Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.aldi.co.uk/uk/html/offers/2867_9910.htm

I'm looking for a new PC to replace my old tired one. I'm probably not looking for a gaming machine, just enough to play emulators (Which mine does reasonably well at the moment)

I've found the above PC on the Aldi website, a friend of mine bought one from there and says it's excellent. Can I ask your opinions?

Is it any good for the money? I already have a monitor and a better keyboard and mouse than there's but to be honest, all those numbers scare me!

I'd see how much the likes of overclockers and cyberpower will charge if you put together a machine of that spec on their sites. Once you are handing over >£300 you want to be dealing with people who know their computers. Same as buying a car - you might have one off a random bloke for a couple of hundred but if you are shelling out a decent wedge you get to an expert seller.

How much are Blu-Ray drives at the minute? I thought they were still quite expensive. If so you might be able to get a cheaper machine by cutting that out.

Unless, of course, you want one.

I could've had a BR drive fitted to my new PC for 30 quid, IIRC. Vizzy baby, have a gander at the thread I started aboot a new PC. John of the Coughing gave me some good advice in there.

It's not bad and will certainly do a job, but as GY said, look around to see what other places do a similar machine for. I have a feeling someone might be able to find you something a bit nicer for the same cash.

You'd need to do the upgrade to 64bit vista to take full advantage of 4gig RAM, mind.

I'd probably do a full install when I get it anyway to remove all those demos and trials and stuff.. apart from that, good advice gents.

I would like a PC but as someone else said in another thread, I'm too old to be messing around.. I just want something that I can plug in and will work.

I think I'm turning into my dad....

I dunno what I'll do for the next office PC. Current one was built by hand but not sure I can be bothered anymore.

I whittled my last PC out of one block of wood. It didn't work, so I built one using proper components that all worked with each other instead.

The yoytech would work out at 500 with a monitor.

Thing is, whilst you are omitting the quad core it's highly unlikely you will ever even use it. Case in point I had a 2.4ghz quad core phenom black. My 2.4ghz core 2 duo is faster at everything apart from GTA4. And that's crap

From memory my quad core phenom rig from PC world with 4g ram and a 500gb SATA was 500 quid with a 19" lcd from PCworld a year ago. I didn't want the monitor..

I've read in a few places that Vista 32bit DOES recognise the full 4gig of Ram? Is someone lying to me?!?

EDIT... It's ok, Yahoo answers comes up trumps again with this little gem

"64 is bigger space. id rec.64 bit"

So I think that answers everything! As you were.

Yeah man, Gordan Brown. Yeah. You know it. *adjusts beret, lounges back, listens to jazz*

Talk about the 4gb addressing is lousy with confusion and bad terminology.

All 32-bit OSs will see 4Gb of RAM. They can address a total of 4Gb of RAM. However, this needs to include not just what you put in the slots, but also things like cache and graphics card onboard RAM. That's why it only reports 3.2Gb or thereabouts as being available.

32-bit Vista SP1 includes a change in the reporting so that the machine information displays what is physically in the box, not what is available for addressing by Windows, that's why it'll say the machine has 4Gb. This makes no difference whatsoever, it's just reporting it differently.

Note that there is an optional cludge in XPSP2 and Vista called PAE (Physical Address Extensions). What this does is create a virtual 36-bit address space for the OS, meaning that it will be able to address your full 4Gb of RAM plus your graphics card memory and other assorted bits and bobs. The counter to that is that it can cause decreased memory read-write performance, and also compatibility errors if software attempts to read directly from memory when the data isn't where the application expects it to be.

As software starts to use more cores, that might become untrue. My main machine has 8 cores, and with the right software I can indeed use them all.

It really depends on if the OS can handle it and if the app writers can write for it.

+ if you do CPU intensive stuff it can leave the rest of the system nice and free if you want to do other stuff. Eg I've left Final Cut Pro rendering while I encoded a load of stuff inside a XP virtual machine.

The SQL Server I'm testing in work has 24 cores (and 64Gb of RAM, and is wired to a 70-disk SAN over 4gig/sec fiber channel). We're having some deadlocking issues, but I've managed to get to around 80% overall CPU consumption. Take that.

Outside of video encoding though, JC's right, I'm not sure quad cores are a sound move for most home PCs. Mind you my quad machine in t'other work burns through DVD->PSP video conversion jobs.

Encoding apps are usually written to take advantage of multi-threading. It is becoming more common. And as I say, it comes into its own with multiple apps open. So perhaps not for gaming but gaming on a PC is for children and masochists, right kids?



Apple users are of course advised that the more cores the better as Snow Leopard is promising greater performance advantages from the off apparently.

You really and truly do not want a 64 bit OS unless you have no other choice.

Hardly anything works on it (like 3rd party apps and software).

A friend of mine called me the other night trying to set up his orange ADSL. Turns out he had an older modem (usb) and it wouldn't work with his XP64 'cos he had no drivers.

I personally reccomend 3gb ram as it's all you need and a nice 32 bit OS

As time goes by more and more things will see quad core, yes. However for years and years I ran dual xeons and all that really saw them both were Windows 2k, Photoshop and video encoding/editing apps.

It took utterly years before games started supporting them and whatnot.

To be fair, if he's still using a USB modem he deserves the trouble.

XP64 driver support is a million times better than when it first launched, and as you're getting the machine new you won't get any issues with unsupported hardware (assuming you don't have any ancient peripherals). Vista 64 has never had any issues with availability of drivers.

3rd party apps and software hardly ever work? That's totally untrue, especially considering that both XP64 and Vista 64 have 32-bit emulation built in.

SO! I've got vanilla XP, XP64 and Vista Business sitting in front of me for my new PC. Which should I install, bearing in mind it's got 4gig RAM?

It wasn't his PC specifically. His wife's dad had bought it cheap.

All I can really go by with the 64bit OS's is what I read. Mind you, the thing I read most about is games not working.

Whatcha gonna do with it, Dimmers?

Look at porn, mostly. Read a few websites. Phhhh... maybe play Civ4 some. And MAME and WinUAE, natch.

Did it come today then?

I would go XP64 & Vista 32 Home premium (for some media center love).

I had Vista 32 on my Advent (which had 4gb of ram, IIRC it 'saw' 3.5gb) and it was OK. Not as good as XP32 for gaming but the media center was absolutely lovely.

I ain'tn't licensed for Home Prem, unfortunately I shall be music listening and watching films. Porn, as I said.

Oh, and still no PC, no. Grr, etc.

XP64 then. Or Windows 7.

Will the larger breasted ladies require more RAM to watch?

Depends on whether you want to see all the stretch marks and pores (HD)

I've been using Vista 64 for 6 months. I'm still waiting for the very first thing that "doesn't work" with it.

Only thing I've found so far is Lady T's mp3 player (creative zen vision, pink). Vista threw a real wobbly over it and wouldn't recognise it at all, even with the awful creative software installed, oddly. I never did get around to trying harder to sort it though, as it was easier just to quickly boot into XP and do it through there.

Weird, I have a Zen stone and Zen xtra, both mount as folders in explorer without complaint and without even installing any Creative stuff.

I was thinking that - it should just be the USB mass storage driver.