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 ?? 

Sadly not for Windows 98. But for Linux and Windows XP it works very well. Just tick the "Enable 3D Acceleration" in a machine's settings. 

 

 

Back on the laptop tip here. Am considering a few options, par example:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158888

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158353

(Noted what nntt said about Toshiba)

Naturally I still have questions and confusion:

2gig ram minimum, more wouldn't hurt. 160 gb HDD is probably enough. Maybe it is worth me getting something cheaper with lower specs and adding ram?

Processor, I don't know what's better out of Intel / AMD, are they roughly comparable?

Graphics, this confuses me too, in the above examples the HP has a small GFX card, whilst the Toshiba has intergrated GFX with more memory assignable. Which is better?

Also, Vista, I've never heard anything good about this, although I've used it at a friend's house and it seems a bit inferior to XP in useability but not badly so. What problems are there with software and shizzle??

Etc etc.

Ta :) 

Looking at tech 5 months after I bought stuff makes me sad :(

The Toshiba is almost identical to mine. From experience, it's a nice machine, runs all my apps without slow down and lets me edit stupidly over-sized PSDs without any lag. Does suffer as a gaming machine (altho not sure if you want a laptop you can game on). While it runs recent games fairly well (runs source engine stuff fine, been playing Demigod a lot on it recently without a hitch), it'll struggle with top end stuff (and sometimes flat out refuse to run (see DoW2)) as well as the occaisional old game that doesn't support it's API properly.


The HP model is easily better spec'd. Likewise, don't know how the Intel vs AMD chips stack up, but certainly for mobile gaming and ting it'll do better, not sure what HP's build quality is like, I imagine it's not terrible (and you're unlikely to take your laptop to a field for several days or have it sat on top of vibrating things ;) but mebe someone else has experience with them.


As for Vista, dunno about the HP, but the Toshibas come with an XP Pro disc since while they are contractually obliged to install Vista, they are well aware it's shite... 

Note, a lot of my points there relate to the different graphic chips more than anything. The Intel GMA just isn't a gaming chip (altho the 4500X does at least manage to cope most of the time, the older versions tended to fall over sideways a lot more).