Quiet & Cool Retro (Vista) General Purpose Rig

For running older non-Win7 stuff, and a good many old games. It should run cool with dust protection and an H-100: #672516

Budget = $2500 or less, including shipping (more or less).

Already have keyboard/mouse/monitor.

This would be a replacement for a bunch of old (4-7 year) laptops that were running MS Office, Filemaker, Photoshop and the like.



Edited by taw2015 - 05 Apr 2012 at 1:57am

I originally had the CPU-only DS cooling with glowing tubes, but thought the Corsair-thingy would be better cost-wise.

When I had an HP laptop, I had Vista Ultimate and it was dead-rock stable, and never blue-screened or caused any other problems. In contrast, my Toshiba a500, which I'm using to type this, has crashed occasionally under Win7. I'm always amazed when people claim difficulty with Vista. (BTW, the Tosh has the mobile version of the 560, and at times it's quite slow.)

I edited my original post, so it will have (lots of) old games that don't seem to like Win7, plus graphics creation using Photoshop and Corel Painter with a digitizing tablet, something called Blender, the editor from Unreal Tournament, and, when I'm otherwise asleep, crunching work units from various BOINC projects (which is why I'd like the 570 in it).

I guess I should've pointed out I have another DS system, and it has dual 570's for all kinds of newer stuff, and whatever might come along in the future. Alas, it's overclocked without liquid cooling. That's alotta fan noise running BOINC.

Ah, okay, sorry. I'll let bprat take over from here :P

Originally posted by bprat22 Hi Minka.....I just wanted to show him another way to go, not to steal anything.  Some of us follow each other around, making multiple suggestions.    It's all good

Ah, no, I was replying to the OP. I was just saying that because you know more on the subject than me. You're fine. :-)

Hmmm...

Did some twiddling of the ol' brain-thumbs and came up with this:

#672956

Took the sound board out, added a 520-series SSD, dropped to 8gb RAM, upgraded to i7, then added a Stage-3 cooler, and it came in UNDER $2500.

(Is the power supply too weak for the new setup?)

BTW, $2500 is what I paid for an Apple //e waaaaaaaay back yonder in 1983, and it's always been my "reference" system cost, as in "what can I buy for $2500?" If I have to go over that, it better be damned special.

Edited by taw2015 - 06 Apr 2012 at 11:16am

Just a thought, but Pro Win 7 comes with an XP mode, I know because I use it myself for running old telecom system admin programs, you can get in touch with someone at DS and ask them to do what's called a Drive Partition and simply dedicate XP mode to a partition, a partition is when you logically split the hard drive into multiple smaller pieces.

I would probably ask Alex if that's possible first, but, if they can, you could just run all your old games from the XP partition, and still have the wondrous OS that is 7.