Ash that is most kind of you to give those links. Yes I will most certainly visit them and have a look round.

I must add that since I joined this Forum a few days ago, I have been helped continuously and in a very friendly, informative and courteous manner. Glad to be here and although on occasions we differ from one another (the point of a Forum anyway), it is all carried out in a very civilized manner and that is what makes it for me a pleasure to be taking part in the discussions.

Regards.
David

its your decision
and you have to make it .... and whatever it is ... im sure all of us will still respect you

for cheap computer parts try Micom International Ltd, computer shop coventry, Nextday Nationwide Delivery

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CPU: Athlon 64X2 4200 @ 2.21ghz
RAM: 2gb Corsair XMS2 800mhz DDR2
Gfx: Palit 7300GS
HDD: 250gb SATA 16mb

Thanks Dylan!
Been busy since I last posted. Here is my update...


Items ordered up to now (Only received the case, PSU and floppy drive so far, most items should arrive on this Monday):

Antec P180B Black Case: £83.82 Link - Antec Performance One P180B - Mid tower - ATX - no power supply - black - USB/FireWire/Audio / Antec P180B EU

Antec 500 Watt PSU: £59.96 Link - Antec NeoHE 500GB - Power supply ( internal ) - ATX12V 2.2/ EPS12V - AC 100-240 V - 500 Watt - 15 Output Connector(s) - United Kingdom / Antec 0761345-05506-2

Asus P5B-E Motherboard: £85.65 Link -
Buy Asus P5B-E Motherboard*90-MBB550-G0EAYZfrom CCL - Online Retailer of the Year 2006

Crucial 2GB Kit Memory: £ 49.34 Link -
2GB kit (1GBx2), 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-5300 upgrades for ASUS P5B-E Motherboard, CT587774 from Crucial.com

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz Processor £152.39 Link -
Processor - 1 x Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 / 2.4 GHz ( 1066 MHz ) - LGA775 Socket - L2 4 MB - Box / Intel BX80557E6600

Cooling fan 80mm 1off £ 8.74 Link -
Antec 80mm SmartCool - Fan unit - 80 mm / Antec 761345-75008-0

Cooling fans 120mm 2 off £21.16 Link -
Antec 120mm SmartCool - Fan unit - 120 mm / Antec 761345-75012-7

Windows Vista Home Premium: £70.79 Link -
Buy Microsoft Windows Vista Home*Premium*64 Bit (OEM)*66I-00788from CCL - Online Retailer of the Year 2006

Graphics card X1650 Pro CCL Value card: £52.29 Link -
Buy 512MB CCL Value X1650 Pro*from CCL - Online Retailer of the Year 2006

E-mu 0404 Sound Card: £64.99 Link -
E-MU 0404 Digital Audio System | Soundware.co.uk

Sony Floppy Drive: £ 15.20 Link -
Computer Parts, PC Components, Desktop Computers, Laptops, Notebooks - Misco.co.uk

Hitachi 400GB SATAII 3.5” Hard Drive: £ 84.86 Link -
HDT725040VLA360 Hitachi DESKSTAR T7K500 400GB SATA-II 3.5IN 7200RPM 16MB 0A33439 IN - HDT725040VLA360 (Components Internal Hard Drives) Reviews

Hitachi 320GB SATAII 3.5” Hard Drive: £ 59.87 Link -
HDT725032VLA360 Hitachi DESKSTAR T7K500 320GB SATA-II 3.5IN 7200RPM 16MB 0A33435 NS - HDT725032VLA360 (Components Internal Hard Drives) Reviews

Plextor Internal Optical Drive: £ 37.72 Link -
PX-800A/T3KB PLEXTOR DVD+-R/RW/DL IDE BLACK BULK +18X8X -18X6X DL+12X-6X 8.4GB NS - PX-800A/T3KB (Components DVD Drives) Reviews

Plextor External Optical Drive: £89.48 Link -
PX-608CU/T3UK PLEXTOR DVD+-R/RW/DL/RAM USB2 RET +8X8X-8X6X DL+4X-4X R5X PORTABLE ML - PX-608CU/T3UK (Components DVD Drives) Reviews

Take a look at the current CASE prices on the websites at the link, and also that of the Hitachi 400GB hard drive. Within a very few days (only 2 when it comes to the Hitachi Drive) the prices plummeted. In fact so much so with regard to the Hitachi 400GB drive I have written and asked if there was a mistake with the price only 2 days before. It appears to have gone down by £14. The stock when I purchased was 11 items and then someone else has purchased and there are now 9. I cannot grasp why the price of the same stock group should go down by such a large amount in such a short time. The case I think went down by £10 just after I purchased it. I notice they have a new model I think P182, maybe that is something to do with this change, and I was just unlucky.

