The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Science & Nature => Topic started by: jough on January 27, 2006, 10:10:32 pm
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Hey kids,
Well, my laptop died on me... AGAIN. It's still under warranty, but I'm fed up with this thing.
Now I'm looking around online for something decent but reasonably inexpensive and it looks like the same PCs are the same price everywhere.
I remember there used to be places to find deals posted and stuff, but I'm kinda out of the loop these days.
Does anyone know of a decent place to find good deals on PCs?
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I like the Dell Outlet. It's there returns and refurbs. Prices seem good to me.
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Also, while I guess price is a factor since I don't have that much money saved up, I use my PC every dang day and need to love to use it.
I really hate the IBM/Lenovo laptops, and Sony seems out of my price range.
I've never seen a Dell laptop. Are they any good? They seem to get good reviews, but their desktops sure do suck.
I've actually liked the HPs and Compaqs that I've owned, other than having to send this one in for service three times now.
I was just hoping maybe there was some w00t-esque site that featured this week's specials on laptops and stuff. I'm trying to maximize my bang-for-the-buck here.
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I still use www.pricewatch.com for all my purchases (but it usually leads me back to newegg.com again).
Mind you this is for parts for my towers, but they list laptops there too.
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gottadeal.com lists coupon codes and free shipping offers and such. You can filter by device, retailer or price. I heard about it from OhGizmo!
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I have a Dell laptop, and I hate it. It does nothing but break and be slow, and the fan has to be on at full speed for these things to happen - it is Not Good. I also hated IBM/Lenovo laptops for the longest time, because they were overpriced and overhyped and not that great - until I was given an X41 convertible tablet to use for a semester. This thing is a dream - I have absolutely no complaints, aside from some bugs in Windows Tablet Edition. It's solid, (relatively) reasonably priced, light as can be, and fast as you'll need. I love it.
I have also had bad experiences with HP laptops, as I used to work for one of my school's technology departments, which owned about 100 HP laptops. Of these, I personally sent 10 back for various reasons, and had to replace numerous hard drives and Cd drives myself, without sending them in - that kind of failure rate is unacceptable, even when they're being used by brainless students.
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Thanks.
I'll check out those deal sites for deals.
As far as deciding on what brand/model to buy, I don't know what the hell to get. They seem to ALL suck in varying degrees. The Gateway notebooks look nice, and I like their keyboards (I do a lot of typing) but I don't know anyone who's ever owned one and reviews seem rare for them.
I'll probably get another frigging HP because the good thing about them is that their service is good. The bad thing is that you'll NEED to rely on that good service, because I've not owned an HP/Compaq in the past three years that hasn't had to go in for service at least once.
But I've never had one fail before just five weeks after getting it back from having its motherboard and hard drive replaced. This is ridiculous. When it comes back from service it will become my backup PC.
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I forgot to attest to Gateway - my brother has a Gateway, and though I haven't used it extensively, it feels solid, and he's never had to send it in (in 3 years.) He did have to call support once, because he's an idiot, but apparently they were helpful and like that.
My last Gateway was a Pentium 90 tower in 1994, so I haven't spoken to them in a while.
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I have a Fujitsu laptop that doesn't suck at all. I could type on it all day. Um, I actually do sometimes, come to think of it.
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A number of years ago when I was starting my techie career I actually worked for Gateway. I, strangely enough, worked in their corporate laptop division. I haven't kept up as much as I should've (my current company uses Dell laptops, and I don't recommend those), but with Gateway you get what you pay for. Their top of the line was always reliable but under that was utter messes.
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I have a Fujitsu. I haven't had it very long. It seems to operate properly. The keyboard sucks, but that's just a laptop thing (it's my first) so I don't have a comparison.
~Paul
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I have a Compaq of some description, which isn't too bad, but also isn't great.
What I was tempted by was a Toshiba tablet/laptop I saw recently, not expensive and a surprisingly respectable spec too. Everyone around me has recently gone for Toshiba laptops and they do seem quite nice it has to be said. The Vaio is quite nice just for the screens (the X-black TFT stuff) but they're prohibitively expensive.
