD issue, it's the motherboard support for them that sucks. You can find far more awesome Intel-based mobos for Intel chips than good ones for the AMD chips.
Got my first crash (actually a hang) when the girls were playing Sims2 FreeTime. Turns out, that POS game is using the latest and greatest SecuRom anti-piracy software, and lo and behold it doesn't like Win XP 64-bit very much. A few minutes at GameCopyWorld fixed that problem pronto. :)
