Geek payback time

[Badcat]

FF -surely someone here could have fixed it for you? Pity you aren't in Wellington

anyone in AK need mac help - i can do.
no PC skills though - sorry
ken

[menace]

[wkid_one]

So what would it cost me to get a new puter built with all the trimmings? as I'm getting sick of not being able to watch all these vidios that people here post.... I try to download em and this old tart locks up every time
I'm pumping out a massive 32MB ram and 1.18GB hardrive and it just aint working for me anymore.

As per Ant's comments - depends how fruity you want to go.

HD's are about $150/100gb give or take, slightly more for ATA (if you shop you can get cheaper)
CD-R's are about $60-100
DVDR's are about $150-300 (depending on quality, brand and burn speed)
Motherboards are up to $250 (for Asus p4p800se you will pay $235)
CPU's with H/S are about $400 for a P4 3ghz
Graphics Cards are about $200+
Memory is $200 for 512mb DDR400 (max price)
Sound cards start at about $80-100 for Sound Blaster 5.1 Live
Monitors vary in price - a 19" CRT Monitor should only cost you $400
MOuse and Keyboards vary in price $150 should you with a multimedia set.

I just upgraded the feck out of mine - too a reasonably high end for not as much money as you would expect. Computers are very much a case of the sum of the parts being WAY LESS than the cost of the whole!

If you search around (Trade Me - let me know if you want to as I know someone incredibly reliable off this site who I source all my parts for a gr8 prices) you will pick up a bargain - and if you can work on a bike - you can put a computer together - it is a piece of piss.

If you want a reasonably good system - go with
- Asus P4P800Se MB
- 2 x 512mb DDR400 ram
- 3ghz P4 CPU
- Sound Blaster Auxigy 2 Card
- Nvidia Ti4200 128mb vid card
- ~100gb min HD
- DVD-RW Drive

and you are away

[riffer]

Sounds similar to my computer here at work.


Asus P4P800 motherboard
P4 3Ghz hyperthreaded
2000 MB DDR400 RAM
2 x 120GB SATA drives stripe raid
Geforce FX5600 256MB video card
Pioneer DVR-A05 DVD -R burner
Sony 21 inch Trinitron CRT monitor calibrated with Gretag MacBeth I-1
and the ubiquitous microsoft optical mouse and natural keyboard.

lots of power for web surfing!

and the occasional 2GB photoshop file....

[geoffm]

A useful site:
http://www.pricespy.co.nz
It is amazing the variation in prices. I used to get a bit of stuff from www.qmb.co.nz (their shop actually).. Good if you know what you want..
www.pp.co.nz are usually pretty good, quote delivered GST inclusive prices as well.
Geoff

[aff-man]

Yip i'm keen to help anyone with computers if i can. I am doing be in electronics and computing so any networking/hardware can maybe help as well. Built my comp for a little under 2k. but it is pretty cool athelon xp3000+,120 gb hardrive, 256mb gforce graphics, 19" monitor, nforce 2 k7-triton motherboard, cd/cdr/dvd drive, 1 gb ram ect ect ect

[riffer]

anyone in AK need mac help - i can do.
no PC skills though - sorry
ken

Hey Badcat,

do you know if anyone has managed to resolve the .kext file foul-ups with MacOs X.3 yet?

My G4 - sawtooth 400 AGP has the problem.

When MacosX.2 was coming out with Quartz Extreme Apple said you needed 32MB ram card to run Quartz Extreme properly.

My mac originally came with an ATI Rage Pro 16MB card, so I paid the big bikkies for the Nvidia Geforce 2MX 32MB card, which worked fine with my mac.

Now, I upgrade to OSX.3 and whaddayaknow, it gets stuck on the login screen with just a blue screen and nothing else (basically it won't load the mac equivalent of X-windows).

Solution, would you believe, is to remove RAM until you get down to 256MB.
Apple deleted the old .kext drivers for the video cards with OS X.3. Before you could have any card with any Mac, now you only have drivers for the cards that actually come with the mac. And the Sawtooth G4 never came with an Nvidia Geforce 2MX. So Apple uses that proportion of system ram for something else with the Sawtooth. End result - the mac equivalent of IRQ hell.

I haven't found anything yet on the usual places ie xlr8yourmac.com which is usually pretty good.

Have you discovered an answer to this problem yet?

Sorry for the long post. You did say you knew a bit about macs.

It would be nice to put all my RAM back in my mac. It kinda sucks with only 256 MB RAM.

Cheers

Simon

[Badcat]

hey.
i haven't come across it.
if it were my machine - i'd visit:
www.macfixit.com
www.macintouch
and the forums on
www.macnn.com
i'll have a hunt around too.
k

[menace]

Anyone use amd? i never have but i think that my next purchase will be an amd rather than intel?

[aff-man]

yip i got an AMD xp3000+ noice and fast but they tend to get a bit hot so if your cooling fan shuts down it could get a wee bit hot. As for comparison well depends on what you are doing. Gaming speed ect use an AMD but if you want grunt like not speed but workload i think pentium has it. Though i can't notice the difference between this machine an a mates p4 3ghz