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I'm typing this on a Compaq laptop, and while it's a big piece of machinery, it's also been reliable for the year+ I've had it. The only thing it's ever had a problem with is MMOs, and I'm led to understand that that's a function of the graphics card sucking.
I'm not sure if this is just me, but I would urge you away from refurbers. My last desktop was a Compaq refurb job, and it had ridiculous problems for about its first three months, ran tolerably for a couple more years, and then messily shat itself. I'm not sure how representative a WinME machine really is, but it was Trouble. The SO also has had some refurbished-laptop problems, mostly dealing with screen quality.
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I kinda agree with you regarding avoinding the refurb crapshoot, but it seems Jough is value conscious so I was reticent to throw the ol' 'you get what you pay for' out there. IIRC, he's trying to replace a refurb machine so's maybe steering towards new w/ rebate action is a better course.
That's fair. I mean, not all refurb machines explode, and I'm convinced half my desktop's problems can be summed up with "WinME." If Jough's willing to take the risk and looking at cost as a primary focus, refurbs are at least worth considering.
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My past two laptops were refurbs, and they were decent deals and served me well. This one just keeps failing. I do tend to run my computer all the time, doing lots of video compressing and such, which is about as CPU-intensive as it gets.
I've been researching online and the refurb + extended warranty (required since the refurbs tend to only come with 60 or 90 days of warranty) is only slightly cheaper (well, $100-300) than a decent mid-range new laptop that's a current model.
So I'm not necessarily looking for the cheapest laptop I can get. I did that with this one, getting the most PC I could for under $1000, but I use this thing every day, for many hours a day for both business and leisure, so I think I deserve to get something decent.
Having said that, if I can find a deal on the PC that I want I'd rather get the deal than throw away a couple few hundred dollars when I could've gotten it for less if I just knew where to look. So I figured I'd ask around and see if anyone knew of a forum or site that posted PC deals regularly, whether it be a discount or coupon or whatever. I pretty much hate rebates so I don't even consider them deals.
I was looking around today trying to decide on a computer as if money were no object and while I really like the Sony Vaios I just can't see dropping an extra $1000 for style. Plus, from past experience Sony's warranty service sucks. And when you use a laptop like I do a good service plan is essential. It's not that I abuse the thing - it hardly ever leaves my desk - but I tend to really use it.
I have a very small space to work (the rest of my workspace is a bit crowded with books, other equipment and stuff, etc.) but I'm also considering a small footprint desktop PC as an alternative. If I could get a non-tower desktop PC like they used to make I could stick an LCD monitor on top of it and be set. But nowadays all they seem to sell are towers and I wouldn't have anywhere to put one. Keeping your PC on the floor is the fastest way to kill it.
It's just a pain in the ass to shop around, find something I like, re-install everything, etc.
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If you're willing to do the buiolding, you can get desktop cases to fit ATX form motherboards. Or you could go even smaller footprint and get one of the little Mac mini size things, but that's started to limit it a bit more.
Certainly, while Vaios are quite nice, and have amazing screens, you are paying a grand or so extra and getting the performance of a machine worth over a grand less. That said, I did everything I could to cover up the evil Compaq logo set into the back of the screen on mine. It's actually raised and it strikes me as really bad design. As well as looking extra gimpy.
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Keeping your PC on the floor is the fastest way to kill it.
Why? Not that I do this, I'm just wondering.
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My PC has been living on the floor for about 5 years. It seems to be thriving down there and I don't exactly have the most immaculatly clean house.
~Paul
Edit- Oh wait, it was on the desk for the first 2+ years. But the top of the desk wasn't all that clean either.
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Jough's essentially right that the floor is bad news bears for the pc, mostly because of dust.
However I have a ginormous tower on my main pc that can't fit anywhere else and I find as long as I vacuum it out every other week there are essentially no problems. So I just threw that into my vacuuming routine and called it a day.
