Bulding a computer

[Doug R.]

My desktop winbox needs to be replaced, and I'm considering building a new one from scratch rather than buy a preconfigured system this time. Any advice/recommendations from the computer jockey demographic? It must have RAID, and I want at least a dual core because I want to play flash games without any issues at all. Hopefully it'll last at least six years.

[joo]

What is wrong with your old one?

[Cdls]

Without more information this will be nothing more than a shot in the dark.

What is your budget for a new desktop?
Are you only interested in the component build, or will you need peripherals (keyboard, mouse, monitor and so on)
Any preference on brand (ie. intel or amd)
What kind of use do you want to get out of it? (other than flash games of course)

[Doug R.]

What is wrong with your old one?

It's 5 years old. It can barely handle the flash games and second life on a low setting. (Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.40GHz, Memory: 4096 MB, Video card - ? (don't know how to find out).)

What is your budget for a new desktop?

Under $1000.

Are you only interested in the component build

Component only.

Any preference on brand (ie. intel or amd)

No, and I don't know enough about it to have an opinion, which is why I'm asking.

What kind of use do you want to get out of it?

I play games like Medieval Total War, Civilization, etc, and I used to like to compete online in games like Team Fortress (when I got my wifi, I stopped being able to connect to Steam for some reason, so I don't play that anymore). I use Second Life for avatar creation, and that runs pretty slowly on my current system. Other than that, it's all low-impact stuff like Cantr, word processing, excel, photoshop, etc.

Maybe it's a more narrow question if I ask what garbage is out there that I should avoid like the plague?

One thing I definitely need is a CD/DVD burner that just works without me having to dick around with it (like it does on a Mac). I have Windows 7 on my laptop, and I don't have any problems, but I haven't been able to burn a CD on my desktop for close to 3 years now because the burning software sucks so badly (either that or the drive is broken, but I can't tell the difference).

[joo]

It's 5 years old. It can barely handle the flash games and second life on a low setting. (Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.40GHz, Memory: 4096 MB, Video card - ? (don't know how to find out).)

It sounds like you have a bad case of software bloat and/or an outdated video card. In any case, a system like that could go to good use by someone less equipped than yourself, so I hope you put it on somewhere like http://www.freecycle.org if you do replace it completely.

One thing I definitely need is a CD/DVD burner that just works without me having to dick around with it (like it does on a Mac). I have Windows 7 on my laptop, and I don't have any problems, but I haven't been able to burn a CD on my desktop for close to 3 years now because the burning software sucks so badly (either that or the drive is broken, but I can't tell the difference).

Use a different piece of burning software?

[Armulus Satchula]

Why must it have raid? If it's for a backup solution, raid is not a backup solution.

Where I work, one of the raid controllers went on a server of ours. This caused bad data to be written to the other drive. When the main drive went the other drive was full of corrupted data. What if your house/apartment burns down? Your data burns down.

If you need a back up solution, there is software out there that will sync your data on their servers (automatically on whatever directories you pick) for a fairly low price. I know of one that is only $5 a month with unlimited space, but it doesn't offer historical access. Such as if you have a file saved and then modify it a week later, you won't be able to get the original version, just the newly updated.


If you want to know what video card to buy, all you have to do is go to google and type something like "toms hardware video card june 2011". Change the month and year to be current and you'll find that tom's hardware basically tests and tells you what card to buy for each price range.

[Armulus Satchula]

Actually, now that I look. This month they listed out 500 and 1000 dollar system builds that should both be able to play games.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/diy ... ,2970.html $500
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bui ... ,2969.html $1000

[Doug R.]

Thanks.