How is my computer?

[Volcon]

How is my computer? Its a HP inspiron desktop 4 gig of ram Quad processor (what exactly does this do?) Light Scribe 22 inch HP w2207h screen, 1680x1050 resolution My graphics card was integrated, but i got a free http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130328 off my friend, all in all how good is this comp?

[Ynot]

4 1/2

[Volcon]

Out of...

[Ynot]

Out of... annoying, ain't it.... *edit* ignore me I'm being an arse

[ninja9578]

4 gig of RAM? I hope you aren't running Windows, Windows can only use 3.5 unless you get the 64-bit version. But the 64-bit version doesn't have very many apps for it. A quad processor is 4 CPUs are once, this helps with multithreaded programs run faster.

[Volcon]

No worries, im running x64, im constantly reminded as programs wont run and link me to a x64 download

[ninja9578]

That's good Hopefully Microsoft will figure out how to make Vista run both 64 and 32 bit programs like every other operating system in the world

[Volcon]

I hope haha, do the 64 bit versions run faster or anything? I don't understand why there would have to be 2 diff versions.

[ninja9578]

They have two different versions because there are a lot of 32-bit apps floating around and they couldn't figure out how to run 32 and 64 bit apps on the same platform. All processors are actually 64 bit now, but have a backward compatible mode that allow them to run 32 bit programs. The OS though has to do some magic to allow them to run 32 and 64 bit together. Apple and the Linux community have figured it out, both OSs are open source, I don't know why Microsoft doesn't just look at how they did it They don't run faster, but they allow for much more RAM, which makes programs that require a lot of RAM to run faster because they don't have to do page swapping. This makes programs like Photoshop or Preview run much faster when dealing with large images.

[Volcon]

Oh alright, sweet. Speaking of which i need to get photoshop on this computer.... (woo for free student copies from my school)

[Dreamhope11]

i haz vista

[ninja9578]

i haz vista I'm sorry.

[Marvo]

Spoiler: Ninja has no idea what he's babling about. Vista is working perfectly for me after I installed service pack 1. I'm having absolutely no problems with Vista, that I didn't have with XP. The only decrease is the slightly slower managing. Vista 64x, which is on my desktop computer (32 bit on my laptop), is running perfectly aswell, though I had a few problems with my graphicscard, and they'll persist until I get service pack 1 and perhaps some better cooling. As far as program compatibility goes, I've not had any problems with that so far, except for a bit of confusion in 3D Studio Max and a few games. Once again, these were simply fixed by patching. Vista is better than XP. XP is more stable than Vista. For now. That's the bottomline. As for your computer, it's pretty good. I've got a 260GTX graphicscard, which is better than your's, but the rest of your computer looks better than mine. You didn't specify how powerful the quadcore processor were though. What you're looking for is Gigahertz and L1/L2 cache size, usually mentioned in MB, unless you're from the future.

[ninja9578]

Vista is better than XP. XP is more stable than Vista. For now. That's the bottomline. Uhm... for all practical purposes Vista = XP. They changed the kernel which makes loading and process handling a little better and the interface changed. But the middle layer of Vista (which is the majority of it) is unchanged from XP. It still uses a registry as it's core, that gets slow fast because there is no way to clean it without buying third party cleaners and defragmenters. The hard drive also gets fragmented which slows the computer down.