sorry, i forgot to mention: the temperatures look fine. All fans working, heatsinks clean. the only thing that might be hot without me noticing is the northbridge.

most voltages are a little low, but they have been since day 1. I tried increasing agp and cpu voltages slightly, so that they match the desired values.

I unplugged all unneeded components. Remaining: CPU, Board, Hd, RAM, floppy drive, GFX card.

Memory got through the first pass fine.

Linux: hmm, it's hard to reproduce the problem in windows already :(

I just tested stalker some more and it ran fine for an hour or so. Then, when i quit the game and it switched resolutions, it crashed :(

I think it's either the power supply or the gfx card, or the board, which has had problems with the ide controllers before. Guess i have to try to get my hands on other components and swap :( 

I experienced random reboots for a few months; it always seemed to be when the hard drives had gone to sleep and then tried to spin up. Then one day, instead of rebooting, my PCI-e got fried.

I'm fairly sure the problem was my power supply - I had a stock 300W, which was probably not adequate for extra HD's & cards. I've since replaced the PSU (with a 500W) and the mobo: no problems since then. 

To check the heat, simply open the case and touch the components after such reboot. 

I have a friend who has just offered me his old shuttle:

- Shuttle SN95G5 case + motherboard
- 2Gb RAM (can be upgraded to 4Gb)
- 500Gb HDD
- CD/DVD rewriter

Not sure what processor is in but I know it's dual core.

He says it will be a pretty cheap price second-hand.

Obviously this is quite an old spec machine, but currently I'm using: P4 2.8 G / 2Gb Ram / 120 GB HDD / CD writer only.

So if I can make a little step up at a cheap price, well, I'm pretty damn tempted. Saves me dicking around with components basically. The guy who had it is an uber geek, I'm trusting it's set-up well.

The main question being: He's only got an uber-basic GFX card in, and obviously I want a pretty damn good one for games. So, what is available for a shuttle like this, and what is recommended?? 

You probably want something single slot and fanless to fit in the case and not overheat it. Dunno what would be, exactly. 

Can one recommend me some good comparison sites or give me some ideas here?? It's ages since I looked into this sort of stuff... 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/benchmarks,30.html 

Forgot about Tom's, that's quite useful.

Now, which one will fit in a shuttle and cope with it's power supply? 

Thats the million dollar question isn't it. Shuttles are not really designed as gaming pc's so I doubt you are going to be able to find anything that beefy that will work inside it.

Also there is the question of space, quite a few of the new graphics cards are quite large and barely fit inside a full size atx case. 

Being a barebone owner myself I strongly suggest you get a proper (tower) PC... 

sometimes, after playing the quake i got this in my pc
http://img90.imageshack.us/my.php?image=90561958.jpg

almost all icons look incorrectly
i'm sure this somehow alt-tab related, because
i'm using alt-tab frequently during playing
after rebooting the icons look correctly again
any solutions? 

Try running crap-cleaner registry cleaner. I've had that stuff before and I think its related to the registry (whatever the hell that is)

Brainy people will know more, but in the mean-time try this free program:

http://www.ccleaner.com/ 

i don't see anythig wrong with those icons. they're just monotonous. ;) 

Laptop recommendation please.

For general stuff not particularly gaming.

Must be reliable, cheap (below �400), decent processor and RAM. Not bothered about fancy trendy kid extras on it. Non-widescreen would be an unlikely preference. Smaller the better too.

Ta. 

and i'm very satisfied with it, although the high age brings disadvantages like having only one usb1.0 slot :(

Keyboard is high quality with a good layout, small (12"), both trackpoint and touchpad, etc.

If it's your secondary computer mainly for carrying around, i'd always suggest smaller models over faster ones, unless you need the speed or good screens. 

and it came with external cd and floppy drives ;) 

Lenovo/IBM's Thinkpads are said to be amazing.

megaman: Doesn't it have a PCMCIA slot? I got an Dell D6x0 something and it only has one USB1.0 too. So I grabbed an PCMCIA card with 2 USB2 slots. It's very "fragile" though or it is the driver or Windows, transfers like to stall and I get some filesystem warnings (on my 8GB stick, 2GB one is fine I think).

And one (noname) card I got earlier froze the whole PC (from the hardware or low-level software side) when I put it in. Once I unplugged it, all was fine again... 

Lenovo/IBM's Thinkpads are said to be amazing.

They are indeed. I got to play with one for a few months while cleaning it for a business associate last year. Core 2 Duo model. While I didn't try gaming on it much, it did run Quake fine and I could edit half a gig PSD files without slow down...

They're fair spenny tho, model I had was retailing for over a grand when I looked. Depends how much disposable cash you've got and how much you value portability (they are very ickle and very light, especially for the power).

Using a Toshiba Satellite Pro now, which I'm very happy with. Runs everything except DX10 games fine and you can pick them up fairly cheap these days (altho I did combine xmas sales+recession to get mine cheap). Bit heavier/larger tho... 

ibm's are fine, too. that's why the quality of my dell surprised me so much. it's almost on par (and has more features).

if you can't spend so much money, get a used one and buy a replacement battery.

Spirit: hmmm, i had a card like that a few months ago, but it stood out of the chassis on the left (where the pcmcia slot is) -- i don't know how portable the laptop will be with something like that. Is your card smaller so that the slots are completely inside the chassis? 

Oh, it's perfect to leave a USB stick plugged in and accidentaly step on it... So, no, sadly not. It is also chunky and blocks the other PCMCIA slot (not that it matters for me). 

Yesterday my dad uncommented the lines with "hiddenmenu" and "timeout" in the menu.lst. And the next time he booted the machine the screenrez was too low. Doesn't that sound strange? What can be wrong with the machine? 

Just spent over 12 hours this rainy easter trying to install Win98SE on my 4coredula-sata2/E5200. No joy though... I think it's meant to be possible, but perhaps i have to remove the SATA drive (I've got win98 on an IDE drive) where Linux lives.

I tried hyperion drivers 500A and 522A, and 4-in-1 drivers 145 and 143 i think, as well as 81.85_forceware_win9x for my AGP GF6800. But whatever i do i can't get my dvd on ide2 recognised, and no agp either i think, as the card is reported as installed but wont go over 640x480/256colors.

It's not a bad board actually.... I guess i'll do a clean XP install, but i
miss those old games running natively. Ho humm.. 

It is a shame that VirtualBox has no Guest Additions for Windows 98. Wine might be a better choice. I just recently spent a whole day testing and doing a bug report, heh. 

in the BIOS. Had a problem with my freinds computer where we had to "enable Plug and Play devices on the PCIe"

Until we did the card would only allow us 640x480, 256 colours.

So I would go through the bios and look for some sort of PnP AGP option or something..... 

Thanks Ricky, will try that.

Spirit.. I used to play with virtualiszation... but none of them have hardware accelerated openGL/directx do they ??