JP-

No, never use the other 1 It saps my will to post.

Doesnt work here either or on a friends PC, is it down or something?

Hey, i remember it running fine in win2000 but i havent tryed it yet in XP. Ill give it a go when i get home later and see if mine does the same thing.

Have a nice time being a mod and nice plug for your site

Some parts of sandra i like, such as the cpu mips bit and the memory bandwidth. They are a good guide to see if everything is working and to see what effect (if any) that last tweak had on the system. Some of the bits of it though are terrible like the HDD test and especially the information, it seems to actually guess most of the things rather than work them out In summary....good tool but dont trust it with your life Brian if you could just knock out some sandra benchies and tell me what version of the bios/driver you are using it would be much appreciated I still find the HDD test a good indication of the overall speed even though its not that accurate.

Imaging and ghosting a drive are the exact same thing, its just that usually when you talk about using norton ghost you refer to it as 'ghosting' So ghosting/imaging are the same thing essentially, and a win2k system can of course be ghosted, i am 100% sure about that part

Hey Ill just make it clear that ive never had probs with amds chips, i had a slot athlon 700mhz with an amd irongate (750/751) chipset and it ran great. But my other boards, Via KX133 and the KT133a always had some stupid problems which took hours/days of tweaking to get stable So my problem isnt really the chips, i know they are faster than the p4s atm, but they are just not stable enough with those stupid via chipsets (at least for me). Think the case i will get is...... http://www.coolermaster.com/products/atc/atc200.html Its silver but has a kinda black front which would look great with some black drives when the time comes to change em. BTW Brian, your running 2x60GXPs in RAID0 like me Any chance you could do some benchies I need to make sure mine are running right, and what strip size did u use?

Hey i would prefer intel as well, as ive had some bad experiences with amd myself and none with intel. Im thinking i might just get a new case though, my current 1 is getting a bit old and broken Im thinking a quality all aluminium 1 this time. (Lian-Li maybe, anyone got any suggestions?).

I would LOVE to go dual but what are the options. Just dual athlon or dual p3? Which mobo would be the best in each case?

Yup, previously i was running an Abit KT7A-RAID in this same ATX case, my new p4 board (Abit TH7-II) has the exact same mounting points as the athlon board so it fits no probs. If this fits then all p4 boards should fit, and you should have no probs. You will need to swap PSUs if your current one doesnt have the required 3 connectors

I want to spend some money but i dont know what to get

They fit fine in a normal ATX case but you need to make sure you PSU has all 3 connector types for the p4. They are the normal ATX power connecter, a small 4 plug square shaped one and a small rectangular shaped 1.

I think youve probably managed to get 90% of all your posts from this 1 thread alone. Its like a constant status update

ME is a weird 1. I hear so many negative comments (like brians )about it but yet in my experience i found it to be a fairly good OS. Ive had it installed on 4 PCs now and none of them have had any problems. It is bigger than 98SE but i would still use it simply because it looks and 'feels' better and more like win2000 (authough obviously it isnt) Why do you want to use partition magic btw? You can setup your partitions before hand using the winXP installer and then format them in there respective install programs as NTFS/FAT32.

Must be good if it 'rocks', ill download the demo and give it a go

Dont post when mad

Fair enough, we are all entitled to our opinions. But tbh i dont care if the lithtech engine 'sucks', all i care about is how it looks and runs, and it happens to look and run great. Obviously its not as 'good' as a good opengl engine like q3 but it fits the game perfectly and manages the lighting better than ive seen any other engine do it. And how can you say it has 'terrible graphics' the graphics are fantastic. Authough it does require a pretty good PC to get them like that, ill give u some screenshots of it looking great if you want I just really enjoyed the first game, but the problem was that the missions were essentially seperate levels with no link between them. AVP2 makes all the stories interlinked and you really have to play all 3 to get the full experience. Maybe its a game that you either love or hate (cue the ppl now who say 'its ok').

BTW i might give it a try ill look into it. 1 more consideration is power, i dunno if my 431w PSU would cope with a good peltier + all the other devices i have, the voodoo 5500 (not in sig) probably uses about 400w on its own If you try it let me know how it goes

Yes they are electronic but you still need something to be able to cool the 'hot' side. I dont think that heatsinks can cope with it (at least the higher power peltiers) so i would have to use water to get decent results. I would probably need a better HS than the intel stock anyway

That would be great Except that i would probably need water cooling to go with it, and knowing me i would probably screw up my whole pc with water Im really looking for something like the Swiftech MCX-478 HS/F but the only place i found that sold it and shipped to the UK was in Holland, think ill have to ship it in.

Ive seen nothing in XP that makes me think its 'badly' needs a service pack, it runs great. I would go with XP on that pc simply because XP works right outta the box where as with 2k you would probably need to get loads of updates/fixes and because its the latest version. But lets face it, they are practically the same thing underneath the blueness of XP

Well ive not posted in this huge thread once so far so i may as well do it now Abit TH7-II-RAID Intel Pentium 4 1700@2047mhz (until i can get hold of a better cooler ) 512MB RAMBUS 2xIBM 60GXP 40GB in RAID0 on the crappy highpoint grrr Floppy drive Hercules Geforce 3 Ti500 Voodoo 5 5500 PCI Soundblaster Live! 5.1 Platinum Linksys 100TX 10/100 NIC Pioneer DVD-105s 16x Plextor 12/10/32a CD-R/CD-RW Iiyama Visionmaster Pro 410 DTT2500 speakers MS Intellimouse Explorer/MS Forcefeedback 1/and 2xMS Gamepads and a window and 2 neon lights (red and green, looks very nice). and that is it...

For once i agree with you

If you get norton ghost it has a utility called GDISK that will do just that. We used it here at work to do exactly that. DOS command line type thing.

Cos it sounds less geeky than imperial star destroyer?