OT- Buying new computer, which way to go?

RW+/- wrote:
On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 07:45:57 GMT, David J Taylor wrote:

LOL, your reading comprehension leaves much to be desired. I never
spiked AMD, although I could happily do so on many levels. I spiked
your "recommendations" and choices. AMD started out at the top in my
book, and I still would love to see them succeed. Their main problem
was supporting chips, especially the fully crap VIA chipsets.

"AMD spec crapola"

Perhaps divided by a common language?

Nope, see my above paragraph. IOW's put what I said into context if
you can, like certain film emulsions your brain appears to have
rather high density levels which precludes comprehensive insight and
understanding of known recognizable phrases and words as taught by
old fashioned English professors and teachers. Now if you are a
product of the more current educational systems disregard all the
above as there would be no hope of anything other than hindsight.

I don't consider it productive to continue this argument, as it won't help
the OP get a PC appropriate for his intended application.

Generally speaking, hardware follows software. Check the requirements
of the packages you are thinking about using. I know my son has a
couple
of games that require a video card with at least 256M of RAM. If
you're
not going to run games that require a video card, the on board graphics
chip set that comes with basic DELLs and GATEWAYs are fine. Even
Adboe's Premiere Elements only requires 256M of RAM. I think 512M
is the minimum but that's just me.

The more disk space you have the better but it's easy to upgrade a
basic DELL or GATEWAY later. I bought a basic GATEWAY machine
last year and I've added a wireless network card, a high end video
card (mostly for my son's games) and a FireWire card. I have 512M
of RAM and a single 72G drive but I'm going to add 512M of RAM
and another 72G disk drive soon, mostly for video. Video takes up
gobs of RAM and disk space. If you're just running something like
Photoshop, 512M of RAM and 72G of disk space is fine.

You can put a system together yourself but you're not going to have
any odd compatibilty problems if you run an Intel machine from DELL
or GATEWAY. You'll probably want to upgrade the monitor from one
of their basic packages. If you're thinking about doing any video
editting, you'll want a machine with either FireWire built in or at
least be able to add a FireWire card. I know Apple had FireWire a
long time before PCs but Apple just doesn't have the all the
applications
that PCs do. MACs are cool and come with all sorts of great built
in applications but PCs have by far the most applications. You can
even find great applications for PCs that are free out on the web.

In article ,
says...


"Hunt" wrote in message
...

[SNIP]

How do I get two monitors hooked up. Is that aspecial graphics card? Can I
use a CRT and LCD together on the same card?

A vid card allowing dual-head option will allow you to hook up two monitors.
In Windows, you set the Desktop to "expand" (sorry, but I forget the actual
syntax here) across both monitors. With some cards, you set this up first with
the card's software, then with Windows. I would assume that it is similar, but
probably easier with MAC, as they have had dual-head displays much longer.

I have a Matrox G-450 dual-head, nVidia Quadra 4500 dual-head and an nVidia
9600 dual-head and they are all pretty much the same with WinME, W2k and
WinXP-Pro. On all of mine, its vid-card setup, MonitorDual tab, then stretch
the desktop in the various Win OS's. There are some considerations on matching
monitors or matching rez settings. On my Matrox with W2K, I can only run one
monitor at 1280x1024 (actually I could bump this one up a notch, but choose
not to), but the other monitor will only go to 1024x986 (?). Both nVidia cards
allow 1280x1024 on both monitors, but they are newer and also have 128MB and
512 MB VRAM. On the Parhalia line of Matrox monitors you can run analog,
analog, analog digital, plus several forms of TV video in a triple-head setup
if you do video editing.

Hunt

In article . com,
cjcampbell wrote:

Hunt wrote:
In article ,
says...


"Hunt" wrote in message
...

[SNIP]

How do I get two monitors hooked up. Is that aspecial graphics card? Can I
use a CRT and LCD together on the same card?

A vid card allowing dual-head option will allow you to hook up two monitors.
In Windows, you set the Desktop to "expand" (sorry, but I forget the actual
syntax here) across both monitors. With some cards, you set this up first
with
the card's software, then with Windows. I would assume that it is similar,
but
probably easier with MAC, as they have had dual-head displays much longer.


The typical Mac desktop has an ADC connector and a DVI connector, so if
you use two Apple Cinema displays you need an ADC to DVI adaptor. My
PowerBook came with one, so I would expect a desktop would, too. You
click on the Apple and choose System Preferences, click displays, and
click the Arrangement button. Deselect the Mirror Displays checkbox and
you now have continuous displays. If you have them reversed, you just
drag the displays on the Arrangement diagram to match what you want.

On current Macs, the ADC connector is gone. Everything is DVI or
mini-DVI now. All Macs except the Mini will now mirror on a second
monitor or allow spanning across two monitors.

Hunt wrote
(in article ):

In article ,
says...


"Hunt" wrote in message
...

[SNIP]

How do I get two monitors hooked up. Is that aspecial graphics card? Can I
use a CRT and LCD together on the same card?

A vid card allowing dual-head option will allow you to hook up two monitors.
In Windows, you set the Desktop to "expand" (sorry, but I forget the actual
syntax here) across both monitors. With some cards, you set this up first
with
the card's software, then with Windows. I would assume that it is similar,
but
probably easier with MAC, as they have had dual-head displays much longer.

Plus you can have multiple color management profiles loaded
simultaneously, which is not supported properly under Windows.
If accurate color is important to you and/or if you want to run
dual head with the same, Mac OS is far superior.



--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

On 15 Jun 2006 00:58:45 GMT, (Hunt) wrote:

In article ,
says...


"Hunt" wrote in message
...

[SNIP]

How do I get two monitors hooked up. Is that aspecial graphics card? Can I
use a CRT and LCD together on the same card?

For what it's worth, of the past 3 laptops i've bought, they all have
a vga out and all support "extended desktop". The vga out is analog
and that's how i push the 19' viewsonic crt or the newer samsung 20'
rotating lcd. The lap screen is for the tools and other stuff on the
desktop and the larger monitor for the pic/edit window. I like the
mobility. I run the larger monitor color profile in statrup if thats
going to be my main viewing/edit monitor...

Color calibration is a good issue wiith this setup...needs some
tweeking.

I run Photoshop 7 and on a laptop with ntfs file mngmnt - you usually
are dealing with only one sector...eg the "scratch disc" is gonna be
the start disk (you won't partition).

I have 512m ram ..I can see where at least a gig would be desireable.
I don't worry much about vram and that stuff because i don't do video.
I'm more concerned with what was "dot pitch" as opposed to refresh
rate.

So anyway..that's another variation.

rgds
Ken