Up and running on my new comp!

[jhall]

Well, I finally got everything in and put together.

The system goes as follows.

ASUS P4P800 E Deluxe
Intel P4 3.0Eghz
Kingston 512megs of RAM (Soon to add another 512)
Western Digital 200gb SATA HDD
Sony 16x Dual Layer DVD recorder
Artec 52x cdrw /DVD ROM
Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite
And i have a NVIDIA GEForce MX 4000 a friend let me borrow till I get the cash for the ATI Radeon i want.


And i think thats it.

Oh, and a brand spanking new copy of windows xp pro i got compliments of my g/f's university student discount. Best 10 bucks spent ever.

The build was extremely easy. Ive only ever upgraded stuff before, never really built one from scratch. Everything plugged in and worked right off the bat. I did have some trouble getting my wireless network back up and running, but i updated the drivers and its all good now.

Couple of questions, what is the difference in all these dvd formats? It looks like the DVD+R is the one to use from what ive read. is that right? Plus I can get the Dual Layer ones and have more room to store stuff i think.

Also, how do you copy dvds. some of mine are getting pretty scratched up, and it would be nice to have some sort of backup i could use instead of the original. can it be done?

Also what temperature range should i be running at? Right now Its at 38c for the cpu and 33C for the MOBO. is that OK for this CPU?

Thanks for all yall's input!
Justin

[Cinic]

I'll answer a couple of questions and leave the rest for others.

The dual layer dvds do hold twice as much data. However, blank dual layer discs are running about $12 each. I'm sure that price will be coming down as they gain popularity.

I use dvdshrink (http://www.dvdshrink.org/) and dvddecrypter (http://www.dvddecrypter.com/) to backup my dvds. They're simple and seem to work well. There are entire forums dedicated to burning dvds so there are plenty of opinions on this subject.

The temps appear to be solid. Does the CPU heat up very much when you stress it? I can get mine up about 10 degrees if I run toast or something similar.

Congrats on the first build. I built my first one a year ago and was quite pleased with the results. I'll never buy a packaged unit again.

_John

[NetNinja]

Congrats! I know you will never ever purchase another store bough PC again.

You have top quality components and the knowledge to fix whatever breaks.

[jhall]

Ive hit 51C when i copied my first dvd. which was pretty slow i must say. about 20 mins to compress and then 20 mins or so to burn to DVD. Is that about normal? what can I do to speed it up?


Also, maybe someone can help me out with this. I have Combo CDRW/DVD Rom and the the DVDRW right. well, for some reason I can only get the DVDRW to actually burn cds. The other reads everything just fine(except blank media) but wont write anything.
The DVDRW does both. Its not really that big of a deal, but it still bugs me. anybody know what might be the cause?

Thanks. Justin

[Tvov]

Originally posted by jhall


Also, maybe someone can help me out with this. I have Combo CDRW/DVD Rom and the the DVDRW right. well, for some reason I can only get the DVDRW to actually burn cds. The other reads everything just fine(except blank media) but wont write anything.
The DVDRW does both. Its not really that big of a deal, but it still bugs me. anybody know what might be the cause?

Thanks. Justin

I don't know if this relates to you, but our comp has a CDRW and I couldn't get it to copy anything for the longest time. I finally figured out that there was a different program buried in my computer for copying to the CDRW. I can't seem to find it at the moment...