Sertorius

Currently holding at the #1 rank. And to think I'm on a laggy sat connection that can't do MP... :p

Probably an Intel i7 for pure power (And higher price tag), or the AMD Phenom II 940 for a more affordable but still powerful solution. I'm an AMD fan myself, but the i7s are currently the heavyweights. They just require a more expensive mobo and RAM. Edit: I don't know what your old CPU is, but I'd bet there's a high chance of bottlenecking if you keep the old CPU and stick a GTX 295 in.

Well, as long as installing Linux doesn't involve excessive amounts of work, it sounds like a good deal. Ubuntu is the only Linux-based OS I've heard of. Is that good, or should I be looking for something else? Hail to the Cheap 2.0 Case: HEC Black/Silver SECC Steel MicroATX Mini Tower PSU: 485W (Included w/ Case) Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM CPU: AMD Sempron LE-1200 Sparta 2.1GHz Memory: Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) HD: Western Digital Caviar 80GB OS: Ubuntu Desktop Edition Monitor: Hanns·G HX-191DPB Black 19" D Drive: LITE-ON DVD-ROM Cost: $332.92

Hail to the Cheap Case: HEC Black/Silver SECC Steel MicroATX Mini Tower PSU: 485W (Included w/ Case) Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM CPU: AMD Sempron LE-1200 Sparta 2.1GHz Memory: Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) HD: Western Digital Caviar 80GB OS: Windows Home Basic 32bit Monitor: Hanns·G HX-191DPB Black 19" D Drive: LITE-ON DVD-ROM Cost: $432.92 Couple of questions: 1. Any other ways that I can skimp on the cash? This computer is supposed to be a budget home system for accessing the Internets and running a word processor. 2. The Mobo has an onboard ATI Radeon HD 2100. Will that be enough to run the display at 1280x1024?

Hey QBA69, Newegg has a GTX 260 available for exactly $200 (And there's also an extra $20 mail-in rebate). It's here if you want to take a look.

Newegg has currently got a Radeon 4870 512MB card going for $170 (See here). If you don't want Radeon, probably one of the better nVidia cards within your budget is the 9800GTX+ (Link). You might want to compare them on Tom's Hardware or something similar. Edit: A quick look on Tom's Hardware (At aggregate scores for 1280x1024 performance) shows the 4870 with a slight lead, though both cards are definitely near the head of the pack (Excluding the mongo 4870X2s and the GTX cards).

Could be true, but the problem is that US debt is neither limited nor manageable. I could see the government operating one or two billion in the red, as a relatively small increase in taxes could quickly eliminate the problem and put the country back in the black. Of course, the US national debt is no longer even measured in billions anymore, it's measured in trillions (Soon to be tens of trillions ). While it is the banks fault for offering the stupid loan, it's also the consumer's fault for seeking and taking the loan. If you borrow X Dollars to buy an object with the assumption that you'll immediately be able to turn around and sell the object for X + Y Dollars, fine. Different people invest in different ways. But I fail to see why people who gamble and lose should be compensated for the money they were gambling, particularly using money from other people who are either digging themselves out of a similar hole or people who didn't bother digging such a hole in the first place. Ditto for the banks that tried to make a buck by investing in the risky loans.

A lot of the old C&C games (RA1, RA2, Tiberian Sun). Also Age of Kings.

Is the reverse also true? Could I buy a new mobo/CPU and keep using an old PCI 1.0 card?

Thank you. I asked because NewEgg sells some cables labeled as "SATA" and some as "SATA II", and I wasn't sure if I might run into compatibility problems. I wasn't quite sure how many USB ports a header could support. Thanks for answering my question  . I'm looking at a Gigabyte GA-EX58 UD3R. It's supposed to have 6 SATA connectors from the South Bridge and 2 from the SATA2 chip. Probably not that big of a deal, I'm not planning to do RAID.

OK, a relatively minor question. I've got most of the wiring for my theoretical computer worked out, but one part has me scratching my head a bit. The system has a mobo with 8 SATA 3GBs ports and 1 PATA port (ATA100 2 Dev. Max). I'll be connecting a DVD-RW drive ("SATA interface"), a hard drive (SATA 3GBs), and 4 external USB ports on the case. The USB ports come on the case, I believe they come with cabling, and I'm not particularly concerned about them anyway. What I'm mainly wondering about is which format of cable I should use for the other two devices (SATA or SATA II). The mobo comes with an IDE/PATA cable and a SATA cable. Should I be shopping for SATA II cable(s)? I certainly am not looking to be stuck with PATA/IDE. Edit: However, speaking of the USB ports, they are located on the front of the case, and I would like to have all of them connected to the mobo. The mobo is listed as having 2 USB 2.0/1.1 headers. As I said before, I'm pretty sure the USB ports come with connectors, but am I going to need to purchase some sort of bracket/splitter to connect the USB cables to the mobo? Edit2: Right now, I'm pretty sure I'll need a SATA II cable to connect the HDD to the mobo (A SATA 3GBS HDD to a SATA 3GBs port seems fairly straightforward). The SATA cable will connect the disc drive to the mobo. Am I on the right track here?