I can hear you all now – saying “The world's all-time loser” !! yes, yes.... and other such comments like, “I wouldn't like to be this guy when he installs that E6600 expensive processor” !!!! Oh and on reflection – he is the chap with the HITACHI drives.... he must have money to burn.

I don't!

Never mind guys, that's Life as they say and makes for a bit of fun here don't you think.

You wait until I start assembling and you will hear from me again for sure. Now that should also be interesting I think. Be lucky – and I will write later!

David

I wish you the best of luck for your build.

be careful,, go slow and have fun


good luck!

Many thanks for your good wishes, and also to you as well Dylan.

You will see from my posting earlier that I seemed to pay around £14 extra in such a short time for that 400GB Hitachi Hard drive.Well in fairness to Morecomputers, their customer service is excellent and they gave me a full explanation as to why. Despite my continuing to reply to their emails putting my point of view they were always very polite and informative.

In the end I did pay the correct price for the Hitachi drive at the time I purchased it. The new low price that you can get it for now is because of something they explained as [quote],

"We do not buy stock in we sell back to back through distributors so we do not hold stock that has been purchased at a certain price when an order is placed we send that order through to our supplier and they then send the goods to the customer." [end quote]

Which is fair enough I think. Some you win and some you lose. But as I indicated earlier they have a very good customer support. The item in question is given in the link below:

HDT725040VLA360 Hitachi DESKSTAR T7K500 400GB SATA-II 3.5IN 7200RPM 16MB 0A33439 IN - HDT725040VLA360 (Components Internal Hard Drives) Reviews

Some of the items I purchased are turning up today, and need checking, so I will come back to you all later.

David

I see that that you chose the Sapphire 1650 graphics card. I just recently purchased a 1950 from Sapphire and find it just good enough to edit pictures. What program are you going to be using to edit pictures?

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http://valid.x86-secret.com/cache/banner/371640.png

Hi Eli, thanks for your comments. Went up and had a look around at the Links you provided. Soon could see you are a young guy with some great interest in games and photos. The photos there are so wide and varied and superb.

For my own part we are light years away from each other in age....!! I am much much older and as such for me "games" are a 'no no'. I expect though many older people are into games - it is just me. My interests in photography are based on producing very relaxing photos for the viewer, essentially of flowers, but also mundane, very ordinary things for example I was out in a storm a few years ago and whilst my wife and I were sheltering I noticed this water rushing down a drain...and took a picture as the rain drenched us!! So you can see what I mean I hope.

I sometimes see an event for what it is, just a moment in time and if I do not capture it, then it is lost. My camera (a small inexpensive Nikon) is usually with me most of the time. One day I hope to have a website with many of my photos on it.

In response to your question about what program I will be using to edit photos. Well this is not able to be answered directly. My computer building project is very much a forward, hopefully future proofed activity. What will work with my Vista Operating system? This I think will be a learning experience over a lot of patient time! We have to start somewhere, so I hope to successfully build the machine with help from here. Then slowly one step at a time, install a program, try it out and go from there. Then there is the hardware. Will my current simple Canon Printer still function? Take for example my external Plextor Optical Drive - well it will work if I switched to Windows XP somehow, but I understand it will work fine when the Nero software which I believe is supplied with it, create the driver for me to download. Plextor hardware works with Vista, it is the updating of driver software that is required. So you can see what I mean be being patient and learning steadily. Also I have to wait for the E-mu 0404 sound card drivers which should be available around Mid-June according to the information on their website.

In the meantime of course I will continue to use most of the time my current computer which has the Windows XP Professional SP2 operating system and which I have had working fine now for just over a year. It is a matter of keeping all things moving along gently and not being in too much of a hurry I think. Below is a list of my current situation at home.

Links to software I use at present and hope to use with Vista Home Premium 64 bit

Fireworks 4.0 Link - Adobe - Fireworks CS3, Vector Graphics Editor, Vector Image Editor
Thumbs Plus 7.0 Link - Cerious Software - The Home of ThumbsPlus!
Picture Project 1.7 Link – Nikon UK - Home
PIX Resizer Link - Image resizing, do it with PIXresizer
Lview Pro 2.8 Link – LView Pro Home Page
Easy Thumbnails 2.9 Link - Easy Thumbnails Software -- Free thumbnail utility from Fookes Software
Picasa 2.6 Link - Picasa

All the best.
David

I'm sorry, but what? Perhaps I misunderstood, or perhaps I'm mistaken, but what do you mean, that the x1950 is barely able to keep up with the photo editing that you need to do? Photo editing performance is more dictated by CPU and amount of system RAM installed rather than video card specifications. Because it's rare to have to do heavy rendering of frames for photo editing--just a little image alteration, but nothing that requires a lot of rendering. Now video editing on the other hand is heavily dependent on the graphics card because it requires constant rendering of images, but pretty much any newer-gen video card (ATI x1300 through x1950, Nvidia 7300 through 7950 and up) with on-board VRAM will be sufficient for photo editing. Even older cards will be fine. But video editing on the other hand...

