I need a much better pc than my 2006 laptop in order to enjoy sc2. I have a working understanding of lego instructions, so I want to try building my own desktop with newegg shit for once. I've come to terms with the fact that it will be difficult if I want everything done. I want to grow from this.

I have $800 to work with. So the typical "Buy this, this, this, and this. That is all." is a good place to start. Do not be offended if I ask you why you think seagate is shit, and corsair is not.

Now with all that stuff said, I'd like to ramble for a second about random things I heard, and quirky preferences. I definitely want to have both a windows OS and a linux OS installed. Is it true that vista and win7 log all your pirated software, and sends that info to Microsoft? Sounds crazy, but a professor said it. I know and love XP and don't see the need to get windows 7 yet, but I felt the same about win98 vs XP, and shudder thinking where I'd be if I stayed with 98. RAID sounds cool, any1 here do it? I also definitely want an above-average speed HDD. I heard Ex say something about it being better if it's a single platter. I want that. Basically what I want is for my computer to be super responsive. I don't want games on max-settings, or have 10 multitasking programs, as much as I want firefox to load the second I click it. He can play starcraft2 better than me, clicking links or launching programs has this 1 second lag that does not exist for my ancient laptop. I don't want to make that trade. I can't stress enough how important that is to me.

I think I might youtube my assembly attempt.

Bear in mind that Firefox's startup time directly corresponds to how many add-ons you have, as most add-on developers stupidly initialize all of their services when the program starts, instead of waiting a short bit of time and/or loading code only when it's needed. IOW you may not even be able to shorten Firefox's startup time with a good computer, simply because the people who code the add-ons don't always think about performance.

I wouldn't say pirated software is a Microsoft concern (unless their software gets pirated), so I think your professor was scaring you. Still, the programs themselves can send data if they're pirated.

Wait 'till Ex or Rocks get here, I suppose.

For operating systems, you do want to go with Win 7, preferably ultra or whatever the best version is, for your windows distro. However, if that eats into your cash too much and you don't have a copy lying around, but you DO have xp, I'd say roll with XP, especially as you only have $800 to work with nvm, USD is worth more, try get a <$200 copy of win 7 ultra. If you don't know much about linux, get ubuntu, it's the easiest to use and is easier to install than windows. Install windows first, then ubuntu, and ubuntu will make a nice partition for you and pretty much do everything for you.

Firefox is always going to not load instantly, as cobb said. If you want a browser that pops up immediately, get chrome. Chrome has a lot more addons and skins and such if that was stopping you before, the adblock is pretty good too.

What Jack said. Though I'd go for Windows 7 Home Premium, because you get all of the sexy of Windows Seven and you need to conserve cash.

My laptop (which is awesome, so awesome I've been saying it for two+ months) has SSD's in Raid0 configuration, which can apparently be dangerous unless you make backups but which is very, very fast. When I had photoshop CS5, it loaded in four seconds; Word is one second, Onenote is instant. I'd recommend splurging some money to get an above-average hard drive and getting not-too-impressive GPU/CPU, because you really don't need them. My lappy has a Nvidia 330M GPU and a simple i5-540 CPU, and I can run starcraft on medium settings near flawlessly. It will definitely look better to get a high-end GPU and your budget is large enough to get one, but, having a 5770 in my desktop (after upgrading it from a 8800-thingimagig), there really isn't that large a difference. If it's for SCII, you don't need anything special; if you want to play high-end games, might want to invest more in this.

Maybe I'm overestimating how important hard drives are, but I'm pretty sure Word doesn't typically open in a second. ;o. Wait until Ex says something, I could be wrong.

If you need speed/responsiveness that bad you should get a SSD. They are way faster than HDDs. Maybe buy 2 smaller ones and configure them for parallel RAID for extra speed and monies. Your mass storage device should still be a HDD because you can't pay big SSDs (~ $90 / 32GB).
Main limiting factor for loading times are your hard drive speeds.

I'm working on this. I have to go to work but I'll edit my build into this post, and this will remind me so I don't forget.

made this for the other thread. Replace the graphics with something better like a gtx 460


hard drive and case are at ewiz, you can get bing cash back if you refer superbiiz, and $10 off with "study10" on $75. Monitor is junk I found on fry's.

there's numerous upgrades to make. If you buy before noon, spinpoint f3 on newegg 1TB is $60, a steal.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393
since you've got headroom if you like my build, here's your super responsive. I haven't had time to check the stats on it. Put all your small programs and OS on it, games on the HDD.

Now that I know what SSD is, I must have it. That reminds me, anything basic I should know about partitioning if I don't knwo anything about partitioning? Like is windows going to be totally fine with me having it and some games installed on the SSD, and other games installed on the HDD? Will the second starage device have to be external? Don't I want SC2 on the SSD to run better?

Also remembered some other preferences: I don't mind OCing, but not if it means my cpu will be fried in 3 years. How many things should I OC? I'll definitely do my cpu, but should I think about my ram, and video cards? What am I missing out on by sticking with a 32bit OS, instead of a 64bit OS?

I wouldn't OC. If it was easy/risk-free, Intel or whoever would've OC'd them before selling for the performance boost. And you don't need it.

Also, Rockz' build looks good to me.