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Vacuuming?
~Paul
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Indeed. You'd be surprised how sluggish a pc filled with dust can get.
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Actually, HEAT is the killer of PCs, but dust happens to be a really good insulator. Also, dust can get in between electrical contacts and make things break.
It is a bad idea to keep a PC on the floor.
The problem with the small ATX type of PCs is that the components are mere novelties now and thus are actually more expensive than just buying a system at Best Buy (a big consumer electronics chain in the States) or something.
I'm going to look more into a small desktop system, but I do like the compactness of a laptop - I just hate the closed-box system that I can't just open up and vacuum out every other week, or fix something stupid like a power supply when I need to. This having to be without a decent PC for ten days because I have to send the whole thing back whever ANYTHING goes wrong is a pain in the arse.
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Actually, HEAT is the killer of PCs, but dust happens to be a really good insulator. Also, dust can get in between electrical contacts and make things break.
Pedant.
:P
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Actually, HEAT is the killer of PCs, but dust happens to be a really good insulator.
I guess the same goes for cat hair. Which is just as much on the desk as on the floor. But the floor also has dog hair, so it's worse.
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Thank you to everyone for your replies.
I decided to NOT go with a laptop and instead build a miniATX box that is somewhat larger than a mini/shuttle PC but smaller than a full desktop or tower.
It will be nice to buy components peacemeal and then assemble the PC. Also, future replacements should be less painful and easier than the laptop, which sucks because if ONE thing breaks I have to send the whole dang thing in to the service center for repair.
I'm going with a very snazzy little case, upon which will sit a ViewSonic 19" widescreen LCD.
Inside it will ROCK YOUR WORLD with an AMD X2 4200+ dual core processor, 2Gb of memory, a 250Gb Seagate Barracuda HD, a fast DVD+/-RW burner, and possibly an ATI x800XL/256mb RAM video card, although that may have to wait until next month.
The whole system will come in at just around what I paid for this low-end laptop, and will be much faster and will kick so much more ass.
Of course, it'll be less portable. There are trade-offs here, people.
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See, now you will have a real computer! Isn't it wondrous?
I have looked a few times at the tiny little miniATX cases, as there's a place near me sells them dirt cheap, but it would be a hugely less powerful system than my second tower, so it just doesn't seem worth it. It would be quieter though...
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Slink,
I opted not to go with the super-mini cases, but rather just a microATX which is about the depth of a mini-tower but only 9" high, and about twice as wide. So it's just a desktop case, essentially. The physical volume of the case is actually fairly large, and it has expansion for two hard drives (I already have three external USB2/Firewire drives), two 5.25" drives and a 3.5" bay in the front, two full-sized PCI slots, a PCI express, and a PCI Express x16 for a video card (which I'll also be adding).
I ordered one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811144162
Anyway, my laptop was actually a fairly decent machine - it had a desktop Athlon 64 processor, large hard drive, burner, 1280mb RAM, 15.4" WXGA display, etc. But it tended to overheat and then things broke.
I'll probably set up a partition for SUSE Linux on the new system. I've gotten to really like KDE as I've been using it from a Linux Live CD while waiting for the new hard drive to ship (it probably won't be here until Friday).
It'll be nice to have a modern GPU though. The laptop is a 2-year old model now and the graphics card they put in it was a year or two old when it came out. It's only DirectX 7 compatible.
And I'm looking forward to being able to upgrade little by little like I did with my old desktop system back in 1997, which was the last time I didn't have a laptop.
I'll probably sell this one once it's repaired and buy something smaller to travel with. It's a monster system for a laptop but it's huge.
I'm very excited, though, and am hoping that I'm not wasting my money with a dual-core X2. The chip I ordered came in third or fourth in the extensive Tom's Hardware Guide benchmarks this year, and the only ones faster cost several hundred dollars more, so I think I made a good decision. The thing will of course be obsolete by the time I assemble it.
