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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (3355)	11/2/1998 12:05:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Respond to of 14778

Clarence, IMHO your anxiety on both counts is as understandable as it is ultimately unwarranted. :) On SCSI/IDE, I too was struck by Sean Daily's beating of the SCSI drum. Having used mostly IDE peripherals and all IDe HDDs since starting with NT, I respectfully dissent from that view. IDE standards and support have improved vastly over the past few years. In my limited experience, I've actually had more problems with SCSI drivers than with IDE (an SCSI problem is keeping me from using SP 4 as we speak.) I'm even having great luck so far with a fasttrak IDE controller under NT. As for PCNut, my experience also was that Humphrey might not get back to me for a day or two, but that he'd come through with a good reply/solution eventually. AFAIK, it's just he and his wife who mind the store there, so he can get pretty swamped short term. Good luck--hope it all arrives soon, and keep us posted.

To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (3355)	11/2/1998 12:11:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

>>like oil and water. Of course I'm not reading the author's story, but my guess is he has a logic chain somewhat like the following: o NT is for servers o Servers have many simultaneous users o Many users use disks randomly and unpredictably o Memory is so expensive one can't afford to allocate much of it to disk cache o Therefore fast disks and multithreaded pipelines for many concurrent disk operations are necessary on NT machines. I think virtually none of this applies in our case ("our" meaning most readers of this thread), and some of it is just plain out of date. Of course I made it up <g>, so the author perhaps has more applicable reasons. If so I'd like to know what they are. NT is no more antipathetic to IDE than other Windows OSs (is antipathetic a word? Should be if it isn't). Once in a long while I have several very active disk operations going simlutaneously and get some disk interference, provided I've used up all my memory disk cache. In these isolated instances, I would probably get less interference from SCSI disks. But unless I spent a fortune on them (AND the controller, AND the cables --sheesh, the price of SCSI cables!), the disks themselves would probably be slower than DMA IDE disks with the proper mb and drivers. Faster disks and memory cache make up for a lot of multithreaded overlap. Need plenty of memory, though. Spots

To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (3355)	11/2/1998 12:31:00 PM
From: Len	Respond to of 14778

Clarence... To assuage your anxiety, let me confirm to you that your choice was a good one. I have been using NT Workstation as my sole trading machine for over 6 months now, and I couldn't be happier. I daytrade, with 3 realtime feeds coming into one modem, and I have virtually no problems, other than the occasional ISP related ones. Yes, there is a steeper learning curve, and you need to teach yourself to do some things differently than before, but the positives far outweigh the negatives. Remember to use a lot of RAM (I use 128) and set a large pagefile, (I use a total of 400) and you'll be fine. You'll love the stability that it offers over the other model. I also think far too much time is spent regarding cooling. If you are not overclocking, the stock fans do a fine job of keeping things cool. One CPU fan, and one case fan (optional) is really all you need, IMHO for adequate cooling. Len Len