Any advice on getting a new 'puter?

[Ubermensh]

There's really no need to pay for most of your programs these days, especially security software, just as long as you take the proper precautions. Anyway here's my recommendations for security and other:

MS Security Essentials I've heard good things about it and Z loves it.
Panda Cloud AV Free cloud AV so it's always up-to-date as long as you have internet connectivity. I have it running on a few workstations at work and it seems pretty good so far.
AVG Free Also use this on a few workstations at work. Good free protection with some nice features for a freebie, but TBH I much preferred the pre-8.5 versions.
Avast Old standby. Good protection and some nice skins. Also has anti-rootkit


Now onto the free firewalls. I wouldn't even bother with ZoneAlarms these days. I think you get a better firewall with much better interface with either:

Comodo Personal Firewall. You can also get the a free AV with it for simplicity, but I think the AVs listed above are better.
Online Armor Free
Outpost Firewall



Also get some good scanners to run on a regular basis:
MalwareBytes THE malware scanner, and a must have on every machine.
SuperAntiSpyware
Sophos Anti-Rootkit Free rootkit scanner.
And you already have Spybot.

Also get these other great freebies:
Process HackerNot a necessity, but a great alternative to the default windows task manager.
Cobian Backup Awesome free backup program.
ImgBurn You really don'tneed it in Win 7 but this is an awesome iso burner for XP/Vista users.
Defraggler awesome free defrag tool (I know Vista's is the worst ever, don't know about windows 7) or you can use
Auslogic Defrag.

[zeiroe]

Originally Posted by Ubermensh

Sophos Anti-Rootkit Free rootkit scanner.

Yeargh! sopHOS!!!! God damn you sophos!!!

... I would highly recommend against sophos (head aches out the wazoo because of it here) ... Hate the hell out of their software suite since Northrop ditched Symantec and went with ... sophos *facepalm*

[Ubermensh]

You hate their suite but what about the stand alone rootkit scanner? It's free, and doesn't do anything real-time, just on-demand scans. I would highly recommend having a good rootkit scanner, but there aren't many free ones out there. Do you know of another good one Z?

I personally like GMER, but I would think it's too advanced for Fist and wouldn't be of much use for him.

[Ubermensh]

Found a huge list of great free programs http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic3616.html

[Blackfist]

Dude uber. that was exactly what i was looking for. awesome.

[Ubermensh]

Glad I could help ;-) Bleepingcomputer.com is the shit btw. Great forums for computer help.

[Arkkham]

thanks for that site, def going to book mark it

[Dretchen]

While on this Subject:

Micron put out a new SSD.

YouTube - Micron RealSSD C300 vs. HDD—Everyday Tasks

YouTube - Micron RealSSD C300 vs. HDD—Everyday Tasks

Although it looks pretty dang good, I would like to point out, Micron has yet to bench against the WD VelociRaptor 10k rpm instead of the 7200k rpm standard HDD.

For a gaming rig, the V-Raptor still outperforms SSD's on the majority of benches. The WD 150 V-Raptor does freakin great! The smaller the drive size, the faster it is. Most benches partition the drives to 32Gb for tests.

On the other hand, if you do a dual boot system like I do, then for everything else aside of gaming (video, graphics, music etc..) then by all means, add 2 of those Microns because they are steady w/large reads / writes w/ around 121Mbs as opposed to the V-Raptor that delivers about 97Mbs

Here are results of what the V-Raptor's Out Performing SSD's and other HDD's.

Read / Write performance:
It's obvious that the disk drives are at a disadvantage due to mechanical delays: The moves of the read/write heads as well as the rotational latency (it takes 6ms for a 10,000 RPM disk to spin once).

Random writes are the SSD's achilles heel because of it's erase blocks, so performance is not nearly as good as the random reads. Disk drives on the other hand are able to cache written blocks and write them later. The partitioning trick helped with random writes as well, improving the score of the 32 GB Raptor partition by 20% and the score of the Velociraptor partition by 30% compared to the full disk.
The end result is that while the SSD is 11% faster than the 32 GB Raptor partition, the Velociraptor partition beats the SSD by 6% – however without partitioning the SSD is 13% faster than the Velociraptor (and 43% faster than the Raptor).

Sequential Reads / Writes:

1024KB, The Velociraptor is in the lead across all file sizes, it shows that it has a SATA-300 interface, whereas the Raptor and the SSD have a SATA-150 interface. Note that these high speeds (up to 238 MB/s) are reached thanks to the disk cache of the Velociraptor.

Random reads / Writes:

The SSD fares poorly in this test, because of its achilles heel "small writes". Apparently there are not enough (or not distributed enough) writes to make up for it with its access time advantage.
This achilles heel of the SSD is due to "erase blocks": Wherease a disk can write small blocks of typically 512 bytes in size, the blocks are much larger for SSDs. First, the block has to be read into the cache, the data changed in the cache, and the full block written back to disk. So small writes have a lot of overhead.

Large Reads / Writes:
Here is where we see the SSD out perform;

Both disk drives make use of their cache to buffer writes, and performance drops noticeably as the transfers become larger. The Veloricaptor writes 100 MB transfers at 117 MB/s, the Raptor at 84 MB/s.
The SSD writes about 132 MB/s no matter the transfer size.


My results:

Bang for the Buck : V-Raptor hands down.. as SSD's cost more.

The V-Raptor out performs an SSD for gaming until I can see proof otherwise.
Games are not dealing w/ large read / writes so that SSD performance there does not matter unless you have a dual boot rig like I said above or have an all around rig that does everything. Even then, it would do you better to dual-boot you your "everything rig".

For Gaming, I will stick with my 150 V-Raptor x2 (raid 0)

When I want to boot into the SSD for everything else, yes, I would use the New Micron C300 x2 (Raid 1)

[Ubermensh]

WTF I tried posting 3 goddamn times and every time something fucked with my post...

Anyway... So Dretch do you work for WD or just own stock? Because I've never seen someone not in a Best Buy uniform push hardware like you're pushing these Raptors. Which is moot because Fist already made his PC....

Also, as I've stated spending money on two Raptors in RAID 0 should be the ABSOLUTE LAST upgrade you should do for performance, you will absolutely get more bang-for-the-buck on just about any other component. More RAM, better CPU, better GPU, all would be better places to drop that dough for real-world performance gains.

And to really piss in your Wheaties Dretch, the Raptor isn't even the fastest drive you can get. You're better off with a Samsung Spinpoint F3, here are the benches. And a smaller capacity does not equal a faster drive. Drive form factor, platter diameter and platter count, recording technology and data density, rotation speed and access time, interface and buffer memory, are just a few things that are far more critical to drive performance than capacity. I think you are talking about short-stroking a drive, which does help performance at the cost of a great deal of data space, and has nothing to do with capacity.

[Dretchen]

Nope, Sorry, not pushing anything.

Was just mentioning the new SSD out by Micron and that if you had read thoroughly,
you could then tell I was just pointing out the difference between V-Raptors and how Micron has not benched against the V-Raptor.. as of yet.
And yes, I already know the rig was done, this is just reference since being on the subject of rigs.
So go ahead, piss in wheaties all you want, I don't eat wheaties.

If you have Certs in both OS / Hardware and have done benches on SSD's, or any Drives for that matter, then I welcome to see your reviews not someone else's, otherwise your point is moot and subjective and objective to a matter of preference.

I have not Benched the Samsung Spinpoint F3 as of yet, but then again, the bench was against the Micron.

When I do the bench, I may just let you know, maybe not since I am subject to having my wheaties pissed in.. oh wait, I already said I don't eat wheaties..