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I don't know about the dual core and how worth while it is at the moment. I had the same thoughts when I stumped up the extra cash to get a larger on die cache when I moved to 64 bit. I have no idea how much it might help with any of the things I do, but... Ah well.
Hell, is 64 bit enough of a gain to be worth while?
But certainly the desktop chip in my Compaq is prone to getting awful warm. Hasn't actually overheated but it's most certainly dangerous to the crotch (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/22/man_burns_c*ck_with_laptop/).
The thing that makes me stick with a dekstop would be the upgrade feature. And avoiding Macs...
If I were to buy a new laptop I would go with something lower spec but lighter. My mom bought a new Toshiba recently that is about 2.5 kilos. It's awesome!
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That's probably what I'm going to do eventually - keep the desktop for video editing, everyday work, burning DVDs and stuff, and then get a thin and light laptop for travel. Right now I actually use my PDA for a lot of things that I used to use a PC for while on the go - email (reading only), daily web reading, watching movies and tv shows, playing chess, etc.
The 64 bit advantage won't be evident for a few years. I actually think that applications will work better with multicore chips before they're updated to work with 64-bit chips. There are a number of applications that already will see a dual-core chip (or even a hyperthreaded one) as two CPUs and spawn threads to each of them, so they can process in parallel.
Ironically, all of these gamers are buying dual-core chips to play games better, but pretty much every CPU-intensive chip on the market will only utilise a single CPU.
Of course, for games the GPU is more important than the CPU.
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Well I'll be damned. The Distributed.net client sees my hyperthreaded chip as 2 CPUs and runs in parrallel. I'd never really looked before.
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Good video editing/compression software should use dual-core to the fullest, as you say. Games don't currently, because writing separate animation, rendering, AI, physics, and game logic threads that all work together seamlessly is hard. What'll mostly happen with current code is one core will run the monster game loop, and the other one will handle the sound, data loading, and other background processes.
Eventually the new engines will figure out a good way to multithread, and then everyone else can copy from them. Likewise, there are a few special tricks that come with 64 bit processors, but mostly it's just about the larger addressable memory space. Still, no point in limiting yourself to 32 bit when 64 is available already.
As for video cards, I tend to try to find the best deal for the latest generation chip with the most RAM, because those two things will limit your gaming possibilities. The speed of the chip is important for framerate, but I'd take a newer, slower card over an older, faster one simply because it'll be compatible with new games longer. I use a 256 Mb X700 in my most recent computer.
The above may be choppy and difficult to parse. It is past 3 AM and my geekery is overwhelming my writery.
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I've always liked the nVidia cards better, but right now ATI is kicking their ass in the mid-range.
I'll probably get an x800xl because it's fast, has a lot of memory, and 16 rather than 12 pixel pipelines, whatever they are.
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I generally prefer nVidia as well, especially due to their superior driver-writing skizzles. I went with ATI this time because I needed a card RIGHT THEN, and that was the only one that had 256 Mb under $200. It's worked out all right.
Also: if you want a good deal on random stuff (occasionally featuring Dell monitors &c), have a look at Slickdeals (http://www.slickdeals.net). People there look for this stuff and then I look there and then I know about it!
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I use a couple of price searching sites to compare prices when I'm shopping for stuff online. Sometimes a place I never heard of will be the cheapest, but as long as somewhere reliable like New Egg is within the ball park I'll usually order from them or Buy.com or something, since they are reputable and have good return policies if something goes wrong. Heck, New Egg will even pay for return shipping if something shows up DOA. You won't get that from FiveGuysWhoSellComputerStuff.com.
From what I've heard ATI kicks nVidia's ass now in the low and mid-range, with the x800 chipset being almost as good as the higher-end nVidia.
I love me some Half Life 2, also, and while it seems to play well on both platforms they seem to have some kind of deal with ATI, so that's something.
The nice thing is that my motherboard has a decent onboard nVidia GPU (actually two chips, but I don't really understand the whole Northbridge/Southbridge multi-chip thing) so getting an ATI card will give me options.
