- Windows 7 64 bit works great for me on 8GB ram. I never use 8 GB though, not even when rendering in vegas or compiling maps with q3map2.

- Don't buy a TV. Television is bullshit.

- No I don't but I heard many positive things and would like to get one.

I don't actually watch TV Channels. I just enjoy watching movies and some TV series (dled). I am tired of watching them on my PC so a TV would be nice

32bit or 64bit still doesn't really matter, Win7 is nice and usable but I still prefer and boot much more into XP.

More ram is nice if you can't spend your money on anything else, I have 8GB and because my 32bit XP can't use more than 3.25GB, I use the rest for a ram-disk. It's just awesome like a superfast ssd.

TV-->price, size, web, 3d? .... to many questions

Bugdet is around 650 Euro. I also don't mind spending 500 Euro if it does what I need it to. (Just for clarification, my company gets nice discounts from Samsung since Samsung is a customer of ours)

Don't need 3D crap but I see most models these days come with it.
Don't need any WLAN or Interwebs goodies either.
Ultimately wanna connect my PC to the TV to watch movies. This is done via HDMI I suppose? Anything I need to look out for here?

Sizewise 40 Inch will do. I looked at the 46 inch as well since I will sit around 4 - 4.5 meters away from it. But they are a bit out of my budget.

- Samsung LE40C650 (Make sure you get a "SQ" panel!!!)
- Samsung LE40C750 (same as the c650 + 3D. The 40" model is only available with "SQ" panel, so no panel-lotto there)
Also don't worry about led thing, it's a marketing gimmick like laser sensors in mice. True RGB-LED is better indeed, but that's a different price-segment. CCFL>EDGE-LED!!!

- LG 42LK530 (cheap, no 3D, THX or any other fancy stuff, but nice big screen and can do 24p@true100Hz)

ps.: Don't forget that these TVs all have high (40+ms) input-lags, even in "game mode".

Thank you for the reply. Did some reading up and I know now what you mean in CCFL vs LED Edgelit.

What about Plasma?

LG 50PV350 seems like a good deal but maybe you get what you pay for?

I never saw the 50PV350, and I won't put my trust on a model without seeing it IRL, so I can't help with that, sorry. If you are decided to go for a bigger screen, Samsung has the c650-750 in 46" with SQ panels too (le40c650-750).

Plasma gives awesome picture quality (especially with darker images), but not really good for computers because of the annoying ghosting effect. Most plasma have shiny screen surface which gives more reflections when used in daylight, and also requires a little more power.

What do you mean not good for computers?

When there are still images (like the taskbar, or a hud in a game ) is on the screen for a long time (for hours) the still images will burn into the screen, and if you start watching a movie after that. You will see those burned in ghosts for minutes until they fade away.
More bad can happen if you accidentally fall into sleep watching a movie, and your media player exit/closes after the movie ends, you will wake up next morning with your desktop burned in permanently, and warranty won't cover that kind of problems.

I see. Thought you meant like ghosting from gaming now xD

That LG seems nice indeed.

Question for me is: How bad is the effect from edge-lit screens?! From what I understand, the effect is most noticable with single colour images (like all white or all black). But that is not too common when watching movies. Or do you still see a lot when watching movies too?

It's noticeable, and you have to go into a shop with a dark preview room) and decide it yourself.
I think you need to do this before you buy a TV anyway , nobody can tell you how much you can tolerate, except you:)

"That LG seems nice indeed"

Yea, There was a special sale here a few weeks ago for 119.990HUF (399€).

Are there any applications you would recommend for setting up a ram drive or any articles you would recommend to read up on?

Also, what do you think of hyper-os? Have always wanted to use a ram drive and never got round to setting one up :(

Any help/tips would be much appreciated!

Sorry ,I never used/tried hyper-os.

I use Superspeed Ramdisk Plus, it's not the fastest, but very easy to use and have very nice features. It's not free, so if you want something free, try this (it's very limited, but it's free).

