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When is the best time to upgrade OS, RAM, Vid cards, etc.....
This is a difficult questions to answer. First let me say that in order for your computer to be all it can be, it needs to be balanced. Now, let me give some examples. Think about putting a Corvette Engine on a motor skooter. You can see how that is just silly. Think about putting a motor scooter engine in a corvet. Again, silly. What about putting a corvette engine in a corvette, but - you put wheel barrow tires on the vet. Perhaps again you can see how even though 99% of the car is a corvette, the 1% that make up the tires will prevent it from performing well.
The same holds true with computers. You can take the fastest computer in the world and put in a geforce 2 in it and all it will be able to do is get 3 fps in DOD. But isnt it the fastest computer in the world? You see if one piece of a computer is slow, it only runs as fast as that slowest piece. Hence, you need your computer to be balanced.
When you talk about upgrading your video card or processor or something, the first question you shoudl ask is - will it make a difference. Alot of the time when you buy a computer from dell it may have a nice processor and enough RAM but only integrated graphics. In that case you want to upgrade your video card. However, if you have a computer which is about 2 years old, you start to think about upgrades. When you do this, you again ask yourself if it is balanced. Often times what people do is they say "ok, i'm going to upgrade my RAM videocard motherboard powersupply and processor by the end of the year, but not all at once because i cant afford it" Then they might upgrade the motherboard and processor wait a month, buy more RAM, then after some times a new card. (which ever order works out best)
Keeping that all in mind, most people do nto have balanced computers, and even so it may depends on what you are playing. In DOD you need a good graphics card to play with high FPS - but when playing supreme commander you can have an older card and you need a ton of CPU power. Thats why here we often reccomend to get better cards but in some supreme commander clan they are reccomended everyone to get better processors.
If you hit Ctl-Alt-Del and you can go to the processes tab or the performance tab and watch your CPU useage. In game its a little harder. But, if you notice that your processor cannot keep up with the tasks you want to do then you know you might need a new processor.
If you are running your game or apps and see that your memory is running out or if you are using aton of your page file then you probably need more RAM.
Hard drive capacity is based upon user preference and habbits. But if you play single player games and the loading screen is up forever it is probably your hard drive access time and transfer speed is slow. You see, hard drives have more than just capacity, there is RPM, seek time, cache and others. Most people only talk about capacity but when you build computers to be at a higher quality level the other things start to come into play.
When to upgrade your OS.... hardest question ever. Easiest answer ever. Find somebody you trust, someone in the technology field and ask them. No lie, there is no other answer. It used to be that people would upgrade everytime they possibly coudl and stool in lines at walmart for windows 98 and such. In reality, weather you change OS is so complicatedly dependant on the SPECIFIC OS in question that you have to get reccomendations from others untill the poaint where you know enough to do your own research and or possibly have the funds or abilityt o try it out on one computer and make your own judgements.
When Windows XP came out, most people said go go go (also windows ME was soo terrible that from now one, lets not mentinos its name. Bill gates would deny it's existance if you asked him about ti on the street so lets just take the hint). With vista most people are saying stay away. Myself, i say "it depends".
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Better to buy from a name brand or build your own.
Well, as long as you understand or are able to understand some aspects of computers and are willing to actually do the research then of course to build your own. Alot of people may give mixed answers saying that Dell buys a million motherboards at once and thus can provide things at a cheaper price and to some extent this is true. However, along with that tag you also are choosing to let Dell decide which corners they want to cut to make money off of you instead of giving yout he best performance. You will see that on the computers which sont cut corners, liek the XPS perhaps, you can build for cheaper because they charge more money for computers that dont suck.
Another thing is that the components in a Dell, aside from having corners cut, are also relabled, and in some cases recoded. For example, a Dell motherboard is labled with Dell so you dont knwo what brand it is, and also the biod of the motherboard is coded with the Dell bios - which, even though the motherboard may support many featurs including overlcoking and such, nolonger have any way of changing those featurs because the Dell interface prevents it.
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Are dual screens an advantage for FPS or smaller ones?
Neither. When you utilize dual screens, like myself, your videocard no longer has to use its energy to calculate the immages displayed on one screne btu now it must make two calculations. This results in LOWER FPS. The reason you choose to use dual screens is for efficiency of the human kind. I am able to use one screen to, say, draw my design of a 5 stage mips pipeline processor in my design programm while my other screen has the class website with the assignment open and or I can be taking notes in MS Word or writing what I do down for the paper that is due with the design. It is basically just so it is easier to work. However, some games such as Supreme commander or fligh sims will take advantage of the second screen and when I play SupCom I use my left screen as my map and my main screen as my main screen.
Second, the physical size of the screen makes no difference on the ammount of FPS you get. What makes a difference is the resolution. If you run DOD at 1280x1024 and get 30 fps, you can lower your resolution to 1024x768 and get perhaps 50 fps. It doesnt matter if the 1024 is on a 14" or 30" screen. That being said, most of the time people happen to run higher resolutions with larger monitors but you dont have to.
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Boost FPS / computer efficiency?
Forgive me but I'm not going to write much here. Basically, you turn off programs you arent using, get rid of spyware and stop downloading pron. Those will help with both. There are alot of things you might be able to do but they are dependant on your situation. Sometimes you need a biger page file or more ram, someitmes you need to turn off the number of bullet holes allowed or all kind sof htings. If you are having a problem then you can ask for help, or search the webzorz - tons fo peopel have alot of fixes for just about everything but at this point, I would just rather leave that to those other people. Many people here will help you out. I encourage them to post here, but I think you can still search the forums here to find lots of suggestions in past threads.
(jk and no offense to anyone). every detail helps
