im sorry to say, your very ill informed in most computer-related things.
If you ‘upgraded’ to this computer in the last 3 years, id ask for your money back m8.
And as u say, min specs are jsut that. the game will run. thats about it. even at 2 fps, the game is still running. capiche.
If you ‘upgraded’ to this computer in the last 3 years, id ask for your money back m8. <-- WTF
I can see this already, you running to the store, Hi my name is ‘Domi’ and i bought this hardware 3 years ago and suddenly ITS OLD!! i don’t know how this could have happend… I’m stunned… I thought my hardware didnt get old. i want my money back you ripp off!!!
Be helpful instead and give proper tips, if you’re planning to do an upgrade then prepare for future updates 3 years later. :bash:
wtf??
why dont u go back to your little hole, and SHUT THE FUCK UP.
he says he recently upgraded… to a 1ghz cpu and a gfx2. a cpu/gfx combination that was in circulation, what, more than 4 years back? I bet the poor sod payed his good friend 6 months ago to ‘upgrade’ and was ripped off.
christ, read the post more before you go making a fool of yourself.
fucking idiot
Well, it’s not the only reason. Those reasons don’t belong here, but I’ll put em here anyway g.
You obviously don’t have much money if you upgraded to such a system (I guess, in contrast to other posters, that it’s an older used system you bought cheap). Linux doesn’t cost a cent. It’s free, as in beer and as in speech (that’s double-free !). You can spend the money you save from not buying Windows on hardware !
The most important reason is that M$ doesn’t control your computer. The registration is the first step. It won’t be too long until M$ and other companies can disable applications if you don’t pay, or they just don’t want you to run it. The movie industry doesn’t need to know when, where and why you play their movies, privacy is a right. That’s what I see coming. Just wait until every PC has a TCPA-chip, M$ (and others) will be happy to make use of it.
You think I’m paranoid ? That situation was already there. When DVDs hit the market, Linux-users weren’t able to watch DVDs, because they didn’t get a key for decryption. Only companies developing Players for Windows got those keys. CSS was hacked, but when TCPA is ready that might not be as easy any longer.
I think it’s well worth learning Linux. Once you have it for a while, you don’t ever want to go back.
Just my 2 cents. Take it as a warning. All I say is, just try it ! You don’t have to delete Windows, you can easily install Linux as a second OS to try it out. Don’t fear, it’s not that much a “geek”-OS it used to be anymore. If you can use Windows, you won’t have much problems with KDE. Sorry for putting things here, which don’t belong into this thread.
RECON In the end, it doesn’t really matter why you choose a different OS, the fact is you decide to change. My hardware has more or less paid for itself over the last three years - the biggest upgrade was the GFX card - Halo was really the first game I came across where I felt the whole thing ‘lagged’ a little but tbh I found Halo to be a bit tedious - Deus-ex plays quite well if tweaked - it’s really down to using (in part) an OS that suits your hardware - I’ll never forget playing around with a Mac IIci 'bout ten years ago - it had 20Mb of ram - unheard of at the time - most Mac’s came with around 4Mb for officey work and 16Mb for Quark/Photoshop - 20Mb 
- it ran like I’d never seen an OS run before - fast and sweet, so much so that years on, it was an obvious thing to increase the memory on my PC to the point where the OS has few excuses to hit the disk. Of course you can’t avoid the fact that the your spec is budget-class now - you can build a 1.4Ghz machine complete for £250 now anyway so that should give you a perspective on what you’ve got - just concurring with what has already been said tbh.
*edit petameta - I agree with your thinking btw 
sock, my current system’s baseunit cost that 
250 quid got me:
AMD athlon XP 2000+
256 DDR2700 ram
asrock mobo, onboard lan, onbourd sound (which i did replace with a crappy sb64), 8x AGP, 6xusb2
Geforce FX 5200 128MB
40gb hdd, cdr, case with the window, etc,etc
so, rough estimation on this current spec of his, £130 - £150
- just goes to show. PM the webbies you got those parts m8 - even a cheap bastard like me can afford that kind of an upgrade!
I suddenly think my PC is running ET quite well now. I’ve only got an Athlon C 1.3 OCed to 1.4 with 512 SD RAM and a crap GeForce FX 5200 but I usually get between 60 and 90 FPS on most maps (radar’s the exception but it sucks arse for performance). Even when I get toghter with friends and I host I’m still getting excellent performance.
It’s nice to see some of your PC’s are worse pieces of crap than mine.
evilsock here’s a system, all in Black/Silver including black DVD drive & monitor, windowed case with LED fan, etc. If you knock off the price of monitor, dvd etc and compare it to Domi’s its even cheaper, faster processor too.
