I want to know your thoughts on this build:
ABIT IL9 PRO, Intel 945P, Socket-775, ATX, SATAII, DDR2, GbLAN, PCI-Ex16
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz Socket LGA775, 2MB, BOXED w/fan
NEC DVD+- burner AD-5170 IDE Silver OEM DVD+R/+RW/DVD-R/-RW (Dual Layer)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM
OCZ Gold XTC DDR2 PC6400 1024MB KIT, w/two 512MB PC6400 XTC, CL4-5-4-15
ASUS GeForce 7300GS 256MB DDR2, HDTV, PCI-Express, Tv-Out/DVI-I, Retail

I know there are some things missing, but I'm gonna take those from my current computer. But anyway, what do you think? Will this bird fly even though it's a budget version?

haha. definitely. it's better than mine. and with the right maintenance programs and some care, it should work very fine in fact.

of course, i wouldn't expect it to run Crysis on max graphics if you get what i mean.

Heh. It's not supposed to be a gaming computer, not hardcore gaming anyway. I mostly use my computer for regular surfing and Photoshop, which is why I decided to go for a tad bit more expensive RAM.
Anyway, I've ordered that stuff now. Hopefully I'll have it here in 2 weeks or so :P

regular surfing and photoshop? that's is more than enough man. i'm a huge surfer and while i don't do much picture editing, i do run some demanding programs and mine's already pretty satisfying. i believe you'll find yours very good.

however, keep in mind maintenance is very important. partition your drives properly, keep your files organized, get Diskeeper to keep your drives healthy, and every few months do a format to ensure it's performance keeps up.

of course, if you're VERY good at maintaining, formatting won't have to be done that often.

have fun. hehe.

Alright, regular surfing might be an understatement. Most of the time I have atleast 10-15 downloads running at the same time (torrents), but I wouldn't call that extreme surfing.

Think you can teach me a thing or two about how to partition my drives properly? I've actually never done it :P

10-15? haha. high five man! i'm about the same. finally got myself a Demonoid account.

anyways, partitioning? well, it's actually personal preference of sorts i guess. let me sorta try and explain a little and see if that can help.

i've got 280GB of space, 80 old IDE HDD, and a 200GB Sata HDD. i partitioned my 80gb into 1 single drive, and installed my OS and all stuff i term "disposable" in a sense into it. programs i can easily replace and such. usually work stuff and all like Word, Frontpage, Photoshop and the usual.

my 200GB disc is partitioned into 3 drives. a 20GB Bitcomet drive, to limit down how much i download at once. of course once it's done i move it into my Entertainment drive, which is 80GB. mainly movies and games and Anime.

the last 100GB is partitioned into my Download drive, for my song downloads and all from Ares and occasionally torrents. this drive hosts my song collection, music videos and my ripped cd collection.

this way, i keep my Operating System drive relatively clean. no cluttered music files or video files or anything. jsut programs i can replace easily or whatsoever when i format it.

so when i do decide to format my computer, i can easily just format that drive, leaving my files intact. and when i want to remove games and all, Entertainment drive. it's pretty easy for me.

i don't know what you mainly have in your computer, so can't exactly help that much. but i hope telling you mine will help you a little. and of course, you might want to partition a drive for softwares/programs you might find online. i sometimes download programs online like Diskeeper and such, but you might never know what the installation file actually holds. so in case of virus, partition that drive straight and reformat OS drive.

Okay. So how about I partition my current drive into one partition for my OS only, and then another for "office" programs (such as word, excel etc.) Then partition my 320gb drive in half or something, one for entertainment (movies and music) and the rest for just anything.

Sound ok?

yeah that'd be good. of course another thing you can also do is, install your "office" programs with your OS, but partition one drive for all your documents.

like currently, even though my word documents and stuff isn't under entertainment, i keep my documents saved there. just to be on the safe side. i've tried once, i forgot to save "My Documents" before i reformat. lol.

but yeah your idea sounds real cool too. should work pretty fine.

Hmm... But if I formated my OS partition, wouldn't I have to reinstall most of my programs? Is that why you put your "office" programs on the same partition as the OS, since you would have to reinstall them anyway?

hmm... i don't really know though. i always installed them on my OS drive. since i've got the cd i don't really mind reinstalling those. takes a short time only for me. i'm usually just more worried about my documents and all.

but i do think that you should not need to re-install it even after you've reinstalled a fresh copy of windows i think. frankly i've never tried that. lol. thanks for bringing it up man i'll keep this in mind the next time i partition my drives.

so... frankly i've got no answer to your question. i'll try and search online later but i'm not exactly good at surfing for answers. good at surfing for torrents lol!