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I generally prefer nVidia as well, especially due to their superior driver-writing skizzles.
Damn straight!
Also, my friend who switched to ATI had a hell of a time getting anything to actually work.
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I have an ATI card and actually had to downgrade back to the driver it shipped with in Dec '04 for it to run Civ 4. Supposedly they've upgraded twice since the game came out and the now newest driver works as well.
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I'd love to get one of those nVidia 7800 cards, but they're like $500 whereas a somewhat less capable ATI card is around $200.
I don't know if getting a few extra FPS in Quake 4 is worth the three hundred bones.
But I haven't bought an add-on card yet, so I'll have to read more reviews I guess.
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I used to be an only nVidia guy. When I built my new system (about 4 months back) the ATI cards started looking a pretty pretty good to save a buck or two.
I've yet to have a problem with mine. (I believe it's an x800 IIRC but I'm at work and I can't be arsed to look it up).
ATI is different from nVidia in that they actually state NOT to update your drivers unless you're actually having a problem. This was a bit different for an update junkie like myself, but I have survived.
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I'm going to be dual-booting XP and SUSE Linux, so I've been finding components that have good support in both platforms.
I think there are drivers for any of the latest cards from either ATI or nVidia.
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I've been having serious problems with my ATI driver lately -- in brief, City of Heroes runs for 5-15 minutes and then hard-locks. I've attempted to install new drivers, but the system still reads it as being the May 2004 driver this thing shipped with. An attempt yesterday to deinstall the driver, clean out traces, and install the newest update resulted in a borked installation ("blah blah standard VGA driver blah blah fuck you") and a System Restore. I'm thinking the easiest solution at this point is "until you can get a new system, do your damn homework and don't worry about gaming."
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Well, I'm building a new system, and would like to maybe play some games in the future (although I play maybe two new games a year, and mostly play a little chess online when I want to unwind).
Anyway, I will probably look at Quake 4's specs and see what they recommend. I'd like to play that one, as I am a fan of First Person Shooters.
Plus, Half Life 2 will be coming out with an expansion pack around my birthday, so that'll be fun too hopefully.
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No matter how many times I check this thread it hasn't wandered off topic. What's the matter with you people?
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No matter how many times I check this thread it hasn't wandered off topic. What's the matter with you people?
You've discovered the one thing that we are the most deeply interested in.
~Paul
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You've discovered the one thing that we are the most deeply interested in.
dude it is raining so hard outside, i swear to god i just saw kittens building an ark.
oh, wait.
what "we" are most deeply interested in.
i like Dell support.
him "i need the error codes for the hard drives to send you replacements"
"i can't give you error codes until you ship me the replacements for the Power Supplies"
him "ok, can you email me the error codes, uh, later?"
i spoke to a man on a different continent which is also an island AND acountry because the previous person could not operate the telephone correctly too.
seriously, though, these new computers suck, there's no VESA bus slots to plug my 1MB card into.
i mean, really mr gates, my video car has One MegaByte of RAM on it you stupid fuck.
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Plus, Half Life 2 will be coming out with an expansion pack around my birthday, so that'll be fun too hopefully.
Oh damn, please have mercy on this one poor soul!
Seriously, I expect to disappear for some time, right around the same time it comes out. COINCIDENTALLY
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Half-Life 2 at max settings + Aftermath Expansion Levels + HDR Lighting = Crazy Delicious
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Half-Life 2 at max settings + Aftermath Expansion Levels + HDR Lighting = Crazy Delicious
I didn't think it looked that much better than at not nearly max settings. I first played it on my 3000+ with a nVidia 5700 and it looked really good, then I upgraded to this insane machine and it looked well... The same with a bit of AA and AF. Not that I'm saying that sucks and that it isn't pretty. And the HDR stuff from Lost Coast was very nice but... Well, part of my problem is really that playing F.E.A.R. demonstrated how disappointing I found the HL2 AI.
