armateddon

i'm gonna get some kind of radeon card for the graphics. do most cards have a port for CRTs and LCDs...or do they use the same port? (i'm behind. never had money to buy a new machine before.)

i'm getting a new computer february-ish, and i'm trying to nail down exactly how much it's gonna set me back. i have a general idea of what parts i want, but several things are bugging me. i'd ask these questions in different forums but it would be hard to keep up with and they seem too basic. thanks in advance. 1 what's the advantage of having two dealies of RAM? 2 what's a controller and why do i need one? 3 if i buy a new hard drive, do i simply reboot with the winXP disc in? 4 generally, are high-end machines louder than, say, a playstation 2? 5 do i _need_ an ethernet card for cable or DSL?

i was using google and found someone who said he was getting more ram so multiplayer will be smoother. uh...someone explain this.

i see, so who makes good ram?

i'm building my own sys and i wanna get a ridiculous amount of ram so i don't have to close apps before playing games. so i'm gonna need more than one stick. but that could get costly... so is ram generic like cd-rom drives? and by the way, i was wondering if there's much difference between two channels and four channels of sound. i noticed the motherboard i was looking into buying (gigabyte ga-7vrxp) only supports two.

Say you buy a computer from a well-known manufacturer. Soon, you become a witty, knowledgable, and initimable geek, thanks to the 'net. So you upgrade to a sleek GeForce4, a quick 1.2ghz processor, and a fancy cooling system, like the stuff from Koolance. You even get ahold of a really cool case, aesthetics and practicalities balanced perfectly. But then you realize you've swapped out all the original components. Not a single original capacitor, screw, or speck of dust is left. Is it the same computer?

So a new processor would serve better than more RAM... Cool. I've never installed a processor, is it tricky?

Oh, and I'm using a GeForce 2 MX 100/200... Thought that might be helpful. Heh.

Ohh, I forgot. They say Return to Castle Wolfenstein has a fabulous multiplayer. But I've only played the demo (which is single-player), so... Y'might wanna check cgonline.com for more games.

Dunno about Radeon, being an NVIDIA guy. But as for multiplayer games... Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. I usually connect at 48.2kbps and can handle pings up to 300 without much lag. But if your modem is ludicrously fast you can join those games with 30 players and frag 'til ol' Bessie comes home. Theoretically. Heh.

I was wondering... What's the difference between SIMM and DIMM memory? How do I determine what kind of RAM my motherboard supports? I'm running an XP machine with 550mhz, 73% of my HD free, 128 RAM, and I'm having some rigidity playing games (specifically Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Max Payne). What's more important for me, a RAM upgrade or processor upgrade? And installing RAM is just a matter of pulling the old chipset out and plugging in a new one, right?