OT: New PC!

[AgentZero]

Well, I'm sold. Priced my computer out on their site & it came out €500 cheaper. €700 if you count the fact that since I have a huge big room with loads of space back home, I'm going with a 21-inch CRT instead of the 19-inch flatpanel.

[AgentZero]

Well, the order has been placed, and this is what I'm going with:
Processor AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400
Motherboard Asus A8R-MVP Crossfire
Ram 2 GB PC3200 DDR
Hard Drive #1 Seagate 80GB Sata HD
Hard Drive #2 Seagate 400 SATA HD
Optical Drive LG 16X Dual Layer DVDRW
Video Card Sapphire Radeon X1900 XT 512MB Video
Sound Card Creative Labes SB X-FI Platinum
Speakers Logitech Z5300 Speakers
Keyboard Logitech G15 Illuminated Keyboard
Mouse Razor Diamondback Plasma Mouse
CPU Cooling Zalman CNPS9500-LED Aero Flower
Power Supply Enermax Liberty 620W ELT620AWT
Monitor 21" NEC CRT
Case Thermaltake Tsunami

Now, the important part, is all the new software to load onto the system since I won't be getting it hooked up to the internet for the first weeek. So far, I've got:

Tweak UI
AVG Anti-Virus
Ad-Aware
Azureus
Directory Opus
DivX Codecs
Firefox
Foobar2000
Irfanview
Java Runtime Environment
Limewire
Media Player Classic
Open Office Suite
Photoshop
Spybot
Thunderbird
Trillian

Any other recommendations/things I'll be kicking myself if I forget?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Floppy drive. I like floppy drives.

[Thermodyne]

I’d make one change to the software, you should try the Windows Defender Beta from MS. It’s free and works well.

You moght also want to try the IE7 Beta2, if for no other reason than to see how much IE has changed. I'd keep the Firefox as primary. Also didn't see Adobe reader, I have the corp re-d of 6 if you want it.

PS: What about RAR?

[Fyron]

I'd recommend utorrent over Azureus, personally. 4 MB ram usage is hard to pass up. Its got most of the important features of Azureus, with more being added every update.

[TurinTurambar]

Not software related, but I was suprised to not see a second optical drive. The ability to copy discs on the fly from one drive to another is a beautiful thing. I suppose if you don't make copies of all your music that doesn't matter so much. I also agree with Narf that a generic floppy drive is worth the insignificant cost you'll pay for it, and both your case and MB will have room included for it.

[NullAshton]

He has 2 gigabytes of memory, a little less ram usage isn't going to matter...

Send your computer to me when you get it... Or at least take screenshots of your games.

[AgentZero]

Actually, there is a second optical drive & a floppy drive too, I just forgot to stick them on there. And I've already got a few 'before' screenshots saved somewhere, so once the machine is up & running I'll do a few 'After' shots.

[Fyron]

NullAshton said:
He has 2 gigabytes of memory, a little less ram usage isn't going to matter...

More RAM usage makes the RAM chips run just that much hotter. It also makes for more disk access due to swap file, causing more strain on the hard drive. Sure its not a great effect, but over time, it adds up.

Of course, my recommendation of utorrent is more about the general feel of the app, which is similar to Azureus, but better in subtle ways. You've really got nothing to lose by trying it out. If only they would write a decent tracker for utorrent...

[Baron Munchausen]

Imperator Fyron said:
I'd recommend utorrent over Azureus, personally. 4 MB ram usage is hard to pass up. Its got most of the important features of Azureus, with more being added every update.

I agree. The only feature that I know of which Azureus has and utorrent doesn't is password protection for torrents. This is a special 'high security' feature that most people won't need. There may be other features that utorrent doesn't have, but I don't even know what they are, which shows you how important they are... because I am a fairly regular user of Bittorrent networks for various things.