Proud Moment in personal computing :-)

[Zak33]

2 years ago I built this rig.

nForce2
2x512DDR
Good PSU
Revolution 7.1
XP Pro

I decided, mainly due to advice from people who know (Jiff was mainly to blame/slap on back for this one) to install XP onto one SCSI drive, and have 2 other SCSI drives for other stuff.

Since I have built this PC I have not had to reinstall XP.

When I install games I make sure the go in the right place, and the music etc too. TiG and Nick Tumble have been to a LAN with me where I refuse to let anyone put anything on my PC without me directing them

I have upgraded the CPU 3 times, the ram twice, the video card literally hundreds of in/out/in/out with different models including Radeon 64mb DDR, Rad 8500, Radeon 9600 Pro, Radeon 9800 Pro, Radeon 9600 256mb, Radeon X800 Pro, Radeon 9000 oem, Kryo 2, Geforce 6800 128mb etc etc

And yet on the ame install I have only ever installed XP and drivers on the main drive.

The second drive has all my games on it and nothing else.
The third drive has music, downloads, films, projects etc.
All three drives get Defragged monthly.

And I have just ran 3d Mark 2001 SE and 2003 and noted the scores (18800 and 10,050)

I then put a fresh install on XP on a spare HDD that I have, updated it to the latest, all new drivers and set everything up (GPU clock speeds, ram speeds etc) same as my normal set up.

Simply put...a brand new fresh install with none of the other hardware.

And the 3d mark score were 1% different. 1% slower actually, but that's jusr the randomness of 3d mark.

So....after 2 years....its still sharp as a knife

Anyone ever wondered whether multiple drives, (not RAID) is worth it for tidyness, ease of defrag etc?

It is. 100%

[nvening]

If its on a different drive than it may be the drive responsible, even if is the same model, anyway, sounds pretty good, but i have to have other family members using my rig and so whateve i do i have to reinstall ofen cause it always crashes apparently, authough this never happens to me lol

[BenW]

I think the amount of RAM seems to effect the time a fresh install of windows last more than anything else

I was running 256MB and windows would need restarting daily and reinstalling every 6 months or so but when i went upto 1GB all problems disapeared. When i last did a fresh install i thought it felt slower than with the old install