Be Excellent To Each Other

I don't really like this one.

I do like this one, but I already have it.

I would like one. It was me!

I would quite like this, what do I need to check to know if it'll work in my PC. Which is about six years old if that helps.

It just needs a SATA bus, which it almost certainly will have.

If your current drives have SATA connectors instead of the old IDE connectors, then you'll be alright.

Technically speaking the SATA3 drives can totally saturate earlier SATA buses so you won't get MAXIMUM WARP SPEED out of them but they'll still be a quantum leap ahead of old mechanical hard drives.

I think I've mentioned earlier in this thread that I lobbed a second hand 128GB SSD in a four years+ old laptop, and it's like a whole new computer.

If your PC has a cable like this in it, you're good to go.

http://img.misco.eu/resources/images/pr ... 0x1600.jpg

Jesus, that's stupid-cheap.

Yoinked from Amazon. I look forward to my blazing fast PC you've all promised.

Is Amazon cheaper? I thought it was an Ebuyer promotion?

Read my last few posts in this thread.

Ebuyer appear to have held the price on that SSD despite it being the Deal Of The Day yesterday, so maybe that's the new price point for SSD storage.

I wasn't going to bother with any more incremental upgrades for my current PC as the fundamentals of it really are cracking on a bit now (the CPU, mobo and RAM are fully 5 1/2 years old), so I was intending to sort of struggle on with my 128GB SSD storage wise (I've got a big hard drive a NAS for storage as well, but 128GB is limited even just for OS + games), rather than chuck more money at what is a pretty elderly machine now. (Albeit still very capable, truth be told.)

(The case is over eight years old!)

However, with the next-gen consoles having turned out to be such as astonishing damp squib performance wise I'm beginning to think that the old girl might actually do me for this console generation too, and thus lobbing a big SSD into it makes sense - I really can't see any point in buying a whole new PC.

Admittedly I've had to tweak BF4 to maintain my preferred 60FPS at my monitor's native res of 2560x1440, as it struggles a bit all ULTRA-ed out to the detriment of gameplay in certain situations, but it still looks stunning, and certainly not 'Hmmm yes I need to spend £1500 on a new PC' unacceptable.

Maybe as this console generation moves forwards the age of my PC will catch up with it and developers will tap into oodles of untapped potential in the consoles and I'll be left behind, but you can't get blood out of a stone, I think my ancient PC might be alright for some years yet....

Has anyone used driver detective? My webcam wasn't working so I tried to make it work and downloaded driver detective. It told me I needed lots of new drivers. Should I trust it? They wanted me to register to update everything. I bought a new webcam as well so it might be academic.

I've ordered an SSD from all your recommendations. I'm planning on doing a fresh install but I've just realised that my Windows 7 disk is only an upgrade disk. There's various work arounds online but this could prove interesting.

Just clone it across, s'what I did both times and it's been fine.

I'm going to do a fresh install on mine because I don't see the point of buying a new drive specifically to speed your machine up but then copy and old Windows install onto it; especially as my install's pretty old now. I might see if I can back up my Steam folder beforehand as it's likely to be pretty chunky right now but aside from that it's just the usual stuff I'd need to reinstall which I don't mind too much.

Just download the driver from the manufacturer's site; that's always safer and easier than buggering about with some potentially suspect third-party app.

Before you do the fresh install try a clone of your existing OS and see how things run, SSDs are so off-the-scale mental compared to mechanical drives that you might just be pleasantly surprised.....

(Unless you really want to do a fresh install, which is a nice thing to get done once in a while for general tidiness purposes.)

that and windows 7/8 don't really suffer like older versions, disk cleanup covers most things.

Thanks, I've uninstalled it now. The new webcam was recognised by the computer, but dodn't work, then hen I rebooted, it didn't see it at all. The manufacturer's website doesn't have drivers to download, and I don't know what model it is (Polaroid). Grah! Stupid things. Can I connect the old webcam to my xbox and skype?

Is that in response to Bik's post?

If it was, that's not what I meant, which is that 7/8 are almost completely insusceptible to the gradual crufting up that warranted regular refreshing the prior few releases.

Though 8 even has built-in refreshing.

Malia - Device Manager's properties for the device will tell you the usb id of the webcam. Google that and you may find something useful.

I'm going to do a fresh install when I get my new drive (If I can with an upgrade disc) as I want to clear out all the crap and my YouTube problem has returned so I'm hoping this will help fix it.

