How much did your computer cost?

This thread has not gone well for me. I was looking for comfort in one of you lot having given PCWorld £2500 for a ZX81 in a nice case, but either none of you have, or those that have are staying schtumm.

I've spent, it would appear, 30-40% of my entire income for the last 12 months on those two boxes of tricks. Plonker, eh? Best thing is, Rainbow6 Las Vegas STILL runs like total shite (Supreme Commander, Forged Alliance on the other hand....1680x1050x32bit, 16xanisotropic filtering, 16QxFullScreenAntiAliasing, all game video options cranked off the scale, 60 fucking frames a second, with 4000 units on an 80KM map, I belive the phrase "oh yeah" is apropriate.)

Useful info for yous, the low end 8600GT that only cost me a Colin (see what I did there?), with all the Anisotropy and FSAA shut off, performs scarily well compared to the £300 8800GTXoc2...switch the eye candy on and it dies a death, but still, if you don't play train sims (where the jaggy lines that antialiasing kills are SO annoying), you need not piss away a fortune next time you need a new video card.

Sad news is that my new order collection was primarily held on the drive that died in the move. Most of it is held elsewhere, but I think some bits are gone for good. I't s seized motor by the sounds of it (it does not spin up but instead, well, it plays a tune, a little 4 note riff, over and over), and the 3 partitions are formatted to Linux Ext3, so there's every chance of a recovery, BUT, £250 for rescue services, so I've a long think ahead of me.

EDIT: a happier thought just occurred to me when I hit submit......the money I spent is still less than I woulda spent going out and getting fucked up, had my body not called a moritorium on such pursuits, so I feel better now.

I love your FHM posters!

Dodjem wrote: I love your FHM posters!

Holiday snaps from London ;)

Above that one is a clangers "test card", there's also another HUGE dalek poster, a Jordan-F1 flag and some of my old gig posters. Half naked plastic photshopped chicks just aint my thing, if you want to perv, there's a whole net full of proper porn, so why bother?

Speaking of getting the PC-world anal, where did you get your machine and how much? It smells of big store, fast, but not really fast, and a billion stupid gadgets that don't work and hog resources, to bump the price up. Still, it's well built, which counts for something.

When i was VERY poor LAST year my son bought me this LAPTOP.Not as good a DANCER as me though.:D

Love the high-tech stand, Doc

To answer your question, I've got a HP laptop the same as Jem's with the swivel screen. I bought the display model on impulse from John Lewis for £600. It's got a TV tuner, remote control and all sorts of other crap that applies to your description. I've no doubt that one day when I try to reinstall windows on it I'll have all sorts of problems with proprietary nonsense like I did with Lisa's Dell last weekend.

My other one is a fine PC, built for me by the geeks in the computer shop over the road from my house. I specced it with advice from Ally and it does the jobs I want and no more. It’s got a 5.1 sound card so I should invest in some proper speakers rather than the crap ones I’ve got. Then I could use it as my main sound system rather than the useless one I do use. It cost less than £500 I think - can't honestly remember.

I bought another one at the same time for Littleinoil – a very basic PC so he can go on the net at his house. He’s quite computer savvy for a five-year-old, as those of you who’ve spoken to him on MSN will attest!

I've got two other Dell desktops at home that I was given by my old company. Cleaning them up, putting Windows on them and sending them to a good home is on my list of jobs. But will I ever get round to it? Who can tell! I need monitors for them both so I’ll probably get myself a good one and pass on the 15” one I have with my desktop.

Sorry that’s light on tech detail, but hopefully stoked your wank-bank with a bit of the information you crave.

Loving your cabinets – what’s the lights on the front. Do you ever have the urge to spray ‘Salford Rules’ on the front of them?

Never thought of that, maybe "guitar Nero"?

The lights are fan controllers, at full tilt those blue lighted fans (there's one on the back too), and the huge (200mm) rotorblade thing on the top of the cases, are fucking loud, but if you set them all to "low" with their internal switches, you can't increase the airflow without dropping the side off and going caving in the snakes nest that is the inside of a PC (both of them appear to be entirely full of power supply). So controllers are the answer. When idle, minimum and silent, when the linux box is compiling or the windows machine's gaming it's balls off, you can turn them up and bask in the breeze (really, the one on the right's been with me for a year, and during the depths of winter, the fans on full power causes a really uncomfortable draft!). The screens on them read out RPM for the four fans, but I've lashed up the big blue lighted ones, and they are only 2pin not 3 (no yellow lead), so they don't report RPM....it also shows temps, but I looked at the bundle of temp sensors, looked at all the wiring inside and thought "fuck it, if it gets too hot it'll shut down".

