Speedy system drive wanted

[camieabz]

I've considered SCSI, but with the prices being the way they are, I reckon I'll go for a 10 GIG UDMA100 system drive & a 20-40 GIG "everything else" drive.

It will probably be easier in the long run.

Thanks for all posts folks!!!

<b>
Heatsinks, fans & whisky...Everythings Cool!
</b>

 

[Guest]

Glad to be of service! You'll like the card and speakers.

Mike

 

[beans]

Mike -


We do -- it's an outstanding combination. Blows my (admittedly old) stereo system away.

By the way, early results on EverQuest zoning are surprisingly good -- much quicker than before and occasionally under the mythical 2-second mark. I have to conclude that zoning was not disk-bound on the old system.

Plain Internet access is significantly faster too. I wish I knew why.


Again, we love the sound system. Thanks for your insights.



beans

 

[Guest]

Sorry to interrupt on this enlightening discussion of hard drives, but it seems to me that you might simply want more RAM. Check your memory usage when playing Everquest. The game undoubtedly unpacks the data directly into the memory space.

Leo

 

[beans]

Leo -

I think you're right about memory having a lot to do with the improvements, but I think it's a matter of quality, not quantity.

The old machine has 256MB. That was probably more than adequate for EverQuest -- Mrs. beans says there are many players who have only 64MB. This new system has 512MB, mainly because we have some photo-editing software that seems to want more than 256.

The important difference, I think, is that the old one has PC100, probably CAS3 RAM, and the new one has PC133, CAS2.


I would very much like to monitor memory usage as you suggest. I use NT's PerfMon extensively at work and wish there were something like it in Win 98 or Win ME. I just checked out ME's Resource Monitor; compared to PerfMon it's a joke.

Another problem is that the EverQuest client takes over the machine and won't let you multitask, so running any kind of resource monitor could be problematic. If you have any ideas on how I can get around that, I'd sure like to hear them.



beans

 

[randomly]

A major factor in EQ for zoning is your network connection, a fast connection helps a great deal so get a DSL connection or cable if you can't manage that(DSL tends to be lower ping and more consistent than cable, but not everywhere). The other thing is to modify the DATARATE.TXT file in your EQ directory. This is a tiny file with only a number in it, for modems it should be around 6.0, for DSL or cable you can make 9.0, but no higher. This tells eq how fast to accept data. speeds up zoning a lot. good luck.

 

[beans]

randomly-


We have cable and it's usually very fast.

DATARATE.TXT is at 5.0, so we will definitely experiment with that!

Thanks for the tip -


beans