__________________
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (@2.6 GHz)
2x1GB OCZ Spec. Ops. PC3200
ASRock Dual939-SATA2
Antec TruePower 550 watt PSU
80 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm
300 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm
120 GB Maxtor ATA/133 7200 rpm
ATI Radeon x1950 Pro

Hello Guy, interesting posting - look I am not into all this graphics cards discussion really. All I know from practice using the software in my other posting above, it seems to work fairly well.

I have just checked (because I had no idea!) what graphics card I use at present in the Device Manager. It must be reasonably old as this machine has been built for just over 1 year. The graphics card is called Asus Extreme 550 Series.

When I spoke to the guy at CCLONLINE in sales, he felt that their value card 1650 would be OK for my photography purposes, no problem. So I just went along with it, because at that particular moment they were out of the Sapphire ones and he said it would do just the same job. It has arrived now, and is still in its box, where for a while as I study for example the case - it will remain!

Thanks for the post.
David

PS Guy - nothing to do with above really just a question. If I were to remove the 1650 card one day and install another one, do you have to uninstall, remove one thing or another before removing card. Or, alternatively do you just unplug it and put a new one in with any new drivers or whatever? Thanks for your help on this. The reason I ask is I would imagine the Registry has a lot of important entries in it relating to the old 1650 card in the example I have asked about.

Yes, that 1650 should be ample for any of your photo editing needs--no question there.

In response to your other question, when you eventually wish to replace the x1650, you have two options. If you replace it with another ATI-based graphics card, all you'd have to do is physically remove the card and install the new replacement. Then you should install whatever new drivers are required for the ATI card. Howver, if you choose a different brand (Nvidia), then you should do the following: uninstall any drivers or affiliated software. Then run a program (free I believe) called "driver cleaner" to completely remove any lingering driver components. Then you can remove the card and replace it with the new card--again, as before, install any new drivers, etc.

If you have any more questions, please let me know. Have fun with the new system!

__________________
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (@2.6 GHz)
2x1GB OCZ Spec. Ops. PC3200
ASRock Dual939-SATA2
Antec TruePower 550 watt PSU
80 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm
300 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm
120 GB Maxtor ATA/133 7200 rpm
ATI Radeon x1950 Pro

Thanks for clear explanation. Understood.

However, to uninstall any drivers or affiliated software, not clear how you go about this.

I know about Add/Remove programs in Control Panel and so on. But how would drivers show up here please, if they do? Would they be prefixed for example ATI.... etc.? Believe it or not I think I have just found the answer to my own question!! I went and had a look at my own set up and see a reference to ATI on about 3 occasions in that area.

However, will leave the question here for you to give precise answer in case there is somewhere else I should be looking. With regard to Registry in this exercise, would your advice be "Leave it alone!" don't mess with the Registry?

Thanks Guy.
David

My bad. Your right about the RAM and CPU for the photo editing. As Dave said, I am a young man learning the ropes. All that I'm going to say is that my computer, with it's 512 mbs of RAM and 256 of raw graphical power sometimes lags when using Photoshop CS3 Extended.

By the way Dave, you asked about a photo-editing software that will work well into the future. In order to answer this questions, it all depends on your ethics and morals. Sure, you can buy Adobe Photoshop CS3 at a very high price, or you can go the other direction and get it at the value price of none. While I understand Computer Forums has a no dicussion policy and does not support piracy of any sort, I'm just throwing it put there.

But, if you want to go the free, legal route with your photo editing, you can always use Paint.Net. It is a Photoshop look a like that is open source and runs on the Microsoft .NET framework. In someways, it is better than Photoshop and is update constantly and shows no sign of being shut down. Best of all, it is free.

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Thanks for the Paint.Net open source link, I will definitely keep this in mind when I move to Vista one day. Just went and had a quick look tonight. Will certainly investigate thoroughly one day. If you want a laugh for a moment, what do you think I just typed by accident a few seconds ago but checked the spelling. Pain.Net !! But I know it is not called that......it is just getting late here in UK - I had better stop now. Too late for us old ones!!

Regards.