Ramdisk plus does everything pretty much automatically. If your system is compatible, you can make a permanent drive what you can partition and format just like how you would do with a physical disk.
If you want, it can save and restore the content of the drive at bootups/shutdowns, and you can also make a permanent full size image anywhere you want.

What I did with my XP, is I made 4767Mb image file in my C:\ root, which is the image of the ramdisk. The content is restored every time I boot into XP (I don't save the drive at shutdowns because I only store things there what I only read/never change, or things I don't need (temp shit), but it can be saved if you want).
I use NTFS filesystem on the ramdrive, and make junctions to the specific spots to speed things up)

So I moved this 4GB+ file into the very first clusters to my HDD (you can order and prioritize files with ultimate defrag (wildcards also work) . The image restores almost instantly because the seek and access time is very low at the beginning of the HDD plates, I don't really notice a huge boot time difference with ramdisk ON or OFF tbh, perhaps it takes a few seconds longer, but I have to type in my password anyway, so it doesn't really matter:)

ps.: Anyway I also order many other things on my HDD like this, and it gives me a very nice performance boost.

Ah, fantastic. Thanks for the infos:)

np, hf:)

MyDefrag is free and can also optimize your HDDs by moving the most important files towards the outer platters.

It comes with default scripts that are very decent (for example the "monthly system drive" script improves boot times greatly) and it's not too hard to make your own script or customize the default ones.

I use it for my gaming drive too, with a simple script that organizes files and folders in alphabetical order (so I just make sure my most important games are at the top of the folder list etc.).

nah, i do things very differently.

First of all, I have "last access bit" disabled, so I can't use such features, but I found them slower anyway. I just move certain system files and ddl-es to the front on the boot drive, in a very long and carefully chosen order.

On my data/game drive, I move huge continuous files to the "front", I'm talking about movies (e.g: *.bik, *.iwd etc) and other huge shit what will never get any update.

Both on the boot drive and on the data drive the idea is to move the required but never written files to the front , and let the continuously rewritten and changing files to gather at the end (the beginning of the free space). With a setup like this, the majority of the drive can be optimized to the performance/ order I prefer, but most importantly they never get fragmented with the continuously changing files (logs, cfgs, etc...) The other thing is, if you gather the changing files on the same place, you also reduce the seek time, which is an additional plus.

"First of all, I have "last access bit" disabled"

Me too, but MyDefrag reads the prefetch files (for the system drive script) and just the folder and file names for the data drive script.

The system drive script is very well done and puts the drivers at the beginning of the drive, and makes sure to leave some gaps for the temporary files/logs etc.

Of course that's just the default settings, many people on the forums have made their own scripts that can work very differently :)

I also have a lot of small partitions to make it easier to manage fragmentation etc, and use a lot of junction links (got 3 HDDs + 1 SSD atm).

Also, NTFS with 64kb cluster suffers very little from fragmentation (and the performance for games is a bit better too in my experience) downside is that if you have a lot of tiny files it will take up a lot more space than it usually would. It's also not recommended for a system drive so I only use it on my gaming drive.

I use large cluster size on every drive I have, I can't care less about free space tbh:D

ps.: I measured 2-4% speedup in loading times with properly placed files both on the system and on the data drives, so it still matters a little bit.

I will take a look, thanks for the info:)

"I remember XP 64bit being quite unsupported software wise."

No problems at all. I am using Win 7 64 bit for 2 years, and never had any problems with software.

i turned off the page file with windows 7 64bit and 8gb ram. no probs

I started with using Win7 beta 64bit (about 3 or 4 years ago?), and I've been using it since then. I have had 0 driver problems and it has been more stable than my experience with XP.

There were some driver problems with 64 bit windows, but like, that was years ago.

Alternatively, my brother uses 64bit XP and he seems happy with it.

For a TV I would recommend a Samsung. I don't know how large you would want to go, but I think 32" is already a good size, I probably wouldn't go larger than that (myself). Anyway they're pretty cheap.

