Members PaulyWally Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 I've been gassing for a new PC lately. But I haven't been able to pull the trigger on it yet. Right now, I have an Athlon XP 2000... 256MB RAM... and a 64MB nVidia 4400 card. Running Windows XP SP2. The only thing I REALLY need, is more RAM I suppose. And I can score a GIG for $40. I've been looking at the AMD 64x2 dual cores... PCIe ATI 1900, or geForce 7900... with a couple GIG of RAM. I'd like to throw Debian on it, and try using that almost exclusively. I dunno. Any reason not to do it? Talk me out of it (or into it) baby. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rippin' Robin Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 Get more RAM first. 256Mb is the bare, bare minimum for XP. It'll probably be rattling away at virtual memory all the time, right? That slows down your computer tremendously. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members niomosy Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 I've been gassing for a new PC lately. But I haven't been able to pull the trigger on it yet. Right now, I have an Athlon XP 2000... 256MB RAM... and a 64MB nVidia 4400 card. Running Windows XP SP2. The only thing I REALLY need, is more RAM I suppose. And I can score a GIG for $40. I've been looking at the AMD 64x2 dual cores... PCIe ATI 1900, or geForce 7900... with a couple GIG of RAM. I'd like to throw Debian on it, and try using that almost exclusively. I dunno. Any reason not to do it? Talk me out of it (or into it) baby. More RAM is a good thing. You'll want at least a gig. If you want to really update, Intel's the cpu king right now. The Core 2 Duo's are doing very well. If your current motherboard can handle an AMD dual-core, you can go with that to cut down on cost. I'd probably lean towards the 7900 over the ATi card. ATi cards tend to have drivers with more issues than nVidia, though ATi has supposedly improved as time has gone on. Of course, you're talking about running Linux. That almost entirely eliminates ATi as nVidia's drives are definitely more stable from what I've read. As for Linux, if you want Debian, why not just get Ubuntu? It's the friendly Debian with less snobery elitism To be honest, I've got PC Linux OS 2007 on a desktop at work and I'm having a very difficult time finding a reason why I should throw Ubuntu 7.0.4 on to try. It works, Firefox was already setup with media capabilities for mp3, quicktime, avi, etc. etc. I've been pretty happy. IIRC, Ubuntu doesn't include these off the bat, meaning you'll probably want EasyUbuntu or some other similar software which will download/install most of this stuff for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members misterhinkydink Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 I've been gassing for a new PC lately. But I haven't been able to pull the trigger on it yet.Right now, I have an Athlon XP 2000... 256MB RAM... and a 64MB nVidia 4400 card.Running Windows XP SP2.The only thing I REALLY need, is more RAM I suppose. And I can score a GIG for $40.I've been looking at the AMD 64x2 dual cores... PCIe ATI 1900, or geForce 7900... with a couple GIG of RAM. I'd like to throw Debian on it, and try using that almost exclusively.I dunno. Any reason not to do it?Talk me out of it (or into it) baby. Unless you're a gamer you can probably get away with it. You can run XP under VMWare for things like TurboTax, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members PaulyWally Posted July 23, 2007 Author Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 As for Linux, if you want Debian, why not just get Ubuntu? It's the friendly Debian with less snobery elitism Hehe... A lot of people have tried to convert me over to Ubuntu. I hear a lot of good things about it. But if you like to tinker with the inner workings of a linux box... Ubuntu is not for you (from what I've heard). I'm more than happy with Debian. Very stable... a lot of support... Tons of packages. And it doesn't put up a fuss if I choose to skip a package and install manually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MrJoshua Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 If you're going to be using Linux, don't spend much money on a video card. It's not like you'll be needing lots of 3D capabilities for all those great Linux games. You can build a really nice computer for a very limited amount of money these days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members PaulyWally Posted July 23, 2007 Author Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 If you're going to be using Linux, don't spend much money on a video card. It's not like you'll be needing lots of 3D capabilities for all those great Linux games. No... but it might come in handy for 3D modelling and animation. As well as a nice, high resolution rate for when I'm working with multi-track software. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members HackedByChinese! Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 No matter what you do, make sure that you get an nVidia video card. ATi's Linux drivers are pure crap, a situation which is unlikely to change in the near future. Unless you absolutely must buy AMD, Intel is the way to go for CPUs at the moment. Everything else has already been covered. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LaXu Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 If you plan to run Linux, stay away from ATI graphics cards. In my experience the drivers are crappy compared to Nvidia. I can't even run any Linux distro with the default ATI drivers with my Radeon X800XL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members lokidecat Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 (slinks behind a mailbox with a rifle waiting for a Mac person to show up) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members t3ch Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 256mb in XP, it's no wonder you're looking to upgrade. If you're on a budget, grab another 256 off newegg or something and slap it in. That will boost your performance a bit, whether you game or not. I ran xp on 512 for the longest time just fine, but 256 is pretty ehhhh. I recently built a rig that has the basics of something like this: Intel Core2 Duo 6300 2GB PNY pc3700 Nvidia GForce 7950 GT Creative X-Fi Platinum I couldn't be happier. It cost me $1200 in all with a nice new Antec P90, nice motherboard, cabling, extra fans, 3rd hard drive, etc... If you need further help with ram specifics, mother boards, etc I'd be happy to help, but until you get to that step I'll save my breath Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members niomosy Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 Hehe... A lot of people have tried to convert me over to Ubuntu. I hear a lot of good things about it. But if you like to tinker with the inner workings of a linux box... Ubuntu is not for you (from what I've heard). I'm more than happy with Debian. Very stable... a lot of support... Tons of packages. And it doesn't put up a fuss if I choose to skip a package and install manually. I don't really have a desire to bother with Debian. If I really want something Debian-based, I'll try a distro that's based off Debian rather than Debian itself. Oh, and if you're going to use it partly as a studio... UbuntuStudio? You'd think I was an Ubuntu fanboy given my pushing of Ubuntu, but it seems to make logical sense for what you're asking. You can probably just load the low-latency kernel and all the other software you'd want with Debian anyway, but I do recall Allan touting its simplicity as a desktop and daw. As for Ubuntu, you can easily get dirty on the CLI. At least, back in 6.0.6, you had to since they didn't include tools for things like smbpasswd management and there was a bug in Synaptic where you had to launch it from CLI in order to get it to go through the proxy as configured in the environment variables you'd configured. Personally, I jumped off Ubuntu because I didn't want to tinker on the CLI. I need to actually do things and Ubuntu was just wasting my time with me having to set this and that up. PCLOS got me up and running very quickly, plus I can always goof off on the CLI if I really want to (not that I don't get plenty of CLI time as a Unix guy... ). Ubuntu 7.04's supposed to improve on things a bit, including some things like sshd, so I've heard (sshd wasn't installed by default in 6.0.6). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members allan grossman Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 Hehe... A lot of people have tried to convert me over to Ubuntu. I hear a lot of good things about it. But if you like to tinker with the inner workings of a linux box... Ubuntu is not for you (from what I've heard). Not so. There's nothing stopping me from tinkering with Ubuntu's inner workings - the reason I like it is that I don't have to screw with it unless I *want* to Right now I'm doing some rather bizarre stuff with a serial IR transmitter, an IR receiver and a Dish Network receiver. Got MythTV running and am planning to use my shiny new 500GB ReiserFS media drive as a place to store TV recordings. I can record TV right now but can't change channels on the Dish box - nobody's posted a good remote control configuration so I decided to buy the IR receiver and swipe the codes right off the remote. Let's see - what other tweaking have I done? Oh, yeah - Beryl. Beryl's interface makes OS X look like crap. I've never seen anything as configurable. Ubuntu's good if you want something to keep you out of trouble but you can get in just as much trouble with Ubuntu as any other distribution if you really want to Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members SteveyDevey Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 (slinks behind a mailbox with a rifle waiting for a Mac person to show up) Heehee!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Mudbass Posted July 24, 2007 Members Share Posted July 24, 2007 ATi cards tend to have drivers with more issues than nVidia... My experience has been just the opposite. When 3DFX went belly up I begrudgingly switched to Nvidia and had nothing but trouble. We have three computers in the house and they used to all have Nvidia cards in them. I got so fed up with the constant driver problems that I ripped every one of the bastards out and replaced them with ATI. I rarely have any more trouble with drivers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members HackedByChinese! Posted July 24, 2007 Members Share Posted July 24, 2007 My experience has been just the opposite. When 3DFX went belly up I begrudgingly switched to Nvidia and had nothing but trouble. We have three computers in the house and they used to all have Nvidia cards in them. I got so fed up with the constant driver problems that I ripped every one of the bastards out and replaced them with ATI. I rarely have any more trouble with drivers. ATi does not like Linux. Windows may be a different story. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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