Asking for help/advice on computers

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Jetboy
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Asking for help/advice on computers

Post by Jetboy » Thu Dec 16, 2010 12:05 am

####Work in Progress####
If you have any ideas then post away, hopefully I'll work them in and eventually sticky this somewhere
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After seeing alot of requests here over the years from people asking 'what's the best upgrade for me' , 'why can't I run this' etc thought I might try and make a post of things that I find helpful when I get that question from people so in turn people can both help themselves and get an answer faster

First and foremost....if you want to find out something about upgrading or buying a new PC, give a budget...a realistic one, no real use in asking what's the best video card for me to get if you've only got $100 as people will immediately start listing cards that are out of your budget, hence wasting your time and their's. Oh and cheap is not a budget....as to me cheap is $300, to others I know anything under $700 is cheap...attach a dollar sign to the front of a number...that's a budget

Of particular note for graphic card upgrades, list the monitor your using...the latest and greatest $1k+ video card is a complete waste of time if your gaming on a 1024x768 monitor, the same is also true for the other end of the spectrum, a $100 video card is pretty pointless if your gaming on a 30" monitor at 2560x1600

List as much as you can about your current computer, if your not PC savy then grab Speccy (no not Inspector) in particular the Portable version as it does not need to be installed, just unzip and run, it'll give you a breakdown of everything on your PC. You can save the list as a .txt file but if your listing that on the forum please please please check the file and make sure there are no serial numbers listed as by default it lists the OS CD Key

If your PC is something like a Dell or HP etc, then list the Model or any other identifying stuff so the people trying to help can check the model and see what specs it has (though of course listing the specs goes along way to people actually helping you as they see you trying to help them help you....damn that's alot of help words)

If there's something not working, give as detailed a description as possible, saying 'it won't play rFactor' is not really to helpful. 'it won't play rFactor as it keeps on coming up saying 'insufficient memory' when I launch it using a mod launcher' now something like that is going to let people give you places to start looking for problems and solutions to get you back running again

If your buying/building a new PC then try and list what your planned main uses are for it, ie media machine, video editing, NAS, gaming box, LAN machine...the more people know about what you want it to do then the more they can narrow down the component choices to work within your BUDGET (yea having a budget for me is a big one)

Antivirus....get one, plenty of free ones out there, I've been using Microsoft Security Essentials for around a year now I guess and have never had any virus issues though I don't go round opening .exe files in my email so it may well be just some common sense saving me a few heartaches there

Make sure your programs are updated, java, adobe etc all have auto-updates, just let them do their thing also keep an eye on http://www.filehippo.com for new updates for programs that you commonly use

READ READ READ and RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH, if you make a post that show's you've actually put some effort into trying to educate yourself before asking the question then people are usually 10x more likely to help... make http://www.google.co.nz your friend, learn how the search engine works, ie there are certain ways to phrase searches and ways that you can exclude words from searches as well as ways to include entire sentences as a whole, page here covers them
Read tech sites and if you don't understand something, then google it and read some more, some good sites include

http://www.guru3d.com/
http://www.bit-tech.net/
http://www.legitreviews.com/
http://www.hardocp.com/

Equipment prices - http://www.gearbot.co.nz/ what pricespy used to be, do be warned though, the lowest price does NOT always mean the best deal, I regularly buy from Ascent and VRC computers who are not the cheapest, but their service is way up there....have had many people demand that I try and match prices from Pricespy or they'll just buy from the cheapest vendor....my suggestion...fine go ahead and save yourself $5 just don't come crawling to me when the company doesn't want to hear about your dead Hard Drive that you want to RMA, they've got your money and that's all they care about. Ascent has a real good rep in the community and if your Palmy based then VRC has been a great supporter over the years of many aspects of the local gaming scene

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Aaron
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Joined: Tue Feb 20, 2007 10:41 pm
Location: Palmerston North

Re: Asking for help/advice on computers

Post by Aaron » Thu Dec 16, 2010 10:03 pm

shot jetboy, another link would be that forum link of the pc build suggestion at gameplanet.

http://www.gpforums.co.nz/thread/302905 ... b6ae6053a4

I assume they still update this as I havent read through there for quite a while.

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