I will probably get an SSD with my next major upgrade in the next 2 years, but for my gaming PC I will probably need a 240gig drive, which is quite pricey at the moment.

-been using x64 7 ultimate for 2 years, works great.

-buy a nice big monitor and a tv tuner card instead :)

-ssd is uber leet, make sure to read up on them and understand how they work and how you have to use them first though.

Unless you're using some ancient ass software that refuses to work on a 64-bit platform, then you're fine. I've been running it stably for 2.5 years now. Loving it.

LED TVs offer much high dynamic contrast and response time. I own a 40" LCD 60hz and I rarely watch TV. But I love it when I'm streaming Netflix or watching some DVDs/BDs.

Even a slow SSD will own just about any HDD you can throw at it. A VelociRaptor from WD is pretty fast, but I've seen some high failure rates from them. I'm waiting for them to become a little bigger and a littler cheaper before I bite.

-Win 7 64 is fine, not a lot of compatibility issues here (a few yes, but even with XP I have some old games -not DOS ones- that I never managed to get running properly so I can't say XP32 is perfect either)

-depends what kind of TV you want, huge, medium, small, 3D, Plasma, LED, normal LCD etc.

-SSDs are great OS drives and some applications benefit greatly from them as well, most games don't gain anything from them but a few do (mostly MMOs), when you get a SSD on Win 7 you don't have to do anything special as Windows will do it for you during the install (unless for some reason it doesn't detect that your drive is a SSD)

x64 is fine, you won't have any problems.

tv: I have a 3d led sony bravia, it's nice, 3d is good but rarely used, also get LED. Always get bigger than you think will suit your room. Every time I've bought a new tele, I always think it should of gone bigger.

Windows 7 x64 with 8GB is a dream come true, smoother then Windows XP.

I still looking for anything 32bit what would run faster on my x64 win7. I always get speeds 2-3fps lower compared to XP in every game, and 3D rendering is also slower in win7 with a few seconds. XP handles my custom resolutions much better, and the usb polling is also more stable somehow (XP gives rock steady 500hz, while win7 jumps between 495-500).
......
But the difference is negligible indeed, its just my stupid perfectionism:)

Ah, I thought I was the only one who noticed that all games run a bit slower on 7 (I'd say 2-3fps as well but I have seen a bigger difference in some cases though).

I experimented with different hardware and the results were very consistent so there's deffo something fishy in Win 7 (I've tweaked it too but it doesn't seem to help).

No problem with the USB polling here though, I get a rock solid 1000hz.

As for custom resolutions, I've got it working even better than in XP now thanks to the EDID override trick (combined with nVidia's custom resolutions).

Yea, It's a bit slower, but not much.

About the resolutions:
- On XP, I just make a new resolution in Nvidia CP and set the default Hz, and I'm done.
- On Win7 I also have to make a new EDID each time I want to add a resolution, and even with that, sometimes games just shit on my Hz choice go with 60Hz.
I never have problems like that in XP.

alot of performance loss on windows is todo with aload of the running services that are not needed for your system, but run as default for a global installment and give the whole world a desktop where 99% of hardware and apps work

Imo only a casual computer user would allow windows to load such unnecessary services.

I have disabled too many things to count, and it's still slower.

it might be, but thats because of all the extra widget n stuff on the shell gdi.. disabling unsed services still gives back some performance

http://www.99years.com/~daryl/win7.jpg

this is more or less what my Windows 7 system looks like on boot-up, services/running processes/resource usage wise, with the exception of running mIRC and one other process and a slightly lower memory profile. I boot with 24 running processes and 8% memory in use and I've disabled all the (to me) obnoxious UI elements.

how's yours look?

edit: crap, didn't disable action center before taking the SS but still looks clean enough, apart from the low res I'm on atm. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to get rid of that Show Desktop icon either? I try as hard as I can to get rid of the maximal amount of clutter and bloat.

