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Hello. I'm a new guy but I'm an old guy. I've been working on hardware and software since the days of vacuum tube analog computers. I spent a lot of time working on mainframes in the 70s and 80s. I've been building my own machines for as long as I can remember. Right now I run a dual-core 3 ghz box, but XP will only allow me to see 2 gig of ram, so I'm moving on. The new box will run Windoze 7 Pro. Not that I love M$oft, but I spent a lotta time writing code for Windows-based machines and I'm just familiar with a lot of it.

I've been working with Intel-based machines since the 8088 chip but I prefer AMD processors because....well, just cuz.

I'm a retired programmer but I seem to have found a new career in photography and website design and maintenance. I run my own linux based server from my home and have numerous systems on what we used to call a TAN (Tiny Area Network.)

Right now I'm building the Dreadnought, a dual quad-core Opteron based box with a whole buncha goodies. The build diary is here:
http://www.raytherat.com/dreadnought/Welcome.html

I'm trying to mentally design a liquid cooling system for it. I'd like to find an external cooling tower and add my own pump(s) and cooling blocks. I want to cool the disk drives as well as the CPU. The GPU has its own air cooling system so I'm not gonna worry about it. Until I start overclocking, I'm gonna use the air cooling in the Cooler Master 932 case.

I'm gonna go start connecting some cables.

Ray the Rat in the High Desert

Welcome Ray!!!! Wow glad to have u here!!! Gonna hit u up for some of that knowledge!!!!! :clapping:

Welcome t o the forums Rat.

Air cooling should be plenty for your hard drives, google did a big study a while back that I think showed that HDDs have a higher failure rate running cool than hot. (Not saying you want to run them hot but 35-40C is AOK for a HDD.


As for the rest, going to check out hte log now. Must make for some nice wPrime times ;) DVD/BDROM rips must reencode uber fast on that setup :)

There are a few members here with more than 20+ years experience with computers so you will fit right in :)

Finished reading.

The upgrade version of windows 7 installs the same way that Vista did.

Install with no product key as a full retail install from the upgrade disk
then go back and do an upgrade over the trial install this time using your product key.

Personally, I am not a fan of "upgrade installs" so I always do fresh...

MAke sure you have X64 version of 7. My personal feelings on the OS are not favorable, but I do run it. I am a software and hardware junkie and always want the latest. My 24/7 rig though is still running Vista x64 though and going strong after all this time :) (It has been so long since a format reinstall for me I honestly have no clue how long ago I installed it LOL, a year maybe?, compared to quarterly XP installs... its a great OS)

7 should be even better than Vista once I get over all the stuff they broke in it.

I thank those for the welcome. I can agree about more damage coming from overchilled HDDs, but on my present system, I need to keep a 24" boxer fan blowing into the case to maintain drive temps under 50C. When I keep the air moving, they stay consistent at around 32-24 C.

As for knowledge...well, if ya wanna know why they ran Binary Coded Decimal-based machines for banking, I can tell ya about that. (It was to avoid that extra fraction of a cent in interest created with floating point math that some programmers routed into their own accounts.)

I can also tell about the first multi-processor mini-computer (Burroughs B-900...that's who I worked for) which was a great machine...unfortunately those who marketed it didn't know nuttin about computers so I'd have to go in after the installation and make it work right.

Ohh...I started out with a TI-99 toy, then went to a Commodore 64 and then a 128. I considered an Amiga, but went with MS-DOS based machines because there was more of a market for what I wsa doing on the side...writing dBase III applications. I've worked on a vast array of Burroughs systems, from mechanical adding machines to B-7900 and A-9 mainframes, HP3000s, IBM AS400s and a whole buncha server boxes. When I retired I specialized in writing interfaces between machines that didn't speak the same language...like the AS400s. It was a lotta fun to get data out of an Oracle database and into the 400s flat file system although they called it "an object-oriented system. You can call files anything ya want, but if they're just a collection of pre-defined records especially without inheritance, they're flat files.

Yeah...it's been an interesting journey. Most of the time I use the machines for photo editing and other graphic development and from April through October I'm at hot rod cruises, sports car and bike races or on the salt flats. I have a 29 Model A rat rod (what else would a rat have?) and a car that my partner and I are hoping to have ready for the salt this September.

I play blues bass and Hammond organ (I'm much better on bass than organ...but I'm still workin on it) and I'm a widower living alone in a big house that I bought for my wife before I lost her. Things is what they is. Can't change what already is. Oh...I've been a friend of Bill W since 1992.

My main sites are http://www.chevyasylum.com/Welcome.html and http://www.raytherat.com/Welcome.html I maintain a whole buncha other ones. I thought retirement would mean takin it easy, but I've never worked harder nor enjoyed it as much. I'm livin a dream. Best life I've ever had.

Edit: I've ordered a full version of Win 7 Pro. I figured that since it was gonna live on an SSD, I didn't want to fight the upgrade process and scatter the SSD's data. Easier to do it once and not mess with it.

Welcome to the forums Ray!! I bet you could fill our brains with all kinds of programming knowledge. Hope you like our little slice of the internet.

:welcome: Ray, glad you decided to make your first post. Please enjoy the forums and get to know the gang.

Supes :cool3:

Welcome to the forum, Ray.

As I was reading your posts, I was envisioning you tweaking Win7 to the nuts. :thumbsup:

This was sensationalized by Richard Priors character in Superman where he did the exact same thing to get rich ;)

That sounds about right to me. I'll tweak it til it begs for mercy. :)