Finally finished my first-ever build! What upgrades for $550?

[iMpathetic]

Going out to Tigerdirect to buy my stuff today.

Looks like I'll be building a cheapish C2D.

Any thoughts?

[XtremeBawls]

You should look into ways to drop ram usage if your running Vista and using 1gig of ram with your browser and media player up, you should be able to drop it to right around half that. I know of someone who posted a nice little thread on some tips on how to do so, but I am having trouble finding it atm. Some light searching should give you some good tips on how to do so. Oh and as you probably know, if you upgrade to 4GB's of ram and you're not running 64-bit Vista/64-bit Xp, it won't recognize the full 4 gigs.

Also, the rocketfish (a division of Lian Li if you didn't know) is a nice case but that ultra looks very clean.

[iMpathetic]

You should look into ways to drop ram usage if your running Vista and using 1gig of ram with your browser and media player up, you should be able to drop it to right around half that. I know of someone who posted a nice little thread on some tips on how to do so, but I am having trouble finding it atm. Some light searching should give you some good tips on how to do so. Oh and as you probably know, if you upgrade to 4GB's of ram and you're not running 64-bit Vista/64-bit Xp, it won't recognize the full 4 gigs.

Also, the rocketfish (a division of Lian Li if you didn't know) is a nice case but that ultra looks very clean.

Yeah, I thought my RAM usage was ridiculously high, even for Vista.

If I end up upgrading instead of building a new system (which I might do) RAM would be the first order of business. However, I'm running 32-bit Vista.

BTW, the case is a frickin' fingerprint magnet.

[XtremeBawls]

Yeah, i believe the rocketfish has more of a matte finish and would be less of a problem that way.

There's the thread i was looking for, that's just a few tips, msconfig is a good place to start, just make sure you know what you're doing b4 you change things.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=56728

[iMpathetic]

Yeah, i believe the rocketfish has more of a matte finish and would be less of a problem that way.

There's the thread i was looking for, that's just a few tips, msconfig is a good place to start, just make sure you know what you're doing b4 you change things.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=56728

Excellent, thank you! That should help me a lot.

As far as the rocketfish goes, if I can talk him down to $100, I'll buy it.

Unfortunately, a financial misunderstanding prevents me from spending any more than $125.

I was thinking.... Antec Nine Hundred ($80 AR, free shipping) and 2GB more RAM?