[Christoph]

I've never liked Ad Aware much. Spybot is good though. Filehippo.com has some good things on it as well.

And since we're getting geeky ...

Biostar K8 Micro ATX MoBo
AMD Athlon 64 3300+ 2.41 GHz
1 GB DDR SDRAM (2 sticks of 512)
250 GB Western Digital SATA HD
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GTS 256 MB PCI-e
Cooler Master 430W PS
LG DVD/CD-RW 8x/16x/8x
Samsung DVD+-R/CD-RW with Lightscribe 16x/5x
19" Samsung LCD Widescreen, 2 ms, 2000:1 contrast
eMachines T2692 MidTower case

[BoomBox]

Originally Posted by ketchup_xb

boom i think i just drooled. not coz i think your computer is hot but i have no clue what you're talking about LOL. all i heard was tempura AA.

It's a sweet little driver trick, but you HAVE to have a beefy system.

Snippet from techreport.com

Temporal Anti-Aliasing
Temporal AA varies the AA sample pattern from one frame to the next, taking advantage of display persistence to create the effect of a higher degree of antialiasing. In theory, at least, this trick should allow the performance of 2X AA while giving the perceived image quality of 4X AA. To give you some idea what's going on here, the table of sample patterns below shows the two temporal patterns used in each mode, then superimposes them on top of one another.


I'm one of many gamers that will take the performance hit for a prettier scene. Then again, most games I play are single player, not online, and push your computer's hardware to the limits, not just some silly shooter.

BTW, I forgot to mention that my 3700 is an A64. It's my first 64bit chip, and tho I can't really do anything with it (win32bit) I know when I upgrade to Vista that I'll see another performance increase. Well, should, at least.

[scionxb_org]

Sysinternals makes some really useful utilities for auditing your machine. They are all free, all written for Windows, and now owned by Microsoft!

You can speed your machine up and remove bogus registry keys super easy and safe. This tool is called AutoRuns and is a must have for any Windows techie.

Run the RegMon utility for a truly fun look at what your machine is doing right now!

He has dozens of cool freeware that will expose every part of your machine.

[bfreder576748]

Originally Posted by admin

Yup 2 monitors very useful... when money permits i want to run 2 widescreen 24 inch lcd's if your on the cmputer as much as me thats like heaven..!!!!

If you buy a computer i would recommend waiting for one of the dell deals... sometimes they are dirt cheap. You gotta wait for the right promotion period and coupon.

Check with your employer, I work for a hospital and we get really good deals from Dell and also get 40% off cellular.

[Iateacricket]

Knoppix, Hijack This!, the sysinternal suite, M$ antispyware works pretty well, Ultimate Boot CD, and the Offline PW/reg editor (bootable)! More to come.

[aaronle06]

Originally Posted by BoomBox

Alright, you wanna get geeky?

Sounds good to me!

To anyone building a computer, especially AMD, pick yourself up at least a socket-939 chip. They're being phased out, and AM2 is their big thing, well mainstream right now. There's still a few 939 DC's running around, so uh, yeah, might wanna get a chipset that supports it.

I'm currently sitting on:

Gigabyte K8U-939 mobo that boasts the ULi 1689 chipset (it's pretty sweet, great OC potential)

Coupled with an AMD 3700+ Venice 1M L2 cache that typically runs at 2.2ghz and I'm oc'd to 2.6ghz. I could go higher with liquid cooling and Dual Channel RAM.

1.5 gig's of pc3200 (1 1gb stick, and 1 512mb stick) both 6 layer 1.6ns Samsung chips rare and super sweet. They have copper heat spreaders on em.

I'm still running on AGP, as the reviews only state a negligible 8% or so with a PCI-e card, and double that with 2 PCI-e cards. When the gap gets big enough, I'll move over, for now 40 fps constant outdoors in Oblivion at 12b0x1024, bloom, all settings maxed (Anti-Aliasing @ 2X with Adapative turned on and on quality setting, temporal AA as well). HQ Anisotropic filtering set to 16x...blah blah blah..

It's just a Red Sapphire Tech X800GTO 16 pipes (stock 12, 4 unlocked) with an R430 core, sitting at stock speeds of C=400 and R=500 (DDR 1000)

Still on UIDE 133. I know, I know. I just haven't had the desire to shave off 3 seconds of load time with a Serial ATA drive.

Standard Creative Labs SB Audigy lite card. (My SB live! 5.1 croaked on me at a bad time. Ah, the worries of overclocking).

Then your standard Sony and Lite-on DVD-r's. Umm.....No lights, as they're pointless, and I'm, just using an Antec true 350watt psu.

Man, looks like I'm gonna have to take pics tonight.

beat this--

Dell XPS M1710

intel 7200(2.0 dual core)
2GB RAM
120GB 7200RPM sata HDD(7200 or 5400rpm, dont remember)
built-in creative audigy
mini subwoofer on the bottom
lightFX for the exterior lights
glossy 17"
bluetooth/wifi and computer dock
not to forget the removable nVidia 7900 GS GDDR3 256MB
and im running the LEDs pink.

yeah boombox has a nice system, hand down. dell corporate discounts FTW.

[Mikespri222]

Well it's not very hard to beat those spec's. Then again it was about a year ago since the last post but my little beast is running:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (3.2 GHz)
OCZ 2.0 GB Dual channel 800 MHz
Wester Digital 500 GB 3.0 GB/s SATA
GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB PCI-E
22" wide screen monitor, I can't remember the brand
5.1 surround Sound (Cheap brand)
Sony Dual Layer DVD burner
Integrated 8.1 surround sound card
Generic 550 Watt power supply
Antec 900 hundred case