The little blue dibber on top of the windows machine (still FAC9000,BTW, and the one on the right is still calling itself HAL9000), is an "LCD poster".

You know the "morse code of death" that motherboards play when things like RAM or VGA fail during POST (that's Power On Self Test to the rest of yous), like beep beep beeeeeeep means your ram's fucked, or beep beep..beep beep means your CPU has added it's last 1's and 0's...well that little flummy actually reads throught the phases of POST, so if your motherboards shits itself, it freezes with the last thing being checked being shown....kinda like the old amiga guru's million colours thing it did on start.

I just went into Game Stop and said "sell me a game to fuck over my machine, it's life is too easy". He sold me Crysis, and it actually doesn't run at a flat 60fps like everything else, but it does still run well, and it looks BREATHTAKING. Almost tempted to inflict vista on this machine just to see Crysis in DirectX 10.

Doctor? wrote: This thread has not gone well for me. I was looking for comfort in one of you lot having given PCWorld £2500 for a ZX81 in a nice case, but either none of you have, or those that have are staying schtumm.

If it makes you feel any better, the following scenario has occurred several times.

Friend/acquaintance/landlord(on one occasion) asks for advice on getting a new PC. I spend time looking up stuff on the web, work out the precise spec suitable for their needs, and best bang-for-the-buck.

Next time I see them they mention, "oh I popped into PC world/Dixons/Currys to have a look and the nice man sold me a really good system for only [fill excessive amount of cash here]. I had to get it from them because its the first place someone actually came up and offered to help me choose. And it was on sale."

Course it turns out to be something with a hard drive half the capacity you'd expect for the price and couples an unnecessarily powerful/expensive top-of-the-range CPU with a crappy on-board graphics and slow RAM. And, in one case, a 14" CRT monitor with a strange green colour cast.

Still, at least it wasn't a Mac. :)

AND when it fails, who do they call (after PC world have thanked them for the warrantee money and explained how it covers, well, nothing). Bastards Windows is too good for em.

When macs was macs, with motorola CPU's, I loved em. Now they expect you to pay £2500 for a slow PC running FreeBSD (they can call it OSX all the want, but if it looks like BSD, smells like BSD and tastes like BSD (and has a whole pile of Berkely copyright messages in all the core system progs), then it's BSD.

Lemme see, a £1500 mac, is the equivalent usually of an £800 PC, so you're paying £700 for a nice case, and an OS that everyone else downloads for free (legally too).

About £1000.

Acer Aspire 5652wlmi laptop

1.66ghz dual core processor, 1gb RAM, 120GB HDD, bluetooth, infra red, wireless, dual layer DVD burner, 256mb nVidia Geforce Go 7600, freeview, analogue TV, multimedia card slots, etc...

Got it nearly 2 years ago, replacement would still be a similar price.

Mac Book-- over 1000 bucks

Doctor? wrote:

DigiDiz wrote: Home built computer, recent upgrade, costing me around £450, though luckily, I have got extra hard drive, plus windows vista 64bit, which should be fun, old computer, relegated to running ubuntu, oh well, its seen its good days though I guess

Old Boxen Never Die, they just get Linux installed

works that way here too, too old and slow for windows? shove Gentoo on it and let it run hapily until it's motherboard fails (the way the last two who left us checked out).

The thing is, that this tradition is about to give me a Gentoo box, with a 3GHz AMD dual core and 4GB of shit-hot RAM, Linux being Linux, it'll probably soon work out how to cache the entirety of /usr /etc and /home into RAM and shut the discs down, which should pretty much create a supersonic penguin.

I heard from someone that you can happily install linux on a flash drive, i mean install linux on it, not just copy the distro to flash drive....what i am going to do with my upgrade, is, that i am going to copy all of windows vista 64bit unto the said flash drive, and install it onto hard drive, heard it installs in a jiffy as well

Tis true, I have Knoppix installed on this........


goes nicely in me wallet.

The best thing is, every time you boot it, it has to analyse your motherboard, then inumerate and install drivers for all your hardware. Windows typically takes around 1-1.5 hours to do this, and still leaves you with no 3d graphics, limited sound and not much else. Knoppix sets your whole machine up and hands control back to you in under 2 mins.

A handy thing to have around. If your windows is playing up, you not only have an emergency way to get online, you can also verify that the machine itself is or is not knackered. Ie if it bombs in linux and windows both, it's defo a hardware thing.

If you can get Vista to do the same sort of thing, I will be stunned. I installed it last night in order to see Crysis running in Dx10. My GOD it took forever, obsessively checking files that were not it's business (including MS train sim directory with over half a million files in it...BASTARD!).

Sat down at 6pm, and wasn't finished until nearly 2am. There's a fair amount of anti-vista hostility here today ;)