Quote from TA;456309:
Did you ever stop to consider that maybe not everyone has such simple computers as you?
That's just insulting. omgomg y u insult my computer. ;_;;
Quote from TA;456309:
I have a god awful amount of 3d modeling and 2d painting programs that very specific settings and things like brushes, filters, patterns, renderers, unwrappers and whatnot are extremely ridiculous to get back to normal.
There's also encoding programs and games, and just about anything with modifications could have a bazillion installed and they might just not be all that easy to find and reinstall. Not to mention settings once you do, and on top of that, you might not even know what ones were installed! And there's compiling things which need dependent resources, which who knows what the hell those were...
Most, if not all professional software packages offer ways to import/export custom configurations. And for those that don't, you can often still do this manually by backing up the settings files in the AppData directory. For things like custom plugins, you should keep them backed up somewhere anyway, or at least keep a list of addresses where you can re-download them from. And if you're doing software development work, I think it would be fair to say that it's your responsibility to figure out how dependencies work... :P
Sorry, but this does sound like a problem with organization more than anything else. My machine has seen its own share of piles of dev software and various tools and junk, but I get rid of stuff that I'm not going to need in the very near future to make my backup process simpler. It's also good security practice.
Quote from TA;456309:
Talk about... I mean, all of that was just totally uncalled for.
The obnoxious comment was referring to your "omg NVIDIA >>>>>> ATI!!11one". Being a blind fangirl is fine if you're just screwing yourself with your beliefs. But trying to pass it off as advice to someone else is not acceptable--and disputing fact with those beliefs, without facts to back it up,
IS obnoxious. Someone had to be an ass and set the record straight. :P
Quote from TA;456309:
The fact you think it helps with security and reliability is laughable... If you format and reinstall an operating system, obviously any bugs you may have had will be eliminated, assuming they aren't in the data you backed up, in which case that is a moot point, but it also resets your updates to a very vulnerable point until you re-update them, and you also have to redo your firewall and anti-virus, which unless you keep your computer offline until that's done, you're just leaving yourself open to attack. And it's not going to help with security at all if you didn't have any viruses, trojans, worms, adware, spyware, malware, etc. in the first place. Sure, it might get rid of some tracking cookies or something, but that's not exactly hard to do without reformatting.
Your train of thought is laughable. x( One of the main goals is in fact to eliminate bugs in the OS installation and its updates and components. You wouldn't back up that stuff (I don't see why anyone would lol). These bugs, which include corruption of files in some cases, versions not properly updated and updates improperly installed, are often what slows down performance and makes you vulnerable to exploits. You have to keep in mind that while Microsoft tries to thoroughly test patches, their baseline test is a bottom-up approach where they patch starting from a clean system image, usually from the latest service pack. Sometimes updates get installed in the wrong order and this is later fixed. Sometimes, updates get revised, with fixes built-in. Long story short, if you want Windows to work the way Microsoft expects it to work, you
have to give it a fresh start every once in a while and let it re-patch.
Furthermore, from the security perspective, you don't need to worry about the firewall because if you are behind a NAT router, as most people are, you're shielded from virtually any network-based remote attacks. Not to mention that the days when Windows machines could easily be owned through the network kinda ended with Windows XP.
From the virus standpoint, you're not in any danger either, since you will only be downloading and installing updates until you get your system back up and running. But how can you be so sure that your system never had a virus in the first place? Because your antivirus didn't find one? As someone working in the field of security, I can tell you that the fact of the matter is that
ALL antivirus software is crap and cannot guarantee your system is secure. The only way to guarantee is to do a wipe. That antivirus software itself is exploitable just like any other software on your computer. The best proof of this are the massive botnet networks we have. lolol Yeah, you could argue that those people are idiots and you're better, but you'd be surprised. >_>
TL;DR: The security benefits of wiping your system clean are real and far outweigh the risks of leaving your system temporarily unpatched while you download updates.
PS. One way to mitigate risk further is to obtain the latest install disc of your OS, with the service pack already integrated.
Quote from TA;456309:
And as for performance, well... Obviously if you were using a high percentage of your harddrive space before and then you wipe it clean, you're gonna have better performance. But once you fill it up again, that's going to just drop just like it did before. Which, a lot of that is probably due to fragmentation and the way sectors tend to naturally fail over time in a hard drive. They're generally built assuming things are gonna fail now days cause it'd be too expensive to make ones that didn't. I mean, the only other reason it'd speed up is if something was wrong with the OS installation, like corruption and whatnot.
But... there aren't going to be significant long term gains to justify the trouble for most normal people.
Mostly irrelevant points; see above. Learn to better manage hard drive space. And first of all, hard drives don't fail as much as you say. Second, when sectors fail, they are not re-used, so they won't affect performance. Seriously, if you have a failing hard drive and you don't like backing up data, then performance is the least of your concerns. >_>;
Quote from TA;456309:
Well, we're just going to have to agree to fundamentally disagree about that.
You're just being stubborn and disagreeing with facts. :P You should read up on those new AMD cards instead.
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Quote from Micho;456574:
Any who, I finished with installing a the new drivers, updating DirectX, and also enabling multi-core settings, really don't see any difference. So now we move on to buying new parts, derp.
Can you buy the parts online? Because I don't own a credit card but I have the money, and my parents really won't let me use their credit card for these things, well they won't let me touch their credit cards at all. So, any viable solutions here?
That's too bad. x(
Yeah, you can buy parts online. Since you're from Canada, Tigerdirect and NCIX both support bill payment (also called electronic payment, I think?) as a payment method. That's how I bought my parts when my visa's credit limit was too low to buy the computer. xP Basically, the stores will give you their business name, your account # and the amount you have to pay. You can then go to your bank branch and request to make a bill payment with that info. Otherwise, you can use PayPal, or a prepaid credit card, as TA suggested.
But first, did you confirm with your parents that you can do this upgrade? O_O I mean, if they won't even let you format, letting you dig into the comp and mess with the wires is kinda...
Another thing I'm curious about is, does Vindictus tax all your CPU cores like it should? Try checking the Performance tab in the Task Manager while you run the game. Let the task manager run in the background for a bit as your play Vind, then take a screenshot of the CPU usage graphs for us. :3