Did you NOT mention 2 partitions???
Why have 2 partitions if your only going to install an operating system on one?
Um, so you can reformat one partion with the OS and do a clean reinstall without losing your files.
Alright… I’ll buy that, but in my opinion every once in awhile you just have to do a total partition and reformat to get rid of that “not so clean, hard drive feeling”. 2 partitions just for that seems like waisting space.
Keep in mind that dual-processing is usually limited to dedicated servers, and as a result, most dual-processor motherboards are built for server cases, not standard AT or ATX cases. Currently, the Athlon Palomino chips (aka AthlonMP) are the only AMD chips capable of multi-processor support (which means you’d be lucky to get your machine past POST with Win9x and a pair of Thunderbirds or Durons), and you’ve got all of about one option as far as the motherboard (it’s made by Tyan, that’s about all I know). Also, there aren’t very many consumer apps which will even utilize multiple processors (Quake 3 being the only game on the market which does so, as an example). If you do decide to go multi, you will probably need to use Windows NT, Windows 2000, or a unix-based OS.
Personally, I’d stick to a single processor Athlon Thunderbird. In fact, that’s what I did 
I upgraded my own PC a couple months ago, from a AMD K6-2 350MHz to a 1.2 GHz T-bird. This included the purchase of a new MB (Asus A7A266), video card (GeForce2 Ultra), Hard Drive (Maxtor 40 gig, 7200rpm), CD-RW (Plextor 16/10/40A), case (Blizzard 360 from FrozenCPU) and a ThermoEngine heatsink (my CPU has yet to peak 105[sup]o[/sup]F :)), plus some scavenged parts from my old system (hard drive, floppy drive, DVD-ROM drive, sound card, NIC, etc.). Grand total, including tax and shipping came to about $2,500 then, but prices have dropped drastically since. Of course, I primarily use my rig for gaming; if you just want a good all-purpose machine, you can defintely go cheaper.
a) Far from wasting space, you’re saving space. Unless you need oceans and oceans of scratch-disk space for applications (such as Photoshop) that want you to designate a single volume to use for scratch, or you tend to create individual documents in the high hundreds of megabytes, you get better use of your storage space by partitioning. There’s a minimum block allocation unit that rises as the size of the volume (disk or partition) rises. It varies depending on whether you are using FAT32, HFS, HFS+, NTFS, UFS, or whatever, but with most file systems you end up wasting a lot of disk space whenever you (or the applications you install) place small documents on a volume. Example: you save the contents of this post as a text document. On a floppy, it might take up 1K. On a 20 GB HFS volume it takes up 650K. Slice that drive into partitions and the minimum allocated size goes down accordingly. Considering how many tiny little files litter most folks’ drives, that can add up to a lot of extra space.
b) Your main day-to-day OS gets sick. You boot from a copy of the OS on partition 2 and sic Norton on partition 1. That pays for itself the very first time you need it. And it need not be a different OS, although it can be.
c) What Omniscient said. Data here and OS there and programs over yonder is convenient in many ways. Don’t forget serving and sharing. You might sleep easier sharing only your data volumes.
AHunter3, whose 18G laptop HD is partitioned into 7 volumes.
Yeah, but…
Just to throw my geeky oar in here:
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As everyone else has said, AMD is definitely the way to go. Definitely the most bang for the buck. Don’t get the absolute fastest one out, as you’ll pay a premium for a limited performance gain. 1.2 GHz sounds good.
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From all I’ve heard, unless you’re doing serious number crunching, dual processors aren’t worth it.
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A good video card is key, even if you don’t plan to play hard-core games. (And if you do, it’s crucial.) I have a VisionTek GeForce2 GTS that I’m happy with, which was around $150 six months ago.
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RAM is dirt cheap right now. I just bought two 256 meg PC133 chips yesterday for $46 each. Put in at least 256, if not 512 megs.
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I’ve heard Windows 2000 is finicky about hardware. Personally, I don’t see any need for it on my home computer (I just reinstalled 98SE, after my hard drive bit the dust yesterday), but if you decide to do it, you’ll want to read up on whatever components you plan to buy to make sure drivers are available and people aren’t having lots of problems with them.
