Meh, alot are better up to date on the hardware than me, so I won't chime in on that:

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Then a new update for XP came out early this summer, and now I have to log in to the machine every time I boot. This is annoying and quite un-necessary, since I am the only one using the machine. Anybody know how to disable this again?

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Start > Control Panel > User Accounts > Select your admin account, and the click on the "Remove Password".

Re: the login thing.

You can also use TweakUI for XP to force Windows to always login a particular user. The "force-you-to-login" thing happens if you install the .NET runtimes because they add the ASP.net "user-id". Go figure.

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1. Is DDR2 or Dual-Channel DDR better? Dual-Channel seems to be aimed at gamers- why? Is DDR2 @ 800Mhz really twice as fast as DDR 3200 @ 400Mhz?

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DDR2 is somewhat better than DDR. Right now the performance advantage is a bit limited, IIRC, but you should go with DDR2 if only because that's the new avant-garde memory standard and it's a natural evolution from DDR.

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Are there any compatibility problems with either? I run a bewilderingly large collection of software here, so whatever I get needs to play nice. Stability and lack of errors in my 3D applications is a priority, but I also want to wring every ounce of speed I can out've the machine's basic hardware at the budget I can afford. Which is, needless to say, not unlimited.

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My computer uses DDR in Dual-Channel mode, and the sticks aren't even a matched pair Everything works fine, though. Just make sure to get decent-quality RAM such as Corsair.

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2. Is there any point to buying a Geforce 7800 over a 6800 GT? And how much difference does the type of DDR really make? It doesn't seem to be a big factor in the cost...

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If you can afford it, get the 7800. The video card experts I know say it's worth it. (I'm still using a Radeon 9600 Pro, as I'm not much of a video card purist)

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3. Does anybody have any real clue as to what Athlon 64s really perform better than others? I'm not talking just speed here... I've done a bit of reading about the different cores, and I'm wondering if a Toledo core wouldn't be worth a bit more $$$ just to save power and heat loading. I don't care about heat as much as most folks do (I run caseless, with a huge copper heatsink with 90mm fan), but I hate wasting power that could be used by the SATA drives and GPU at peak loads.

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The newest Athlon64s support SSE2, which could be a bonus in the right circumstances.

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2. I tried running with the Pagefile entirely in RAM, but it wasn't terribly stable. What factors into the stability of such a method? The last time I did this, I hadn't upgraded my power supply, so my theory is that I might have not had enough power available to keep voltages stable at peak loads. Are there any other factors that might have led to poor performance?

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The pagefile entirely in RAM also deprives your programs of the ability to swap out to the hard drive if they need to, which may make them behave poorly. Just my theory, though.

7800 is Shader-3.0-ready and consumes a little bit less power (idle: 7800 GTX: 114 W; 6800 GT: 123 W; 6800 Ultra: 127 W ---- full: 6800 GT: 190 W; 7800 GTX: 199 W; 6800 Ultra: 202 W).
And of course it is faster, it is ... really fast.
No, I am not NVidia-addicted.

at the moment most people will not see any benefit from DDR2 as only processors running with a bus speed higher than 1ghz will be able to take proper advantage of the extra bandwidth. In real terms, at the moment dual-channel DDR will perform almost as fast as DDR2 for a lot less money.

as to running pagefile entirely in RAM, well, you need plenty of RAM - I have 2ghz dual-channel Crucial Ballistix which does the job nicely. However, as you migth imagine there's more to it than that, there are a whole load of tweaks such as iopagelocklimit, ntfsprefetcher, mftzone reservation etc etc that you really need to add to the registry and system.ini to make this work effectively. I will be posting these soon and I assure you they do work, I run my entire pagefile in RAM and it is actually more stable than when I allowed it to use the hdd alone. Also, running in RAM will release the hdd from memory tasks meaning it gets a lot less hammer - you won't see the hdd led on your case flickering away that much anymore. Will be posted this week. or you could use TweakXP which does much the same in a few seconds, at least it saves you turging through the registry, which took me a few hours. you know, restore-point/tweak/reboot/test, restore-point/tweak/reboot/test, restore-point/tweak/reboot/test, and so on.

