Foo - My PC Rocks!

So I started with the RC for Windows 7, and moved to 7 Enterprise when it went RTM.

I built up an AMD-based PC with 8GB of RAM, a 60GB solid state disk, and 4 320GB disks I had laying around crammed into a Raid 5 array. I also have a 9800GX2 in it, as well as an HDTV tuner card, and a few other goodies, including coaxial and optical digital input and outputs, using standard S/PDIF cables, unlike some other PC makers we've all heard of, and a Bluray ROM.

There are tons of great things about my PC, not the least of which is that it uses all industry-standard, commodity hardware, and it is all interoperable. I'm not locked into using any one small subset of hardware to maintain compatibility with the O/S. If something breaks, I can fix it myself in 5 minutes using something I had delivered overnight from Amazon or Newegg.

Windows 7 is all kinds of awesomeness. If I plug in a new piece of hardware, Windows Update just grabs the latest driver for it from the Internet and installs it. I don't have to do anything, and everything just works. Gone are the days of fussing with driver disks, driver downloads, and all that mess. GONE. BUT, I still have that option if it is necessary (for example if there is no internet connection available).

With the primary drive being an SSD, things happen pretty much instantaneously. I can store my massive media collection on traditional platter drives, but all the interactive stuff lives on ultra-fast FLASH. Seriously, an SSD increases interactive system performance by an order of magnitude at least - and even my modest hardware will run circles around anything that runs off of a platter drive when it comes to user interactivity.

I haven't had a crash since I started with the RC (with the exception of exceeding VNE once in X-Plane and tearing a wing skin off, but that's a different kind of crash). No application lockups. No hardware lockups. Here's the incomplete list of major applications.


Electronics Workbench v10
Pinnacle Studio Ultimate v11
X-Plane v9
OpenOffice
SoundSoap
QuickBooks Pro 2010
Ubuntu Studio (Dualboot)


Freedom to Tinker
Freedom to Repair
Freedom to run anything I want on it

Can't beat that with a stick....

What's your PC love story?

Um, that sounds like a good one?

But can you simultaneously pat your head and rub your belly?

Mine makes a funny crunching sound every now and again, which I am pretty sure is related to the inoperative CD/DVD drive. It is slow and Outlook screws up all the time on it. Printer often spews out gibberish and I am beginning to suspect that the machine is somehow involved in the disappearance of several of the former inhabitants of my fish tank, see funny crunching sound above.

Windows 7 is all kinds of awesomeness. If I plug in a new piece of hardware, Windows Update just grabs the latest driver for it from the Internet and installs it. I don't have to do anything, and everything just works. Gone are the days of fussing with driver disks, driver downloads, and all that mess. GONE. BUT, I still have that option if it is necessary (for example if there is no internet connection available).


What a concept. Good to hear MS finally granted this convenience upon its hapless end users.

Mine makes a funny crunching sound every now and again, which I am pretty sure is related to the inoperative CD/DVD drive. It is slow and Outlook screws up all the time on it. Printer often spews out gibberish and I am beginning to suspect that the machine is somehow involved in the disappearance of several of the former inhabitants of my fish tank, see funny crunching sound above.

Windows 7 even went out on my network, found my LAN-connected Brother MFC465CN printer, installed the driver for all of its functions, and made it the default printer, all automagically during the install process.

As far as reducing the population of fish inhabiting the household, that'd be a pretty damn good feature to me :p

Yay!! Congrats, ehidle!! :thumb:









Da hell he's talkin' 'bout???:twitchy:

I'm still running XP. But I've not yet had any sort of virus (secure network), and it doesn't crash. Just runs along like it's supposed to.

I agree with the OP. I have Windows 7 Ultimate and it runs beautifully on a 5yr old P4, 2gb RAM system. Totally NOT like Vista! I'm relieved that MS took more time to do it right.

My PC used to rock....until I used a mac. I also used to lust after high end PC laptops; but they now make me cringe. Sigh...ignorance is bliss ain't it :(

and here I am, still sitting on XP MCE.

seems like I can finally use more than 3GB of ram with 7.

I've built my last 3 computers, all running windows, and have never had a problem. No crashing. No viruses. I don't know what kind of people get all these viruses and issues with computers, I'm just glad they're not around me.

Windows 7 Ultimate has been installed on my desktop and laptop for 3 months now and I haven't had anything go wrong. It just works (and no, I'm not ragging on you Mac people).

I also bought a Macbook Pro, and have since sold it. Why? I didn't like it. You can say that ignorance is bliss for others, but I actually tried the other side. And I wanted to like it, really, but in the end it just left me saying, "meh." I paid this much for... what? Shiny things? No, thanks. I don't hang around coffee shops THAT much.

My PCs rock too.

three WinXP
one Win2K

They run forever. Rebooted them recently for an AVG upgrade, but that's about all.

Only problems I experience is Illustrator CS and CorelDraw X3 butting heads when run simultaneously.

I still have a collection of ancient PCs, too:

Performa 6400 running OS9.x
Next slab running NextStep
Sony Vaio PII 400 with ATi Rage, running WinXP, severely modified to run fairly well with 320Megs RAM. Tried to install Silverlight and Silverlight, said, uh, no, sorry, not on this machine.

Corel Draw?

God help us all.

Our house PC is a p2/266 Toshiba Tecra 8000 with a 40GB drive and 192MB RAM. Runs Debian Lenny with a custom 2.6.31 kernel. It has a PCMCIA 802.11b card and a PCMCIA USB2.0 card so I can actually talk to modern hardware. I can run FF and OOo at the same time, and it just barely runs Picasa for Linux.

The other one is a 12" PowerBook G4 that I picked up about two weeks before the MBP came out. My wife uses it mostly.

We're in a contest to see which machine dies first. If it's the Mac, we'll get her a new MB and I will chug with the Toshiba until it dies. If the Toshiba dies first, we'll get her a new MB anyway and I will put Linux/PPC of some stripe on the 12" PB.

The Toshiba is ahead, as I think its cooling fan burned out recently.

I love my work laptop. I turned off the power mgmt so it doesn't do anything when I unplug it; I can unplug it at the end of the day, snap the lid shut, throw it in the pannier, bike home, plug it in, and not interrupt the simulations I'm running, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Um, that sounds like a good one?

But can you simultaneously pat your head and rub your belly?

I can do that one.

But what I can't do is hold my right foot off the ground, moving it in a clockwise circular pattern, and trace a 6 in the air with my right hand without reversing the direction my foot circles in.


What's your PC love story?

I love the fact that when the power company swapped out our power meters causing a surge that fried the SATA controller on my motherboard, there was nothing stopping me from swapping in a spare IDE drive as a stopgap until my new motherboard arrived. I love that the hardest part about finding a motherboard wasn't about finding one, but picking from all the possible options, and that it only cost $120 for a relatively high end board.

And I've never exceed V(ne) on my computer.