Funkii Munkii

Dear all

I posted a few weeks back looking for a new Graffix card and I have to say I am not disapointed with the choice, thanks MR Footlong for expert advice and recomendation, it was easy to install no hitches.

Problem is I am having great difficulty getting any of my games to boot up and especially when im trying to play on line, as I have mentioned previously I am not a techy but i get by. looking at the hard disk I have 800MB space available on a 4GB hard disk, Is this why the games are struggling??

This is what im running at the moment

800 Mhz Pentium III
256MB Memory
Hercules 3D Prophent II Titanium card
GA-6vxe7 + Apollo pro family AGP set Mother board
Windows 2000 professional
Floppy
2 cd roms 1 is a rewriter, printer, scanner and camera

I have a Saitek Cyborg 3D digital joystick which I can configurate but seems to conflict with every gameand wont respond to commands (do I need to upgrade this as well!! ive hardly used it and dont see the point of throwing another £40 at it.

The original hard drive is 4 years old the rest of the above mentioned is less than a year,
Basically am I having conflicts because of the small size of my Hard drive??, so if I need a new Hard drive can you recomend a decent one 20-30/40 GB and also what do I have to do when installing, after installation can I run it with my old hard drive running paralell?? or will I have to save all applications on CD Rom and then re load on the new hard drive??, if so is there a simple way of doing this, I also have Windows XP Office I'm looking to load onto it and thought I may wait until I get the new Hard Drive (if recomended)

If you can point me in the right direction I would be a happy man, I think this is all i need to do now to get it running properly and reliably. MR Footlong if u are reading this i'd appreciate it if you could lend me your opinion as you last recomendation was spot on.

Anything else I need to consider?? laymans terms are fine with me!!

Thanks guys !!

IanW

Find yourself a new HDD from one of the online retails at a good price, e.g. http://www.scan.co.uk http://www.dabs.co.uk Are two that i have used previously.

Then once you have teh new HDD install the new one as a 'master or primary' device, and the old one as a 'slave or secondary' and use Symantec GHOST to copy all the data/apps from the old drive to the new one.

Its as simple as that.

Scooby-Doo

I have recently upgraded from a Maxtor 5 GB to an IBM 31GB. The new drive has a 7200 rpm spindle speed 100 mhz bus speed and a 2mb buffer compared to an original 5400 rpm 66 mhz and 1mb. I cannot believe the difference it has made to the PC. The increase in performance is greater than when I went from a 450mhz p3 to an 880 mhz (10% OC 800).

Get the biggest you can afford and the fastest speed. Norton Ghost will clone in a matter of minutes, just insert the new drive as a D drive from fdisk(and slave jumper on the back of the disk) configure the bios (if not already auto) or the next available letter and clone from the original to the new, then remove the original, set the new drive as master from the jumpers and boot.

Ian Cook

If you are having conflicts changing the hard drive wont make the slightest difference !

What problems are you getting ? what conflicts do you get? have you scandisk and defrag lately ? have you tried deleting stuff you dont use ?

Funkii Munkii

Ian Cook

When trying to go on line with Quake III and CS it starts to load up then i get a blank screen and look at task manager which tells me its not responding, scan disk regular and have removed any vids / photos / documents onto cd to free up some space everything left on there is an esential.tried burning a cd the other day and as i had less than 700mb available it wouldnt burn the cd!! as mentioned with joystick its all calibrated (even though on calibration screen the cursor seems to be vibrating when sitting in the centre of the set up screen) but when i go into Quake and try and set up the joystick it acts as if it doesnt recognise the fact the joystick exists.

Scooby Doo

I have looked at dabs did a search for Hard drives and HDD, there are so many different types, not being a techy type its hard to see what would suit the home computer, some of these things are £000's and some are less than £100 some are SCSI some IDE 1" pluggable 2.1gb for £500, this isnt what I want so what is?? I thought i'd be able to get 20-30GB for £100 ish am i wrong??

Thanks for your help so far

Dave

IanW

At a guess from the spec you have said above i would guess you would be looking for an ATA100 3.5" IDE hard drive.

I recall geting a 60Gb IBM drive for about £89 + VAT from Scan

Ian Cook

Re the hard drives you want 3.5 inch IDE drives ! will cost between 60 and 200 quid for one !

Will have a ponder over the other problem but it sounds like a driver issue for the game port on the sound card, or a conflict on the game port !

ChrisB

About to go out, so just a quick post...

If you are having grief the last thing I would do is to Ghost the current setup.

Install from fresh to see if that solves the problem - letting Windows redetect all the PCI cards etc sometimes solves a problem.

AllanB

Go for ATA 100 is your logic board supports it and go for the higher rpm available. Alos check the specs and look at the sustained transfer rate to indicate real time performance.

If you want the fastest availabel you can go for SCSI Ultra 160 which will be much quicker but dearer as you'll need a controller card such as the Adaptec 29160 / 29160N

You could also try

www.microwarehouse.co.uk



AllanB

DominicA

FM, you want to buy an IBM ATA100 drive, 7200rpm with 2Mb cache, either a 40GB or a 60GB (this is what I would get for myself) £83 or £108 resp. from somewhere like simply.co.uk

Dom

DominicA

FM, what speed is the RAM in the PC, your CPU is 100mhz*8 I assume... if you're running PC133 RAM, clock it DOWN to 100 in the BIOS...

Dom

Funkii Munkii

Dom

excuse my ignorance how would i find out what speed the Ram is, as mentioned above its PIII 800mhz, obviously showing my cluelessness of IT here, is it something that can be found on "system" in the control panel or device manager. sorry I only know the basics.


Thanks for the advice on HD all very helpful stuff, slowly but surely im picking up bits and pieces from this forum to expand my computer knowledge.

Dave

Funkii Munkii

will either bof these do me??,

shown at scan.co.uk under "HARD DRIVES IDE"
41.2Gb IBM Deskstar 60GXP ATA-100 (7200 rpm, 2MB Cache, 8.5ms) £69.00

or

40Gb IBM 120GXP "Vanvouver" ATA-100 (7200rpm,2MB Cache, 8.5ms) £79.75

thanks once more

Dave

jbryant

Both of those are good fast drives. I can't help thinking however that you would be better paying just a few quid extra for the 60Gb or 80Gb versions. If you're into gaming, the newer titles are taking huge numbers of Gb on your drive and it's a pain in the ****.

As to whether you need it or not because of your problems is debatable. A new hard drive will definitely speed up your machine and as previously described an app such as Ghost will allow you to perform the swap quite easily. You may well be better off though just reinstalling the Operating System.

If you get a new drive, then all you will need to do is install your preferred Windows flavour with just the new drive installed. This really is quite simple and not as daunting as you may think. All of your applications will need to be reinstalled, but to get your data files (My Docs, etc) then add your old drive into the system as a slave drive (simple change of jumper on the disk case) and boot into your new fresh speedy version of Windows. Then use Explorer to copy your data files onto the newer disk. Then you can happily re-format the old drive to make sure it is clean as a whistle and keep it as a spare Backup drive for all your important files (just copy your My docs across once a week for example).

Hope this helps
Joolz

jbryant

edited because of double-post
Joolz

[Edited by jbryant - 1/25/2002 8:48:57 PM]

Funkii Munkii

cheers joolz

I print all these off and use them as reference. coz i need it!!

Dave

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

I have just found this thread and am absolutely sh@gged, so I will endevour to add some advice on top of everything else already listed in the morning.

Cheers,

Nick.