[quote]Mufasa wrote:
What do you guys think about using the small, Local companies?
Mufasa[/quote]
My opinion differs from those posted - I think it’s a bad idea. The small shops I’ve looked at basically buy their parts off of online distributors like newegg and tigerdirect, mark it up 15%, and sell it back to you. As for service… if you want that, I’d go with a Dell. They typically have very good customer service these days and are the best place to buy a laptop anyway.
You can also find great deals on lappy’s at www.slickdeals.net, including coupons for Dells like $75 off a $300 purchase or more.
As a side note, Vista hates my IDE controller hardcore. I can’t run it on this mobo due to this, my data transfer rates are down around 5mb/sec instead of the normal 60.
I’ll be upgrading before I get Vista anyway, but sheesh, it’s a socket 775 mobo, you’d think they’d support it.
128-bit? Never say never, but I’m a bit skeptical. I can’t think of an application where 64-bit addressing would be insufficient. What are you doing that you need more than 17 billion gigabytes of addressable space? You might get buses that are 128-bit or larger, but a true 128-bit CPU seems unnecessary right now and for a foreseeable future.
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Won’t a 64 bit system be limited by a maximum of 64 cores?
[quote]Imbrondir wrote:
Won’t a 64 bit system be limited by a maximum of 64 cores? [/quote]
No. The number of cores a system can have is generally limited by the technical difficulty of sharing the memory and keeping the various cores in sync.
The numbers of cores on a single chip is limited by how many transistors you need to fit and probably by heat dissipation, which is currently one of the tough problem to solve.
Some specialized systems with hundred or thousands of cores already exist. For example, Japan’s “Earth Simulator” supercomputer has 5,120 CPUs and 10 terabytes of RAM.)
The “bit width” of a CPU mostly affects how much memory it can address without having to resort to mapping tricks. It is generally 2^bit. So a 16bit CPU can address 64K; a 32bit CPU, 4GB and a 64bit CPU 17,179,869,184GB (or 16 Exabytes). Various methods can be used to overcome those limitations (those familiar with early Intel chips will remember the hated “segments” technique; or the PAE (Physical Address Extension) method to allow a 32bit Intel chip to address up to 64GB of RAM.
A “wide” bitness is also useful for some specialized vector processing; such as that done by graphics or sound processing. It allows you to process a similar operation in parallel on many operands at the same time. Those functions are often built-in to the CPU as special extensions (Altivec for PowerPCs; MMX and SSE2 or SSE3 for Intels and “3DNow” for AMDs…) Some of those extensions allow 128bit operations to be done at high speed.
Correct me if I’m wrong but couldn’t you call up taskmanager and kill a bunch of the preloaded stuff? Obviously this would be a massive pain in the ass but it might be worth it when running video games etc. Or have some program(that does it for you or prevents the loading of said programs(msconfig or whatever??)? I’m assuming that this won’t be possible?
[quote]ArcaneCocaine wrote:
Vista takes up around 600mb of Ram when NOT DOING ANYTHING!
Correct me if I’m wrong but couldn’t you call up taskmanager and kill a bunch of the preloaded stuff? Obviously this would be a massive pain in the ass but it might be worth it when running video games etc. Or have some program(that does it for you or prevents the loading of said programs(msconfig or whatever??)? I’m assuming that this won’t be possible?
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The code for each task is also bloated. Now there are more services running and each take MORE memory.
So its not possible to cut it down to the level that you can with XP.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet, but www.tweakguides.com is full of free guides that’ll walk you through optimizing windows xp, internet browsers, and a ton of games.
If you’re looking to speed your computer up without spending any money, that’s a good place to start.
[quote]pookie wrote:
Imbrondir wrote:
Won’t a 64 bit system be limited by a maximum of 64 cores?
No. The number of cores a system can have is generally limited by the technical difficulty of sharing the memory and keeping the various cores in sync.
— snip —
[/quote]
Ok, thanks for clearing that up for me.
Oh, and… 16 exabytes of ram should be enough for anybody.
[quote]ArcaneCocaine wrote:
Vista takes up around 600mb of Ram when NOT DOING ANYTHING!
Correct me if I’m wrong but couldn’t you call up taskmanager and kill a bunch of the preloaded stuff? Obviously this would be a massive pain in the ass but it might be worth it when running video games etc. Or have some program(that does it for you or prevents the loading of said programs(msconfig or whatever??)? I’m assuming that this won’t be possible?
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More stuff runs and could be classed as vital to the OS than in XP. On XP of course you can wade into the Services and turn of fprint spooler, indexing, system restore, wireless etc if you don’t want them…even turn off the annoying security centre and autimatic updates and BITS.
On Vista you do this and it starts fking up left right and centre, warning messages, the windows defender messages, everything. I managed to get Vista Ultimate to run at 390mb but it would not run properly.
Microsoft released Vista, the next version of the Windows operating system, yesterday. The reviews are mixed. Here are some things I’ve noticed about it so far.
