Recent content by lfranklin

Mario is pure greatness. Mario, Zelda, and Final Fantasy have lasted for ages and will continue to. They all also have a 9 out of 10 chance of any new game being great!

To answer docta13's question (So would option #3 + 1GB RAM + Vista Premium work well? Or do you feel I'll want to move to XP?) NO!!! That setup would run well for XP, but you will hurt on Vista. For Vista, I advise no less than 2Gigs. Judging from what you state you want to do with this...

Ditch the sound card. The onboard sound will do just as good for everything except professinal music work.

Unless you do professional music work, dump the sound card. Onboard sound now a days are good enough for any game.

Yes

Hmmm...gaming and graphics? Well, I'm going to leverage what Solariscs wrote. You could actually step down from that processor to a E6550 and save about an extra 40 bucks. You could probably go even lower. Reinvest that into getting more RAM (about 4G). That would actually be overkill for...

You never told us what you plan to do with your PC. It would help us help you more if you did. Only thing I frown on is your choice for graphics. You could do alot better with that kind of money, even though it won't be fanless. If you are not overclocking, then ATI would be your choice...

C2D indeed. It would also serve you justice to get a better quality MB.

the 7900gs would be your best bet.

For what you are trying to do, it is all about RAM, Hard Drive speed and space. Get the most and the best you can afford. Aim for low latency RAM. I would definitely go with at least 4GB of RAM. Anything more and you might have to upgrade your OS to Windows Server (x32). Not all of Adobe's...

If you want better gaming performance, go with 7900gs. If you want better graphical design performance and to create HD videos, go with the 8600 GT.

I would upgrade mobo, ram and cpu. you should be able to get all of that for less than 400.

In addition to FRAPS, I believe there is a fancy Logitech keyboard that will display it as well.

The 1280 x 800 should be the max your laptop screen can display and NOT your graphics card. If you hook your laptop to a monitor with a higher resolution limit, then your graphics card on the laptop should display up to either its own limit or the monitors limit. Remember, 1080p resolution...

That setup should last you through another year.