My problem here is that I believe in a difference in the ethics of redistribution to help the unfortunate (People who've had bad luck, whether born into bad families or somehow stricken by unforeseen events) versus helping the willfully irresponsible. I'd repeat my example about the difference between helping the child of drunk and helping the drunk himself. In the first case, we help the child now and hope that they grow into a productive member of society. In the latter, we merely subsidize and likely encourage a continuing pattern of bad behavior. True. From a policy perspective, this still leaves the gaping question of what is a "treatable" illness. Basic medical procedures like stitches, immunizations, antibiotics, or treating broken limbs is one thing. But what happens as we try to pay for treatment of the elderly? The cost of treating an old person becomes higher and higher with every year they live, as the amount of effort and technology used to extend his/her life becomes ever more complex. Organ transplants, joint replacements, cancer therapy, or just sustaining someone in a vegetative state cost many thousands of dollars. At some point we're going to have to say "You've lived a long time, you're using thousands of dollars worth of treatment while inputting very little through taxes, so come up with the payments yourself." Well, I agree with you there. However, personally I'd imagine that massive defense cuts would be accompanied by huge hikes in entitlement spending, as any party that cuts military spending by a huge amount is going to take a beating at the polls (And so must bribe people with more goodies). Hell, I'd think it was great if we slashed our military down to a basic force sufficient to protect our borders, some intel gathering capabilities, and some ICBMs as a deterrant. It's just that drastic cuts will be accompanied by charges of "Isolationism" or just plain "Hating America".

Asides from my opinion that it's not ethically stellar, nor economically sensible, to confiscate from the responsible to give to the irresponsible, there is the problem of subsidizing poor behavior. If the gov't funded a program that gave everyone free dog food, the result of the program would be an explosive growth in dog ownership. Making an item or an activity cheaper without also lowering demand for it through some other means will result in a growth of the cheapened activity. So if we make bad behavior more affordable, more people will engage in it. The result will be that the program will grow far larger than initially anticipated, which brings us right back around to the problem of America's ridiculous budget. So yes, if you make bad choices, your rights are either directly or indirectly restricted. The problem that arises, and one of the reasons I personally have problems with libertarian theory, is that innocent people can suffer because of the screwups of others. To me, at least, there is a vast gulf between gov't health insurance for the child of a drunken bum and gov't insurance for the drunken bum himself. I wouldn't bother imagining that "my share" is going to some good people, because that means someone else is funding the irresponsible people. If you've committed anything more than a minor infraction, you can very likely lose your right to buy a gun. Felonies certainly cost you that right, and some milder offenses (For example, domestic abuse in some areas) will also do so. So will certain psychological diagnoses. If you've blown all your money, you won't be allowed to buy the gun because no one will sell one to you. You also aren't technically "free" from religious harassment, you are only protected against gov't interference and private criminal acts against you. You can lose any right against religious interference by engaging in sufficiently despicable religious practices, such as screwing and/or eating children. On the same note, you might lose your right to be free from a warrantless police search if an officer saw blood in your driveway and heard screaming from the basement. You have a right to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment, at least until you do something really bad, at which point we will throw you into a windowless cell and leave you there for several decades (Admittedly, we claim this isn't cruel and unusual, a stance that is technically referred to as "being full of shit"). It's a positive right, unless the old terminology changed while I wasn't watching. If you have the right to something, it's a positive right; If you have the right to be free from something, that's a negative right. I'm not trying to imply that positive rights are good and negative rights bad ("Positive" and "negative" are not meant to be value judgments), or vice versa, just that the nature of these two different types of rights results in a very different sort of policy for each one. Personally, I think that positive rights are much more expensive, and so we as a country need to make some hard decisions. We may be able to afford a few positive rights protected through carefully managed bureaucracies, but raft of such rights will eventually sink under the sheer weight of what's being funded. Well, pork spending always has had a consequence: People vote for the politicians who bring home the bacon . It's also seemingly impossible to properly fund the government, because balancing the budget will necessitate a huge cut in gov't goodies and/or a considerable tax hike. The politicians reflect what the people want to vote for. If Americans were genuinely concerned with a balanced budget, either the parties would nominate candidates for this end or a new party would arise to exploit the political demand for a candidate with a balanced-budget policy.