Good luck, and have fun! It’s a good time to upgrade – things are cheap.
OK, so I’m starting to fall off the dual-processor bandwagon again. But I’m beginning to hear alot of voices in support of AMD while the Intel crowd is pretty quiet. I suppose I should read something into this. Is there a good comparison between the two besides the amount of the dent it’ll put into your wallet?
I’m also not hearing the unanimous support of the switch from Win 98SE to Win2K. This suprises me, but then you people always do. I’ve always thought that Win98 was the red-headed bastard child of all OS’, and that getting rid of it would be the wisest choice I’d ever made. Is this not so? I also assumed Win2K was pretty much reverse compatible accross the board, not so?
OK, I’m starting to get the idea that a new CPU, Motherboard and Video Card are the necessary upgrades. The brand and model is yet to be determined.
I don;t play games very often, but the ones I go have and play are graphically intense. I’m not a big gamer, so I may not really notice the performance gains some of you really serious gamers would. FTR, I play Mechwarrior 4, Microsoft Flight Sim 2000, Starcraft, and Links LS most often.
I’m going to have to pull apart my box here and figure out what components I have and see if the things like my NIC, Sound Card, and Drives will all work with my new hardware choices. I’m willing to buy new hardware, but I’d like to avoid it unless its really necessary. For example I have 2 64 MB, and one 128 MB memory cards. I’d love to be able to use these for now, and wait until I get around to building a second Linux (a learning tool/toy) box before upgrading to a 256 MB card to pair with my 128 on this box.
Keep it coming, I’m soaking this up like sponge.
Following up a question that I had which I dont think anyone has specifically replied to.
Would it be a bad idea to use my old 13.5 GB hard drive to hold this new OS? I’ll have to check to actually see what the specs on it are, but I’m thinking I’d like to split this drive up into a 5GB(?) OS partion and and 8.5GB programs (Photoshop, FTP clients, AIM, media players and editiors, MS Office) partion. I’m also wondering if Microsoft is designed to run better if I keep things like MS Office on the same drive as the OS. You wouldn’t think it’d matter, but MS sftware is so incestuous.
In short have HD technologies made the same strides as CPUs and other hardware, and would I be handcuffing the new setup by using this old piece of hardware? Assuming its a 5400 rmp drive, is it any worse than a newer bigger 5400 rmp drive, performance-wise?
You can do some digging around and find benchmark comparisons between the two. There are a couple of trends that you may find: one is that for a given price, AMD chips will outperform Intel chips (obviously, because AMD chips are cheaper, so you get a better chip than from Intel for the same price); the second is that even for the same MHz, AMD chips will usually outperform Intel in normal business apps (graphically intensive apps usually do slightly better on Intel machines).
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Again, this depends on what you want to do with your PC. Win2K was originally to be the next business OS from MS. However, because of its stability, it found its way into the home market. Unfortunately, because of its business roots, much of the home-market hardware (e.g., video cards, sound cards, etc.) was not supported. However, this has been changing - not so much because of anything done on MS’ part, but rather the hardware manufacturers have started developing drivers for Win2K. Some older hardware, however, might not have the appropriate drivers available.
As for Win98SE, I am currently using it, and have had no problems with it. I refuse to upgrade to WinME, and I see no reason to upgrade the OS if the current one is working fine. But that’s just an opinion 
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Also, depending on how fast you decide to go processor-wise, a new power supply might be in order. The high-end AMD chips, as well as newer video cards, draw a lot more juice than they used to. AMD recommends a minimum of a 300 watt supply for 1.2GHz chips, for example. Many older supplies are only 250-watt.
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There are many good, inexpensive cards available. nVidia’s GeForce 2 MX gives you good performance-to-dollar ratio, as does the relatively new Kyro II from Hercules (actually, it gives a better ratio, since it can be had for around $100, but performs very much on par with nVidia’s offerings).
You also mentioned getting a TV-tuner, I believe? Or did I imagine that? Many manufacturers are making all-in-one cards these days, but keep in mind that you will take a 3-d performance hit if you go that route. If that’s not a big concern, you should have no problem finding a decent card. If it is a problem, you can always get an TV-tuner add-on card for $100 or less.