/geek rant
Quake 4 I've found disappointing so far too. Except I haven't really been expecting more from it... It's too much like Quake2 and Doom3 combined. And spec wise your machine will kick it's ass.
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Thanks, Slink, that's what I wanted to hear. My machine will kick some game that I want to play's ass.
I built the thing yesterday, very very carefully, packing everything neatly into the very (too) small case until I made sure that no cables were touching the board or getting into the way of the fans, and then I powered it on and it came up for a second and then shut off.
I figured something must be WRONG. So I checked connections, reseated the memory, double checked the plugs and stuff, and tried it again. Same thing. It lit the LEDs in the front, the DVD drive spun up, the hard drive clicked, the little lights on the keyboard flashed for a second, but the display never lit, and then it turned off again.
I kept unplugging non-essential stuff. Then my dad, who has a master in electrical engineering, came over and noticed that it seemed like I probably had a stuck switch (the power button in the front is one of those "soft" buttons, unlike the switch on the PSU) and he removed the little connector from the reset button and power button switch pins and put the reset button on the pins for the power button. I switch it on, and NOTHING. I started to panic a little.
The old man laughed and pushed the reset button. The machine SPRANG to life.
Because I got a faster-than-Paris-Hilton SATA II hard drive and the fastest DVD burner they make, installing windows took about 7 minutes.
The thing isn't fast, it's sudden.
Anyway, my display should arrive today and I had to make an SP2 slipstream CD because SP1a seems to only recognize the first 120mb of the dang drive.
I will look forward to loading this bitch up, getting some games running, and seeing what the onboard GPU can do, which probably ain't much, but it'll be better than my laptop I'm sure, and Half-Life 2 already looked gorgeous on my laptop.
I didn't much care for Doom 3 as a game, although the graphics were good (although not as impressive to my eyes as Half-Life 2, which is all the more impressive because it played really well on a three year old PC with a crappy video card that used shared memory).
I also got a copy of Far Cry with something that I ordered, maybe the motherboard. I don't know anything about it other than it's also a First Person Shooter.
The only game I'll probably really play for awhile anyway will be San Andreas, which again already looked really good on my laptop with an older GPU and very little graphics memory (64mb).
I'm hell of excited to get everything together and just get started doing stuff. With the fast HD and DVD (not HD-DVD) it should take like nine minutes to rip and burn a DVD.
And I have an extra 5.25" bay in the front for my eventual Blu-Ray drive.
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I didn't much care for Doom 3 as a game,
This is the nicest thing I have ever heard about Doom 3. The reviews I saw gave it like 4/10 or something like that.
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Doom 3 reminded me of one of those silly demos people with Amigas used to put out. It would be really pretty and flashy and at the end maybe it would say something like "Destructor X Team! Hello to all our International Friends!" in big block letters that swirled and looped around the globe. And you would stare in awe and say Ooooh... but they were never ever fun to play, NEVER.
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I really loved the original Doom and Doom II - I even made my own level once with one of those editors that were popular back in the day.
Quake was okay, but Quake II was awesome. It was the first (and last) game that I bought hardware just to make the game experience better - I upgraded to a 3Dfx graphics card that handled the coloured lighting, and a 5.1 Soundblaster Live! card and speakers.
The lighting made SUCH a difference in the game - you could see the rail gun or rockets lighting the walls of a corridor as it flew through the air, and it was really pretty most of the time.
Now Quake II is so old but it was a very enjoyable game that I played all the way through more than once.
I didn't really play much Quake III, as I usually just play single player games if at all, but then I really liked the Star Wars Jedi Academy games that were built using the Quake III engine.
Doom 3 was more of a technological showcase than a decent game. The whole flashlight/gun thing where the flashlight would cast a too narrow beam for too short a time and then you couldn't shoot while the flashlight was on was really weak, and most of the game just being BLACK made the graphics a moot point.
I thought the Doom 3 gameplay was pretty repetitive, although the later levels are pretty neat - when you ride the monorail and see the Martian landscape, or the level where you had to go through various teleporters to get to different parts of the base, etc.