7800GT does give a substantial improvement over the 6800GT but you'll really only notice it up at the top end. How much practical difference there is between the 7800 and the 6800Ultra is debatable, I can't see much except in SLi mode with applications that are making those demands - certainly not enough to warrant the extra cost imo unless you really really want to push to the limit and be prepared for upcoming game graphics technology. And if you're bothered about power, you're better off investing in a bigger psu, the new generation of processors and video-cards will be happy with 550W-600W rather than the 450W which seems to be the norm at the moment.

I would recommend you retain your user login as it's a good security measure against hacker scum, even assuming that you're firewalled - and especially if you've opened/forwarded any ports for apps such as p2p clients. Also, if you have RA/RDP enabled but no admin account p'word, you're potentially leaving your pc in quite a vulnerable state. Personally I usually only use RA/RDP on secure VPNs, although there are the ocaasional exceptions to this (shut up Esq)

as to fast AMD64s, you won't get much better all-round than an FX-57 which with a decent heatsink and plenty of airflow, which you've got in abundance, you could overclock substantially. They are insanely fast, and stable too. A hig-end FX-55 will also do the job nicely. Unless Intel come up with something worth having in the next 6 months, my next upgrade will be AMD64/PCI-Express/SLi/Nvidia.

however as I've said on many occasions int he past, it's not just a matter of having the best and fastest kit, although that's a big factor - having a clean software environment esp in the o/s is also very important. I service many pcs that are much higher spec than mine yet mine outperforms many of them, because it's a very streamlined environment that makes the most of what's available to it. I do a major upgrade to my hardware about every two years and that regime works well for me, I'm only just beginning to really notice my system starting to struggle with top-end apps like Doom3 , BF2 and Far-Cry.

btw I highly recommend XP Pro x64-bit if you're going to go down the Athlon64 route - big performance boost if you use over 2gb RAM.

Alrght, I won't say it . *Hops off silently, hoping that the Mullah doesn't have the RR service enabled as well*

hop off.

You mean that you do?!? Ah, poor, poor Mullah *shakes head sadly* .

Silly rabbit, I turned off all but the most important core Services long ago, and I do have a firewall. I'm not terribly worried about the login issue- nobody has physical access to the box, and the Services that would allow remote manipulation are all turned very much off.

Read a scary article at one point about the ... "helpful" screen-sharing functionality built into XP, and then did a multitude of tweaks, like disabling Remote Assistance and Remote Registry (brrr... that's a stupid idea) and a huge bunch of Registry tweaks... which, unfortunately, all was in the misty ages past. As usual, I am surrounded by the many weird things that I have very rapidly figured out how to do, and then just as rapidly forgotten again

So now my machine logs in sans pass again, but I think it's fairly safe from random intruders. I never keep ports open or anything, so I'm not likely to get attacked by random bots, not that they could do much with the box once they got there- I have just about every port-related service turned off, because I only want the machine to be able to access the Internet- it doesn't serve anything, and if I ever wanted it to, I'd turn that back on. If I can remember how (kidding- that part I remember from the last time I had friends over for some fragging on the LAN).

I know that that level of security isn't going to stop anybody who's serious, but it'll stop script-kiddies and other junior llamas. Which is all that I'm worried about, anyhow- if you annoy somebody with real skills enough that they're going to make your day unpleasant... well, you might as well just unplug the router and go enjoy that weird, non-geeky thing called Outdoors that I have heard so much about but never seem to visit, except while driving through it in a well-insulated automobile

"Silly rabbit"? Sounds like somebody has been spending too much time around the Mullah. Not a good sign...

*nitpicks*

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I have 2ghz dual-channel Crucial Ballistix which does the job nicely.

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Ouch the memory latencies must be horrendous!


Btw he means 2GB for those who might have been confused...

my typing fingers develop a life of their own at times!