Happy Holidays! - down with the flu and some thoughts =)

Happy holidays dear visitors and friends!

Today  is the night when most of us celebrate with the family and close friends,  sing along and gaze at the  tree with its light bulbs and  decorations, and hopefully some more gifts under its leaves! a new laptop?, a sleek new tablet computer, or perhaps a new video card for games =).

Some businesses still need to open their gates at least for some hours to cater to their customers and give some service, even if its just for half a day, and even if its a  saturday, we as computer salesmen and repairmen strive to fix any last minute detail with those computers that are to be gifted, or ones that santa will deliver in the early morning :O, and as always i was prepared for such task

pc gaming on a budget December 2011 - how to play the latest pc games for cheap

The following is a guide compiled based on  my experience with computer hardware parts available to me at the moment having checked local prices and online listings, better deals might be available to you, and this guide should be taken only as a heads up to what is worth buying AT LEAST.

Holy days are around the corner, and often its the time of the year when people often want to give  presents, from nifty expensive android tablet pcs, beautiful smart phones, plasma tv`s, gaming console system`s and computer system`s as well, and due to my line of work a lot of people visit me and ask me, what is a good computer that can play the latest games, but on a tight budget!

THE TOP OF THE LINE - everyone wants an AlienWare

Computer hardware stores have been around for years since the invention of the home friendly personal computers, better games started to flood the market, that demanded new video cards and powerful rigs, somewhere along the 90's there where a pletora of computer businesses, companies such as Falcon North West, Tiger direct,  AbsPc or cyberpowerinc to name a few, all had listing from cheap to the beefiest ones, and there  was a company that rose up with the depravity of offering the most expensive computer parts AlienWare, world renowned brand, would give computer gaming heaven if you could afford it! The company grew so much, that back in 2006  DELL bought Alienware. Think of that!

How to repair a CPU with bent pins - heatsink and cpu came loose during shipment!

Today i give you the story of a Pentium 4 478 with bent pins and how i was able to save it, all started when...

Shipping a computer 
A friend of mine that lives in another state, decided to send one of his unused computers back to one of his relatives, he reformatted and packaged all the discs and papers in a single box, the old Pentium 4 socket 478 HP case was wrapped in protective foam to ensure it would not get damaged during transport, and shipped it off expecting nothing to go wrong.

Something did go wrong

Upon arrival his relative noticed a funny rattle like sound coming from inside the box, and as the box was moved from side to side, it felt as tough there was something heavy "loose" inside,   beeing a care full person, the relative contacted my friend about the issue before trying to plug it on, to which he promptly asked to open the box and open the case door, and they where surprised to find "a big piece of metal with a fan, hanging from the inside of the computer, and the metal had a part full of copper pins all bent and warped"

AMD HyperTransport make sure its 1000mhz or higher! /too much work !

 THIS IS NOT AN OVERCLOCK GUIDE ITS A REMINDER TO CHECK YOUR HT AS IN SOME MOTHERBOARD IT COMES IN LOW SPEED SETTING AS DEFAULT

AMD's HyperTransport:

I wanted to venture fort into the subject of AMD and its hyper transport technology and how configuring its speed can mean a slow or fast computer
, but after doing a lot of tests and benchmarks i came up with a lot of unconclusive data and mixed results. in short you just gotta make sure its 1000mhz at least or higher! setting it lower does hinder performance, but beyond 1000mhz  you really cant tell the difference (only in some case specific situations) let me explain a  bit more.

FancyCache - How to use Ram as hard drive cache

Welcome to the last of these  ram caching mini series where i finally show you a great tool to further improve upon any windows caching system, as we saw in the  previous post here, we understand the improtance of using a newer operating system  such as 7 with loads of ram, so that everything is re read from ram, but if you are still reluctant to move on from xp  due to its small footprint, and have loads of ram to spare, you will love this program!

THIS IS WHAT FANCY CACHE CAN DO TO YOUR SYSTEM ITS AWESOME

Understanding how windows uses RAM - Why you Want Loads of it!

 A history Of Ram Caches, prefetcher and superfetch!

Ever since the dawn of computing random access memory (RAM) has always been a limiting factor, it determines how much information  the cpu can "juggle  in the air" to keep a program open and to display its contents, early on programs were made to fit specific ram requirements (not to mention much earlier you only had around 600kb of base system memory to work with!!) because RAM was never cheap, at around  100$ for 4 megabytes (yes MegaBytes), windows 1.0 came and demanded for more, these where the days where you could only open 2 applications at much, before windows notified you ran out of memory!

 You could only run as many programs that the memory could handle 

these two are too big for the system memory!

16GB of ram and How to Migrate Raid0 from one system to another (different chipsets/controllers)

DISCLAIMER: This guide is specific to newer motherboards that include  raid chipset in some or most of the sata ports, from both brands of AMD and NVIDIA, the success rate depends on many variables mainly the  hard drive interface controller and how well the operating system can deal with the swtich to another one (this resuslts in blue screens of death in few ocations, always have a back up of your data!)

I NEED MORE RAM! (8 is not enough!)
As you may remember on a previous post (double your speed with raid0) i told the tale of how i doubled the speed of my computer by adding together 2 hard drives and form a RAID 0 array, dividing the write times in half and increasing the read performance by two, i slapped 8 gigs of DDR2 ram to that computer and i was gold! resources available at all times... but having many open projects and a game by the side, really slowed down my system!

 need more ram!