Here's mine:
http://i.imgur.com/pf5sa.jpg

I could have disabled the nvidia service too (and thus go down to 25 on this SS) but then the nv control panel stops working and I do need it sometimes.
(well, I've actually removed it now since I don't use the control panel at all these days)

I also see that's you've disabled the Multimedia Class Scheduler thing, but if I do that the Windows Audio service won't work at all (even after a reboot) so I get no audio. So I guess you have a different soundcard and it works with yours but not mine, or something. Still weird though.

My ram usage was 600mb when I had only 4gigs of RAM, but with 8gigs I can't get it lower than 800 (doesn't really matter anyway). Of course that's only after a fresh boot, after a while my idle ram usage is like 1.6gigs or something (and it was 1.2 maximum with 4gigs)

I'd love to remove the Show Desktop icon too since I never ever used it and it's just sitting there for no reason (there are keyboard shortcuts ffs).

Maybe I should look at the group policy thing again, there's loads of things you can tweak in there.

yeah, that looks pretty good. normally I'd have BITS off as well, and I've disabled DHCP client before, but I've run into issues when doing so, even though I use static IP settings. I can't disable Workstation or Server or TCP/IP NetBIOS helper since I use file-sharing stuff. I've had to enable a lot of these services temporarily to gett Windows Update to work without annoyingly failing any time I change something and taking 30 minutes to boot-up. I wish it were a lot more clear about what it was doing and what it needed, instead of wasting CPU cycles for ten minutes trying to start disabled services.

why do you have the nVIDIA service enabled anyway? I have it set to manual so I can start it up if I really need to change settings, but otherwise it's just a waste of resources. I've actually only got the network & volume control "notification" icons and no annoying show hidden icons button normally, too, so it looks even more cool. I'll post a new screenshot after a truly clean boot now that I've disabled a few other things going off your image.

Yeah, I got rid of the nvidia one now. I had it on because not so long ago I was using it a lot, having issues with custom resolutions etc. It's all sorted now though so pointless to leave it on.
Plus, for 3d settings and profiles I use nvidia Inspector anyway.

Weird about the DHCP causing trouble, I've got to admit mine likes to turn itself on for no reason even though its startup type is clearly set to disabled (it has to be related to a specific application but I'm not sure which one yet)
It's like the BIT service too, even though it's set to disabled whenever I turn windows update on it still manages to start. No big deal though, just odd that windows seems to disregard the "disabled" state for some services (and they're not even "critical" ones). I just remove them once I'm done updating and all is fine.

I've had some issues with updates too yeah, although the last one went very smoothly by just turning windows update on (it did the rest on its own), which surprised me.

yea, when you use windows update it can revert a lot of disabled services.

I just updated mine a little bit but it ended up taking me about 4-5 hours because my system wouldn't reboot. was because I just installed a new RAID mirror using built-in Windows 7 RAID and for whatever reason it didn't properly install the boot manager / configuration and I had to spend about 8 years pulling my fucking hair out trying to figure out how to get it to work with a mirrored system partition, but I finally managed to issue the magic series of arbitrary, arcane commands, which a googol googol monkeys banging on a typewriter for the entire life cycle of the Hindu god Brahma couldn't reproduce.

it looks a bit better now but I could probably go further:
http://www.99years.com/~daryl/win7_new.jpg

something else I noticed about your set-up is that, somehow, you have the DNS client disabled. how the hell is that working out for you? (my assumption was that this disables DNS resolution completely; apparently it only disables the local cache, but that's surely got to slow things down a bit? although I use a local caching nameserver for lookups anyway..)

Er, I'd never looked into the DNS service much, I think I saw some recommendation to turn it off back in the XP days because it was not working properly or causing issues or something.

Turning it on now I don't notice any difference at all TBH.

SSD is the best upgrade you will ever do. If you are playing something like Total War it makes the game so much quicker to load.

I use Win 7 64bit it works fine for my purposes- gaming and browsing the web.