New PC ram
 

The gaming PC I built Christmas of 2007 had two one GB sticks of very good Corsair ram called Dominator DDR 2 timed at 1066 MHz.

My youngest son stopped by a bit ago and gave me two sticks of two GB each Gskill ram timed at 800 MHz.
A little slower in the timing, but double the ram.

XP Pro only shows 3.25 GB of ram though, a fault with XP itself.
I can not remember if XP is utilizing all of the four GB of ram or not.

But we fired up Unreal Tournament Three and tested it, and the game ran silky smooth, but it always did before, but the PC seems to be running better with it.

I use to play a lot of UT3 in the past, but I have not touched a PC game in probably over two years.

What a joy it was firing up the game and playing it again.
A little rusty, but I got back into it right away.

I had forgotten how much fun PC gaming is, and I hope to have some free time to play UT3 more.

It was great to get back and play it again after a few years.

Double the ram is always good, and I already have one of the best video cards back from the time I built the PC, so I am not going to upgrade it.

Will probably build a new PC a few Christmases from now utilizing the latest CPU and technology.
The one I built back then was top notch.

have u tried windows 7 yet? I just intalled it a month or 2 ago, and with the same hardware.. (3.2 ghz core i5 intel, 8 gig corsair ram, pny 1ghz vid card...etc) the windows 7 is far superior to xp.... everything moves smooth and fast.... although... if u built ur pc in 07, some of the hardware may not play nice with 7...

I honestly think xp just couldnt use all the ram it had availible...

Not going to try Windows 7 until I build my next PC.
I also heard the opposite, that Windows 7 will install and run better than XP on older rigs than mine.

Not that mine is that out of spec.
Here is my build:
https://www.yotatech.com/forums/f98/...puters-134418/

Corey:

32 bit XP only supports up to 3.5GB depending on chipset.

64 bit xp supports 4 GB but I wouldn't rec xp 64 bit as the support is horrible and it's very problematic.

your OS is 32-bit, which can only handle up to 4 gigs, but in reality you only get about 3.5 because some memory is allocated to other hardware components like graphics.

You built the box so you probably know what memory expansion will do, and the purpose behind it, but if I was building a game machine I would really only worry about my graphics card, processor, memory speed, and software/os tweaks. 2-3 gigs is plenty space for game environments to load.

32 bit xp supports 3.5 gb but will only utilize 2 GB of it
32 bt win 7 utilizes 4
and 64 bit system support up to more than u can currently put into a computer

Some (of the more expensive) editions of 7 also come with XP-mode which uses Virtual PC and is a 32bit edition of XP Home iirc. Unfortunately XP-mode runs through a Remote Desktop window and some programs do not like this as DirectX support is still a little wonky or because they refuse to run through a remote session. When you build your new machine, make sure you install service pack 1 for Win 7 as well as this improves RDC integration and solves a lot of earlier issues with running some software in XP-mode. Make sure you don't feed it too much ram either or it will severely impact performance of other software running on the host OS.

Also, ram is getting cheaper and cheaper by the day, when you build your new machine if you should be able to throw a lot of ram into it without breaking the bank, consider 12gb or more depending on the cost by that time. I've got 8gb in my machine at home and honestly some days it just doesn't seem like enough.

I will probably not build a new gaming/work PC until Christmas of 2012.
Will def throw the max ram at it, and by then Windows 8 will be out :D

Seriously though I see no reason to build a new PC as of right now.
Mine is plenty fast, plays Unreal Tournament 3 with no lag, and does everything I ask of it including photo editing.

Support isn't an issue anymore. As newer OSs are already 64 bit, so drivers are readily available if needed. And after service pack 1/Professional people have had fewer problems with it. Since service pack 2 even fewer. XP Pro 64 bit service pack 2 runs just fine on my system.

But so does XP 32 bit service pack 3. I have both. And there's not much difference. Not on my system anyways. Which ain't saying much these days. 1gb ram @ 464mhz x 2.32ghz Athlon 3000+ w/40gb SATA 150 HD & GeForce 6600 GT 128mb @ 1116mhz, 550mhz core clock. It's still got one of the best DVD-RAM supermulti-recorder(DVD-RAM/DVD-RW/DVD+RW/DVD+R DL/DVD-R DL/CD-R/CD-RW) drives you can buy even after all these years though(years = ~7).:D

And BTW...
http://reviews.cnet.com/windows/wind...-31346186.html