RAM is cheap at Crucial just now, I just bought 2x2GB for the laptop which runs Ubuntu 11.10. Cost of the 2 sticks was £19 delivered, so actually cheaper than buying one 2GB stick and adding that to the existing 2GB. This desktop has 8GB, again sourced from Crucial, total cost a year ago was £37 delivered but RAM is now lower again in price, hence the laptop deal and others like it.
Why use different DVD drives for different regions?
Fluendo DVD player software allows playback of discs for
any region, which would liberate one bay for a DVD9-compatible writer, far better than having to use DVD9-5 and compressing films to fit them onto DVD5 discs which are limited to 4.7GB apiece.
On this desktop, I'm using an Asus mobo, having had problems in the past with the less durable caps found on current Gigabyte boards; I built one machine for a friend who'd already bought the mobo and found that several of those (no name) caps were oozing after only three months of use. Asus boards have a mixture of Toshiba and Matsushita caps which are over rated on peak current and VW, so less likely to weep. Being physically larger also means that, when they do start leaking, changing them is less likely to cause problems with heat soak from the soldering iron since each one is mounted through the board, rather than to its surface.
In a ready built PC, obviously such things are covered by warranty but when building with components from a variety of sources, it's much harder to persuade the manufacturer of any individual part to accept liability in cases of claims being made, hence the importance of going for the more durable mobo initially.
tractorman wrote:.....The things I hate with a new PC are that it is a lot of hassle reloading everything and, after a month it doesn't feel fast anymore!
And that right there is one of the main reasons for my having ditched the 'doze for good some years ago. No fragmentation to worry about, no way for malicious code to execute itself when your back is turned and software for anything that 'doze can do is free or very cheap from the many repositories available to the Debian user community. In the extremely unlikely event of there not being a direct equivalent for Ubuntu, the latest release of WINE will run any Windows software from any version, 98se through 7. Just the job for those who want to use, for example, IE. Not that you'd recognise it when running in Ubuntu though, 'cos it works properly!
