HOW TO BUILD A PC THAT WILL NEVER CRASH

[Taverner]

OK....here's the secret. Don't buy Dell. I bought a Dell, but I bought a low end one and reformatted and rebuilt it. For the equipment it was a good deal.

Anyway, make sure your boot/system drive is High Speed SCSI, and your 2nd Drive is SATA-2. Yes, get a second drive. Make sure the Pagefile.sys is on that second drive.

Also, make sure you're using ECC memory. For XP get at least 3GB.

Make sure you get Pentium D - which means Dual Core. This means you get symetric multiprocessing - the effect of having two processors to do the load, only you don't have to pony up for two.

Then - stay away from any "Soft" firewalls like the one that comes with Windows. Get an actual hard firewall/router and use that.

Make sure your programs you use are on the SCSI drive, and the data is kept on the SATA-2 Drive. This will come in handy if your primary fails - all your data will be safe. Of course, get a USB or Firewire external drive and run nightly backups in case the second drive fails. Run your backups at night.

As for anti-virus stuff - honestly it all blows and is slow. You need it though. IN a perfect world, they would build the anti-virus stuff into the firewall/routers, but we don't live in that perfect world yet.

As for all your other stuff, do the research and make sure you get good video cards, sound cards, etc

[Crazy Dave]

1. Most of my crashes come from piss poor buggy software

Hardware problems are not as numerous and frequent as software problems. Exception being the hardware has faulty drivers, aka software.

[LSK]

2. used a good firewall and dont use Internet Explorer

Works for me and I never get trojans or spyware.

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

3. 3GB of memory?

Remastering Star Wars or something?

[Taverner]

4. I run a lot of VM's - what can I say?

I'm a memory hog.

For simple browsing 1GB might be enough, but with memory as cheap as it is -= why not go 3GB

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

5. Wow...I only have 256mg on this computer.

It only starts lagging when I use photoshop.

[meegbear]

8. If they want to use Vista, they'll need it ...

One of the chief complaints about the beta versions by testers is that it's a mega-resource hog.

[HughBeaumont]

16. Rest assured I'll stay with XP . . .

Vista looks pretty shite-bad if early returns say anything. They'll need lots of tweaking if they're getting me to upgrade.

[Beware the Beast Man]

6. I built my own (with the help and advice of the Computer Group),

and I haven't had a problem since. *knockonwood*

[lpbk2713]

7. Do NOT use MSIE or Outlook.

Be very skeptical of online virus scans and spyware searches. Very often they actually install trojans and spyware to get you to buy their crappy product. Do a lot of research before you commit.

[Taverner]

9. Exactly

Use Mozilla Firefox if you can, and for virus scanning I have an idea for a virus-scan appliance that sits on your network if any investors want to help me ;)

[jobycom]

18. I use Firefox, but I'll be much happier when I can get it to work consiste

ntly. Half the time it doesn't have the plug-ins I need, and when I click on the little "Click here to install necessary plug-ins" it tells me it can't find them. Several pages I go to wind up with goofy errors, like text hiding behind pictures, etc.

I briefly tried the beta for IE 7, and like the way it looks, but it doesn't work with some of my favorite pages, either. So I run Firefox, but find myself having to use IE 6 on several pages that just won't work properly with Firefox. It could all be my fault--maybe I just haven't learned how to install plug-ins or set things up properly--but I have a life, and Firefox is frequently stealing precious minutes from it.

And that's not even mentioning that it siezes up once a week.

Sorry for the rant. I wind up cursing both browsers extensively. I've tried Opera, and it's got some nice features, but generally it only works were Firefox works.

Thanks for listening. I'll leave you alone now. :-)

[HughBeaumont]

13. I use Spybot, AdAware and HijackThis for the reads.

PC's been clean since 2004.

[CabalPowered]

10. I'd add two things to the list

1. Get two drives for data and mirror them. If possible, do the mirroring at the card level not through windows. 2. Always burn-in your new comp.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

11. Be sure to note the warranty date on the hard drives

because they will die the day after it expires.

[Deja Q]

12. There's a much more cost effective solution afoot:

Linux

:D

[Taverner]

17. Ahhh but you still need a decent hard drive solution

Even with Linux.

Someone mentioned mirroring - good idea, but as long as you do backups, mirroring is unecesarry.

Personally I'm a fan of RAID 1+0 (mirroring + striping) but kind of hard to do that on just two drives.

[HughBeaumont]

14. Wish I would have followed your advice about nightly backups

for my second drive on my Compaq (hey, it was practically free from work, and when you own a home, you can't pass that up) before it shat on me.

Won't make the same mistake with my current Frankenstien, which me and the wife's cousin assembled 2 weeks ago.

What have you heard about LANParty motherboards?

[Taverner]

15. No Idea on LANparty but...

Google them - you'll find a good handful of reviews.

[jukes]

19. *OR*

buy a Mac...

[lpbk2713]

20. Two hours.

I knew this would show up sooner or later.


:eyes:

[jukes]

23. i cdnt help myself!!!

:evilgrin:

[Taverner]

21. But that would require spending a ton of money

On a crappy product that can write letters or emails only.

See, I was talking about a machine that could actually do something useful.

Maybe if I needed a toy...

[jukes]

22. just messin' about, Tav

i'm not that good w/ electronix & use a PC, off the shelf but w/ some electives like increased RAM.


i just know that saying"Mac" in the vicinity of a PC guru is like a cape @ a bull!



i'm experiencing too many rageful loungers right now, so i'll gladly say "uncle."

[mainegreen]

24. Install *nix

;-) Had to be said.