Oh, Windows users and your quaint "it's normal to reinstall the entire OS every year." In eight years of cumulative usage spread across my two Macs, I've reinstalled from scratch exactly once, which was when I shrunk my MBA down from a 500 GB drive (as my primary machine) to just a 64 GB SSD (for limited use only).

Eh?

That's what we're saying exactly not to do and you don't need to do, ever since the XP days really, and certainly since Vista and 7 came along.

My 'donkey work' PC (which prior to that was my main/gaming PC) is running on an XP install that must be cracking on for six or seven years old now, and it's still working just fine.

That's probably more often than I've had to. Tch, you should probably get a better OS; Windows is pretty good?

Nah, just a lazy reminder to new SSD buyers

Given how old that article is would I be safe in assuming my new drive will have a TRIM enabled firmware pre-installed or is this still a common issue on modern SSDs?

Weeeeee, down a zip line!

(seemed rather pointless)

This is why it was a lazy reminder. I haven't checked. Didn't realise how old that article was to be honest

Heh. It's just like a tedious PC spod in a console thread.

Just FYI though I haven't reinstalled the OS on either my home PC or my work laptop for years either. Probably close to your eight years.

Played for and got

The mac mini I use at work gets wiped every other day!

Nothing to do with it being a test bed for deployment. Oh no sir.

I ordered one of those there 500GB SSD's and will be fitting it into my laptop later this week and doing a fresh install of Windows 7.

However - I can't find my original Windows 7 CD and I can't find one online that's not Dutch.

So I need to borrow a Win 7 home 64 bit disc then if anyone has one please? Or can point me in the direction of a Yarrr version I can put my legit code in for? However...

The sticker on the back of the laptop has faded so much I can't read the product key. Do I need anything else other than the product key Windows info gives me to install it again? I can run Belarc to get every last code going if that's required.

It's some mark of the change in circumstances talked about here where it's been that long since I had to install an OS I've no idea what the procedure is now.

Does the company you work for have any sort of Microsoft Premier contract in place? (They're quite common in larger organisations.) If so you should be able to snag an MSDN key and install media from the IT spods as long as the laptop will be using for testing, development, or work related activities. (I've got every OS since XP that way, although it does help that I'm one of the IT spods.)

You do have the option of simply cloning the OS to an external drive and then flinging it back onto the SSD once it's in place, (using something like Acronis), there really isn't the same concept of Windows installs 'degrading' over time like there used to be back in the 95/98 and to a lesser extent the XP days.

Sorry that's not very helpful really is it? Maybe you should get a Mac or something, DocG says they're brilliant.

SSD get! Now begins phase 2: working up the motivation to bother installing it. I'm insufferably lazy when it comes to this kind of thing so that second phase could take a while...

Where's my bloody PC? It's been 14 days. HNNNGH.

Could have built your own by now...

I think that one I linked to had a 3-5 day lead time.

Personally, i'd have bought a Mac.

Why have something tomorrow when you can wait two weeks?

That reminds me, the badger game is on-sale really cheap here. It's probably worth picking it up now (you'll get a Steam key for it) then you can just download and install it when the machine turns up.

All this tech stuff is all well and good, but imagine the sheer humiliation of turning up in a trendy coffee bar, having paid the best part of a fiver for coffee, basically, which cost a few pence to make- only to unfold some paupers laptop sans fruit logo and lightey uppey keyboard?

Fuck man, may as well be a tramp who's pissed his trousers there and then. Buy a Mac, for heavens sake!!

Cor. Awesome work, Bamba! Thank you so much.

I saw it and thought of you.

In fact, now that you're about to join the glorious PC master race, it's well worth either bookmarking or RSSing the PC section of Lewie's SavyGamer as that's where this and many other excellent PC deals come from:

http://savygamer.co.uk/category/deals/pc/
http://savygamer.co.uk/category/deals/pc/

Oops, bollocksed up c&p of the RSS link there:

http://savygamer.co.uk/category/deals/pc/feed

I remember a while back that you did a list of indie games worth playing and was meaning to trawl back through BeeX and find it. WHEN IT BLOODY TURNS UP.

Where's AE? Do they normally take this long from Chillblast? Anyone? Anyone?

I think I got one for my Dad from there a year or two ago. I seem to remember it taking a while but I can't be any more specific. Did they not give you an estimate at the time you ordered?