Of course it's a commodity. However, most of us (I think) believe that everyone has a right to have some of that commodity. I'm not sure if gov't run train schedules are any more intelligible . Speaking from my own experience as a US citizen, a privately run postal system is superior to a gov't run outfit. If I want to send or receive something quickly, then I'd use UPS, DHL, FedEx, or some other outfit, never the dread US Postal Service. Actually, if I recall, there have been some great bureaucratic semi-scandals involving this principle: The story, possibly apocryphal, is that a politician was strongly arguing against privatizing the Postal Service, so due to this immediate need for some documents he had them delivered overnight by FedEx . Not sure if it's true, but it's a funny anecdote. And it does match at least with many Americans view of the differences between the Postal Service and the private deliverers. The private companies have to compete with each other, hence they make great effort to deliver items on time; The Postal Service has, or at least used to have, no competition, and developed a reputation for sluggish deliveries. Then it's a positive right, not a negative right like the rights enumerated in the US BoR. Declaring health care to be a negative right ("You may not be denied coverage on the basis of sex, race, nationality, political belief, etc") is something I'd be far more comfortable with than declaring it to be a positive right. Why should it be a positive right? Declaring it to be such seems to evade the issues inherent in declaring unconditional gov't-provided health insurance. What about people dying of expensive-to-treat diseases? Putting them on the system makes it one of straight redistribution, not insurance. On a related note, it seems inevitable that with the growth in scientific knowledge, our ability to manipulate the human body will increase, though it will be done through ever more expensive procedures. There must come a point when there's some form of operation that will be very popular but will be completely unaffordable to make a universal right. Ten thousand dollar procedures, heading to hundred thousand dollar procedures, heading to million dollar procedures (Maybe they'll find a way to put quadraplegics into Terminator exoskeletons). A guarantee of very basic medical procedures (Immunizations, anti-biotic prescriptions, etc) is one thing; Declaring that the gov't will handle all your potential medical expenses is another thing entirely. Also, why does everyone "deserve" insurance? What about some of the guys I knew back in construction, whose lot in life had much to do with voluntary choices (Becoming a drunk in high school, dropping out in the 10th grade, and acquiring a minor criminal record)? Why should I, the college-boy who studied on Friday and Saturday nights, spend my working years paying additional taxes to subsidize the lives of people who made poor decisions where I made better ones? Doing so would only make sense if there was sort of benefit to society for insuring everybody, otherwise it's just another weight around the neck of the US budget, which is already half sunk and is still sinking. P.S. - I will return later and correct some of my early morning babble.

I don't even know where to begin. The problem of spending is massive, and I personally think it's locked into the nature of a country that gives the people some control over policy creation. Many people want to pretend that we can put 1 Billion into the government and get 1.2 Billion worth of services out of it, whereas in reality, that billion only translates to maybe 800 million in possible services (Running a bureaucracy isn't cheap). So instead of being honest with ourselves, and maybe running only a minimal welfare system to help the truly unfortunate (And honestly call this redistribution), we build a huge system on the wishful assumption that we can get more out of government than we put in. We want to pretend that the gov't can efficiently function as an HMO or retirement savings organization, whereas in reality it can't do so efficiently. Social Security (Apparently based on the belief that it's not a Ponzi Scheme if you make it big enough) is almost certain to become a massive liability in a few decades, but I guess lots of people are too invested in some belief that it's actually a safe retirement fund, rather than an ocean of IOUs. Plus, the language has gotten so bizarre that it's starting to reach Orwellian heights. The way we talk about "rights" comes to mind. The rights we're guaranteed are those enumerated in the Constitution, and they're a series of negative rights. Yet somehow our political language today implies that we have innumerable positive rights. Instead of "You have the right to be free from gov't intrusion in your speech, arms ownership, home, etc" it's become "You have the right to a retirement fund, health care, and other goodies". Those are nice sentiments, not traditional negative rights, and the result is a total change in the nature of gov't. Instead of a small institution, designed to protect out right to do things, it has become (Due to our own demands) designed to provide everything in the world. The result was probably best described by P.J. O'Rourke: "Federal Spending is determined by a simple mathematical formula: X - Y= A Huge Stink. X is what we want, which is everything in the world. Y is how much we're willing to pay for this in taxes, which is not very much, and we're going to cheat on that."

What about Jose Jimenez ? Oh, and I'm not sure if this has been reported, but the cannon on the Mirage 2000N (The one with the B61) appears to fire thermonuclear bullets. I think I've got the latest version of this addon, but I'll redownload it sometime today just to be sure.

Well, I was thinking of that too, but a lot of this stuff is being sold with a combination of special Christmas discounts plus extra mail-in rebates, so I wouldn't end up saving all that much money if I bought cheaper components. I figured I'd just get her a really nice PC within my price range

Before you play mission 7, practice a bit with the 66 Kes and the APILAS in the mission editor. That way during the mission, you can shoot and scoot against the armor. Oh, and you can kill the BRDMs at virtually point blank range. Mission 8, either get control of the .50 on the jeep, or run into the barracks that are on the right as you drive into the camp.