Case + PSU + Speakers + Mouse + Keyboard:
Deluxworld M80112 4-1 Window Case Keyboard Mouse Speakers
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=51402
£36.10 inc VAT
Processor:
AMD Athlon XP2500 333FSB 512 L2 Cache Barton Retail Boxed Inc Heatsink & Fan with 3year Warranty
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=46513
£59.07 inc VAT
Motherboard:
Asus A7V8X-X SKT A KT400 8x AGP DDR Sound/lAN/USB 2.0
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=49060
£41.55 inc VAT
Memory:
Ebuyer 512 DDR400 PC3200 Extra Value Ram
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=49447
£50.62 inc VAT
Video:
Hightech ATI Radeon 7000 32MB DDR TV-Out Retail Box
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=55267
£19.51 inc VAT
Hard Drive:
Excelstor ESJ360 60gb 7200rpm ATA100 OEM IDE with 3year Warranty.
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=51435
£38.71 inc VAT
DVD-ROM Drive:
LG 16x48 IDE DVD-ROM BLACK Drive - OEM
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=58629
£20.19 inc VAT
Monitor:
CTX VL700B 17ins FST 0.27dpi 70KHz Black
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=48753
£79.34 inc VAT
TOTAL PRICE (INC VAT): £345.09
well well, evilsock getting a new pc, and a fast internet connection, fear teh Sock 
i got my system 9 months ago so u are bound to get it cheaper.
but, the graphics looks suspect in that system quoted, even the fx 5200 is slow, let alone a radeon 7000
ohh, i got all my parts from scan, www.todayonly.co.uk, u can get some neat bargains there.
Yes you could change the graphics. This was a system put together for a friend and she doesn’t play games so the 7000 does the job fine. evilsock already has a card anyway.
Good links fellas!
This is just the kind of info I’d be looking for myself. I took a look at the state of motherboards and such maybe a year ago and had pretty much decided (then) on either a VIA or nForce (mcp) chipset - both supported a couple of levels of RAID. There’s an interesting experiment I wanted to try out - I remember reading about a software raid setup on Linux that allowed you to configure two alike serial ATA hard-drives (for example), each on a seperate IDE bus - you can use RAID0 striping to create a logical drive that actually spans both disks - if you thought-out the disk layout carefully, you would expect to be able to utilise both IDE busses simultainously to access the logical drive and maybe dramatically improve seek and write times (think serial ATA speeds x maybe 1.5 if the stars were shining for you)- that’s the theory anyway.
My experience of RAID is mainly on Sun kit (DiskSuite) to create either RAID1 mirrors or RAID5 striping with parity which although generally quite slow and clunk, tend to be more reliable). I realise the dangers of a stripe with no parity - the stripe depends on both disks and without parity, when either drive fails or has bad blocks, you stand to lose all your data (you would have to rebuild the disk array before you could restore any data also of course :/) - but it’s an interesting proporsition all the same.
I’d be interested to know if anyone has built a recent RAID0 stripe in this way and could comment on their experience?
I have a serial ATA raid 0 on a silicon image raid controller, and it works excellent. You NEED to make backups of anything you don’t want to loose though, because eventually one of the disks or the raid controller/motherboard WILL fail (Murphy’s law). Gaming related the most advantage is gained in loading times.
Software raids are also possible, on linux & win2K server. You will get increased disk speed, at the cost of quite some overhead for your cpu.
sweet - thanks for the heads-up. Hardware RAID sounds like the way to go then
I don’t like RAIDs for that reason - one disk gone everything is gone. With 3+ disks you can add parity, but you’ll loose some disk space at the cost of your data being safe. Maybe it’s better to get a hardware-RAID controller, so you won’t have the CPU overhead. I think you’ll need the extra disk speed only when doing something like video editing. Anyway, having a RAID-system is cool ;).
Also, you need disks that have the same size. Well, you don’t really have to, but the size of the RAID ist limited by the smallest harddisk (1x30 GB & 1x40 GB will give you 2x30GB, not 30+40 GB).
On an older Linux-PC (Server), I use LVM to merge two partitions. That’s quite nice, because I had 2x10 GB lying around, but I needed 1x20 GB. I joined the partitions, it works perfect. If you like, you can use striping with LVM, but only without parity (at least for kernel 2.4, maybe 2.6 allows this). The nice thing is that you don’t have to use whole harddiscs, you can merge single partitions. So you could take 1x80 GB, 1x40 GB and have one non-LVM partition of 40 GB and one LVM-partition of 80 GB. So you could save your important data on the non-LVM-partiton, and put everything that needs speed on the other partition.