Don't bother getting 2 SSDs to put into RAID, unless you have heaps of $$, which you don't.

A single SSD is already 40-50x faster than a spinning platter of rust, so paying extra for a speed increase above that really isn't worth the diminishing returns. You'll want at least a 64gb SSD, basically take it as high as you can afford - but going much bigger than 128gb isn't worth it. Buy an SSD for the OS and 'system' applications (like your browser, anti-virus, and any big/slow programs like office or photoshop), and a bigger 500gb+ HDD for your media/everything else. I've got a 1 TB drive + a 64gb SSD in my system and it works fine - I've got about 20gb free on the SSD, with Win7, Office, SC2 installed on it and a few other small things.

One other thing with SSDs in RAID, is that SSDs use a different read/write mechanism compared to HDDs, and over time an SSD will slowly deteriorate in responsiveness and speed UNLESS you are running a system driver than can send trim commands to the HDD. These drivers are available by default in Windows 7, but are NOT available in Vista or XP. Furthermore these drivers ONLY work for stand-alone hard drives - trim is NOT supported on an SSD RAID of any type (software, fake-raid or hardware). So while Cent might like to brag about his laptop (which must have cost $$$), eventually his performance is going to fall through the floor.

Quote

over time an SSD will slowly deteriorate in responsiveness and speed UNLESS you are running a system driver than can send trim commands to the HDD.

I don't understand this part. How exactly does this help the SSD?

And yeah, I'm definitely not doing RAID now.

Oh yeah. Don't factor in any display in the price. I'm just gonna grab something local for $50 off craigslist.

Google is your friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_%28SSD_command%29

I still don't understand how the SSD telling the HDD to do something helps it. All I got from the wiki was that it tells the OS that a certain spot in the SSD is just deleted file space. So it does not explain to me what Lanthanide was saying.

Lathanide, drivers for Trim on RAID are expected to come out shortly (I actually think Intel DID do it, though Sony didn't include it in their updates), and the Samsung drives in my lappy have some built-in garbage collection mechanism which is reported to work well anyway. Kekekeke, can't rain on my parade! *grabs lappy with three fingers and goes to play SCII on medium-high settings. While starting Word in a second.*

Still, as noted, probably not necessary for CAFG. Probably too expensive.

Quote from ClansAreForGays

I still don't understand how the SSD telling the HDD to do something helps it. All I got from the wiki was that it tells the OS that a certain spot in the SSD is just deleted file space. So it does not explain to me what Lanthanide was saying.

The SSD isn't telling the HDD to do anything.

The file structure used on an SDD is different to that which is found on an HDD. Because SSDs are relatively new, especially in the consumer space, not many drivers have been written for OS's to fully deal with this difference. This means if you are using an old-style HDD drive on an SSD, while it will still work, over time you will get this degradation in performance because the old driver is not sending trim instructions to the SSD.

Really wikipedia has the clearest description of what is going on here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

Quote from Centreri

Lathanide, drivers for Trim on RAID are expected to come out shortly (I actually think Intel DID do it, though Sony didn't include it in their updates), and the Samsung drives in my lappy have some built-in garbage collection mechanism which is reported to work well anyway. Kekekeke, can't rain on my parade! *grabs lappy with three fingers and goes to play SCII on medium-high settings. While starting Word in a second.*

I did a search, looks like Intel do have drivers out a few months ago: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/03/23/intel-releases-trim-for-raid/1 however reading further in the comments reveals that this does not actually support having 2 or more SSDs in RAID, actually what the driver is for is when you have an SSD and some HDDs on the same controller and you want to RAID the HDDs together you can, but it still doesn't let you have 2 SSDs in RAID.

Also generally the samsung drives have performed poorly in benchmarks, and I wouldn't put much stock in their garbage collection either.

I think Sony replaced the Samsung drives with Toshibas in the tiny refresh a month ago (free resolution up to 1080p (on a 13'1 screen) and wifi-hotspot functionality). Anyway, I read through the notebookreview.com Sony forums specifically about the Vaio Z before buying it, and the general consensus was that it worked fairly well, definitely well enough to prevent my lappy's performance from 'dropping through the floor'. Plus, SSD's in raid 0 are going to kick ass, no matter if Samsung's drives are slightly worse than the competition or not. And they pass those savings along to me, the consumer!

Quote from Centreri

Plus, SSD's in raid 0 are going to kick ass, no matter if Samsung's drives are slightly worse than the competition or not. And they pass those savings along to me, the consumer!

From the samsung drives I've read about, it isn't a case of "slightly worse" but actually "quite a bit worse" and also there are no "savings" because they cost the same as other, better SSDs.

Otherwise yeah, if samsung drives were priced in line with their performance they'd be great, because price is one of the things holding back SSD adoption. But the price of SSDs is primarily dictated by the flash memory itself, and if you put 64 gbs of flash into a poor performing SSD or a good performing SSD, you still have to pay for the 64gb of flash.

I was making a joke about the consumer bit, and as I said, I'd looked at other people's experiences with the laptop and read through countless reviews before buying it. Please provide a source. An uncompetitive product isn't usually bought.

I don't know what specific drive you have since all you've said is "samsung", but here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2944/5