I found the "hell" section to be underwhelming, but then again, what could they do to be impressive? Okay, I guess they could've made it more like the alien world from the original Half Life, which was really impressive at the time and cleverly "alien."
Quake 4 I have not played yet because I haven't owned a computer capable of playing it. The new one may not even play it well without a schmancy video card that I will get later in the month, but I'll try it anyway.
Mostly I want to just have a reliable platform on which to type PHP code. You don't need a lot of processing power for that. This system ought to punish at ripping/copying DVDs, though, too. Or re-encoding video to watch on my Palm.
I just got my display in the mail, so I'm going to finish doing my backup and then get her set up.
I have a tradition of naming my computers after computers or *****s from sci-fi movies or television shows. The new computer is simply "M5," from the Star Trek episode "The Ultimate Computer" (I had to look up the title - my geek kung-fu isn't that strong).
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installing windows took about 7 minutes.
holy shit.
i've been feeling like SNL's caveman attournery lately doing my work,
but,
holy shit.
i need to give up and/or just disclaim everything with "i only know anything about shit that is useless and obsolete."
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Re: Doom3 - Penny Arcade knew it all along. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/05/23)
Right now we're at a point where there isn't much more to do with graphics. We have the colored lights, and the bump maps, and the normal maps, and the cursed 'bloom effect', and five thousand ways to render shadows. And it takes five times the art department to get it all in, which means less money for the people in charge of making the thing fun to play.
Anyway. As long as we keep advancing tech, the power available to mere mortals will continue to grow, and that's a thing I like. Even though you no longer need to upgrade computers for anything related to most kinds of work these days -- Gone are the days when programmers needed dual processors and RAIDs just to compile...
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Man, I've been having nothing but damn problems with building this box.
First I thought it was a bad switch on the case, but then the next day the OTHER switch started acting up. I put the power switch back on and it worked fine. Huh. It's not the switch.
Then the hard drive would just disconnect at times. WTF?
The hard drive is next to the system panel pins for the power switch, LEDs, speaker, etc.
Anyway, now I don't know if it's the motherboard (probably) or as some on the Anandtech forums think, the power supply (possibly).
Since changing out the power supply is a hell of lot easier than changing out the motherboard, I'll try that first. It's just a royal pain in the ass and is delaying the joy of having a new computer.
Plus, New Egg's site says that I cannot return or exchange the motherboard, even though it said nothing of the sort when I bought it. I haven't actually talked to anyone from New Egg, though. I'm hoping that they'll be reasonable.
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I had a problem with one of my SATA drives when I built this machine (based on an Asus A8NE board if that helps), which was fixed only by erplacing it. It was the same problem, the computer would boot with the drive visible, but if I clicked to go to it it would vanish. Seemed to be some problem with the 80gb's from Maxtor and the Asus from what I could tell online, but, I don't know what hardware you are using so...
Apart from that, the only things I can think of would be to ensure that you have the Silicon Image SATA drivers, but they should be handled automatically by the motherboard drivers (nForce or Via?). That's all I can think of off the top of my head but I'll have a think.
The usual trying the drive in another machine would, I should think, be the best bet from the sound of it.
As far as Far Cry goes, it's not bad. The outdoor bits showed great promise, but the minute you get in doors it gets generic and tedious.
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Well, New Egg has issued me an RMA for both the motherboard and case. The motherboard has numerous problems and I'm just going to return it for a refund and buy something else. Asus's good name is severely tarnished around here. This board is a piece of shit.
The case does have a short in where the system panel bundle plugs into the switches in the front. If the replacement evidences the same problem I'm just going to do a little surgery and put some black electrical tape around the outside of the switches so that the exposed parts can't touch any other metal part of the case. I think it's a design flaw, although it seems that they're about 50/50 with the QPacks on this problem.
The keyboard that they sent was also crushed on one corner, so that's going back too.
Oh well, I'll have to wait another week or two before I can get my new PC built.