There's no kill like overkill . Besides, this computer should last her all of college, so I want to overbuild so that it can handle what will be thrown at it over the next 4 years. I know that what I assemble will do Sims 3 fairly easily, but I also want it to be capable of handling Sims 4: Will Wright's Retirement Package Edition. Plus any AoE style games, that sort of stuff. For the sound card, I'll probably switch to an HT Omega Striker 7.1

Well, that's good business sense...

How about an Asus P5Q SE Plus P45 as a motherboard? That saves me a few bucks, which can then be spent on a better HD: Case: Antec 1200 PSU: Corsair 650W ATX12V Mobo: Asus P5Q SE Plus P45 CPU: Intel Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz (L2: 2x4MB) [Will be OC'd to ~2.8-3.0GHz] CPU Fan: Artic Cooling Feezer 7 Pro 92mm GPU: MSI Radeon 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1 Channels RAM: Corsair Dominator 4x2GB (8GB Total) HD: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB 7200RPM OS: XP Professional 64bit SPC2 (System Builder edition) Disc Drive 1: Asus 18x/48x DVD-ROM Drive Disc Drive 2: Samsung 22x DVD-R Burner Monitor: Acer X223Wbd Black 22" 5ms Widescreen LCD Actually costs $20 less . Edit - Oh, and a question about the tech specs given for the mobo. It's memory standard is listed as DDR2 1200(O.C)/1066. Does that mean that if I OC the CPU, I can install 1200-type RAM, or that I can overclock 1066-type RAM (That is, my Corsair Dominators) to the level of normally running 1200-type RAM? Edit2 - And if I do use this mobo, is there any point to purchasing a network card? The mobo has onboard 10/100/1000, and this computer is only going to need the connection to connect to a college network (No LAN parties), so is it worth the $ to install a seperate network card? Also, should I even bother with installing a floppy drive? Edit3 - Looks like the design is starting to finalize. Time to rev the engines and get ready to spend .

OK, a couple small tweaks: Case: Cooler Master HAF 932 PSU: Corsair 650W ATX12V Mobo: EVGA LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 750i ATX CPU: Intel Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz (L2: 2x4MB) [Will be OC'd to ~2.8-3.0GHz] CPU Fan: Artic Cooling Feezer 7 Pro 92mm GPU: MSI Radeon 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1 Channels RAM: Corsair Dominator 4x2GB (8GB Total) HD: Seagate Barracuda 250GB 7200RPM OS: XP Professional 64bit SPC2 (System Builder edition)

Though I'm not going to be able to play this until Sunday, I'll put my thanks in early: Thank you for all the hard work .

OK, I made some revisions: Case: Cooler Master HAF 932 PSU: Corsair 550W ATX12V V2.2 Mobo: EVGA LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 750i ATX CPU: Intel Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz (L2: 2x4MB) CPU Fan: Artic Cooling Feezer 7 Pro 92mm GPU: MSI Radeon 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1 Channels RAM: Corsair Dominator 2x2GB (4GB Total) HD: Seagate Barracuda 250GB 7200RPM OS: XP Professional 64bit SPC2 (System Builder edition) Price is almost exactly the same, actually less due to a mail-in rebate on the Radeon 4870. An ATI card should work fine on the NVIDIA mobo, right (I'm not interested in Crossfire, but the one card has to be compatible)? Also, any preference on brands here? I just went for an MSI with a Quad Heatpipe design and a higher memory clock speed (1800MHz versus 900MHz). The Cooler Master case currently is going for the same as the Antec 1200, so I'll stick with it unless the Antec is actually better. The switch to the Q6600 was very tempting, it's almost $100 in savings. Most of what it's initially going to handle is probably Sims 3 and the endless parade of expansion packs. Hopefully by the time Sims 4 rolls out, it'll take better advantage of multi-core systems. One more thing: Will there be any new issues now that I'd be using a 64bit OS? Will my standard-issue Microsoft Office (Home and Student) install on the computer? Should I worry about drivers for the sound/video cards, or anything else (Games)? Edit: With the switch to 64bit XP and the Q6600 Kentsfield, I still have ~$80 in savings after the upgrade to the 4870. Should I go to 8GB of RAM, or will that not have any noticeable affects on games? Or should I put a few more bucks in and just get a faster quad-core? Or should I just save a few extra bucks? Edit2: Will OC'ing the CPU (According to the reviews, putting a good fan on should allow safe OCing to ~3.0GHz) necessitate adding better heatsinks to the RAM, or is that only if I specifically OC the RAM?