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Be sure you pay attention to the motherboard specs to make sure whatever board you buy still supports SIMMs (DIMMs? you didn’t mention which type you currently have). Some of the newest socket-A boards use only DDR-RAM, for example.
Oh, and as far as the hard-drive, if the old one works fine, you don’t need to upgrade it. If you do a lot of disk access, you will definitely see an improvement if you do, though. If you don’t have a problem with your current one, there’s no reason not to keep it.
Regarding a multiprocessor system: Right at the moment, most Windows applications are not optimized to take advantage of them. This will change. Microsoft is turning its back on the legacy software architecture that did not support symmetric multiprocessing (that being W95/98/ME) and as months go by and all new consumer PCs come with an OS that supports SMP, more and more software vendors will take advantage of it.
Right now, when you’re running multiple processes within your pre-emptive multitasking OS on your single-processor system, the result is that process 1 is halted and attention shifts to process 2 and so on until all processes have received their alloted piece of processor-time and it gets back to process 1 again. If process 1 happens to be the burning of your audio CD, you may get another shiny coaster if you have too many processes running. If process 1 happens to be the playback of an MP3 or an MPEG video, you may get drop-outs and/or skipped frames. If process 1 is the Windows Explorer, you may feel like your mouse is on heavy tranquilizers and your Start Menu is coated in cold molasses.
Stick a second processor on board (and run NT/2K/XP or an SMP-supporting Unix) and process 1 gets attention from processor 1 while process 2 gets attention from processor 2 and the round-robin of preemptive multitasking doesn’t give you quite such a choppy skippy hoppy experience.
That much you should get from no more than the OS being optimized for SMP. If one of your programs (say Photoshop, for instance) is optimized for SMP as well, it can hand off one thread of a task to processor 1 and a second thread of the task to processor 2 and now you see serious speed increases as well as a smoother user experience.
So it is an investment, something that gets better over the next 2-3 years, a way of causing your machine to NOT feel obsolete six months down the pike.
Darwin’s, Thanks alot, you’e post was very helpful. Since my graphics needs are toward the lower end of the spectrum I think I’ll start shifting my shopping towards a AMD processor. My needs are somewhat basic with the occasional endevour into a high demand appplication, usually geared towards business/internet needs. Based on what you’ve said I’d be paying alot more for a Intel chip whose benefits I will likely never put into use.
In regards to the whole OS debate, now I don’thate Wndows 98SE, and it gets the job done fairly well, but it seems that I run into some slowdowns that I don’ think it should. It seems much more prone to that annoying OS decay that tends to happen as you use it steadily over sveveral months. It seems I’m itching to do a reinstall twice as often on my home machine than I ever was on my work NT/2K machines. This could just be a matter of perception since my work machines are much faster than my home one, but who knows. The main thing (which is a topic of another thread probably) that has made me start to want to ditch this OS is that ever since I’ve installed a optical Intellipoint mouse into my UBS port my keyboard has not worked every 4th reboot or so. I’m guessing its some silly driver issue, but it drives me nuts, I’ve reinstalled the mouse a few times, but every 4th or 5th time I reboot the keyboard stops working and I have to reboot again until it does work. I don’t change anything when I do it, it just works one time, and not another. Transient issues like ths drive me insane and I feel that a NT based OS woul stop this, although thats basically just on blind faith.
In the whle 2 vs. 1 CPU, I still am not sure, but I do know I’m not really trying to build a infinately scalable machine here. I don’t want to do too many things that “will be used 2 years down the road”. I want to get the best machine for the dollar I can for todays apps. I don’t really shop for each new software that comes out so I’m not thinking I’ll get the chance to really take advantage of all these new software bundles for 2 CPU machines. I have all the software I really need right now, and outside of the odd game, OS and Office suite I really don’t do much in the way of upgrading.
I’m still feeling things out I guess. All I know is that if I get 8 windows running apps right now my computer tries to vomit its silicon, this must stop.
This is a shameless bump for the goof off at work crowd…
You know, I hate my OS right now…I was having so much trouble last night…damn POS. Yet I still wonder if I’d be jumping from the pot into the fire with achange…