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I promised myself I would upgrade my PC after I finished school, but as it turns out I'm not DONE done, just between degrees... ugh... Still, with a 4 month lull between classes, I've had plenty of time to amass and finally assemble parts.

Bachelor Spec (served me well, rest in peace):

Epox Socket939
Athlon64 X2 3800
Geforce 8800GT
2GB
HT Omega Claro Halo XT
250 + 300GB SATA hard drives
2x IDE DVD burners
Cisco USB wifi ethernet
Windows XP

I got some good deals on parts, carried some hardware over, got Windows for free through school. So now I have a solid and inexpensive system good enough to last me until I finish my Master's in 2014...

Master Spec:

ASRock 970DE3/U3S3 AM3+
Phenom II X4 965BE
8GB Corsair DDR3
Geforce GTS450 (free-- Thanks rogue426!!)
kept HT Omega sound card
Kingston Hyperx 120GB SDD
kept 300GB SATA hard drive
Rosewill PCI wifi ethernet (USB wireless sucks.. really badly...)
kept 1x IDE DVD drive
Windows 7 pro 64-bit

In the near future I will replace the DVD drives with SATA Blu ray drives, but that's at the bottom of my priority list. Nothing I'm reading on BR software is making me anxious to bother watching it on my computer.

The system feel is nothing short of instantaneous... I click to open Firefox, and the 10 or 15 second wait I'm used to is gone... in 3 seconds I have pages opening. I love it! I'm so used to XP (a 10 year marriage, no less) that Win7 is a big jump for me, but I'm adjusting. #1 issue is finding a good media player, since WMP12 is pure garbage ("vomit" is the only SFW word I can think of to describe it) and I can't get 10 or 11 to install in Windows 7. That's a work in progress.

The Rosewill card will randomly drop connection shortly after I wake the computer from sleep. Actually, it doesn't drop; it stays connected to the router but it says "no internet'. Running a diagnostic makes it work again, but it's still annoying so I will replace it soon.

Still a lot of tweaking and program installs to go, but so far so good!

A lot of that speed increase is coming from the SSD. Pretty nice upgrade though. Enjoy it Makes me wanna upgrade!

I'm actually still rocking my 939 Operation (too many kids to afford an upgrade!). I do however use Windows 7 64-Bit. I actually used Rosewill RNX-N180PCe and I had a similar problem. Also it was slow. I paired my SMC router with a USB SMC Wireless N and get about 270 Mbps. My router and adapter are in the same room though. But one is behind the couch and another is in a media cabinet.

Blink wrote:

I'm actually still rocking my 939 Operation (too many kids to afford an upgrade!). I do however use Windows 7 64-Bit.

Funny you should say so because I upgraded mine to a mostly-greenfield i5 build just over a year ago, but rebuilt most of the Skt939 system as a media PC -- first with Win7-64, then an upgrade to Win8 with an SSD. My mobo has the annoying 3.25GB memory limit but it is otherwise an entirely solid machine. If I wasn't post-processing 18MP pictures it probably wouldn't have needed the i5 upgrade, it's still a great platform if you're not doing something that chews through high-end CPU or RAM.

Thatguy wrote:

A lot of that speed increase is coming from the SSD.

Um, a lot is coming from everywhere else too. 2 GB to 8 GB. Dual core 2 gHz to quad core 3.4 gHz.

Why insist on WMP? What's wrong with VLC media player?

Meadows wrote:

Why insist on WMP? What's wrong with VLC media player?

I've been trying to find a suitable alternative. I really liked Zoom Player, but you can't save a playlist as .m3u (it only saves as .zpl which does nothing for me) which means I'd have to use a second program to make playlists for my phone. I'll check out VLC.

The interface in WMP10 was absolutely perfect. 11 removed playlist length and a couple other things, but it was livable. 12 is horrid. It auto-shrinks album art to 200x200 (WTF microsoft... really??!?) and took away the menu bar in Now Playing mode, making it a pain in the ass. Registry hacks will re-enable full-sized art, but it never should have come to that. We've moved beyond 640x480 desktops in the past decade or so.

This is what I want in a media player: a) full-sized album art in the main window. b) attached playlist visible at all times. c) ability to save files and playlists. d) a user friendly interface. If anyone has suggestions, I'm all ears. ((((-_-))))