April 20, 2005

• You need to see what ram is compatible with your motherboard and bios. My advice is to get exactly the same kind of ram that is in there right now.
• It's not brands that will be compatible (or not) but speeds and pin numbers. crucial.com has a dingus smack in the middle of their front page where you tell it what kind of machine you have and it tells you what kind of ram you need. You can then buy that kind of ram from wherever it pleases you to get it.
• Everest Home Edition (free to download from whatever website it comes from, I'm forgetting offhand and am too lazy to google it right now). The program will analyze your system and give you all sorts of gory details, including what motherboard you have and who makes it, plus memory details (speed, ECC or non ECC, etc.) that you can use to buy real, good, yet cheap memory from places like newegg.com (who feature not only decent prices but also an amazingly good return policy!). With cheaper hardware, like an emachines system, I'd expect the parts list to vary more than with a Dell or Gateway, so don't trust a thingy on a website unless you know for sure it matches the motherboard you really have.
• Both Crucial.com and Kingston.com have walkthroughs that will let you pick your computer manufacturer and model and tell you which types of ram is right. Often crucial will advertize on sites like slashdot or tom's hardware with special offers for free second day air shipping, so I almost always buy from them. And I have bought memory for an emachine before with absolutely no problem.
• I would suggest Crucial for memory if you are looking for the best RAM for your money. However, for the old e-machine, I believe you should look in the newspaper or around town for sales and the least expensive 2100 or 2700(the slowest (relatively), oldest, cheapest and most compatible) you can get. Online is more risky because there is the whole return thing thats a pain sometimes. Easier to return walkins if needed. Just say you needed SDRAM but bought DDR if you do. Many times I have gone into Office Depot, Best Buy or any other electronics retailer and just picked up the cheapest DDR(usually kingston). In the last 5 years of building computers for a living, I have never had an incompatability or problem with it. Your motherboard may even be able to take the faster speeds, but we're talkin budget class here.
• Second the opinion that the online memory configurators are not going to be terribly reliable for your machine. E-machine's hot-swaps configurations during their builds too often for even E-machine's to keep track of. Dell used to have the same problem years ago. Check the modules that are in there. Most memory modules have labels on them these days, unlike the old days where there was almost nothing to go by on the chips themselves.
• Thanks everybody. This is more than enough info for me to go forward. I should add that I kind of actually like this Emachine. I bought it for $400 with printer and monitor. I needed a backup system (I use my laptop 90% of the time) so i went into Best Buy and got the cheapest computer they had. It runs much better than the Compaq I used to have.
• Is there a Linux program that does what Everest does?
• Never had any problem with my emachine. Nor did my friend who had two. We both bought memory for all 3 off of crucial and never had a problem with that either. On the other hand, I've never heard a good thing about Compaq.
• Trying to answer my own question, so far I've found two that are fairly close: something called LSHW and a GNOME Hardware Browser. Neither program tells me much about my RAM though, maybe because it's too cheaply generic to have that info programmed in. Maybe I'll eventually find a better program at Freshmeat.
• Never had any problem with my emachine When dealing with large computer companies, this is usually the case. Although features and design usually suffer horribly in cheap desktops, actual hardware reliability often goes up. The margin is so tight that the corporation can't afford to have many break down under warranty. That doesn't mean that components with a limited life span should be expected to last much longer than the one year warranty, though. It runs much better than the Compaq I used to I can tell you from much experience that Compaq is no worse (or better) than other major manufacturers, but they do have a bad rep with a lot of people. Ironically, I've found a lot of those people have never owned a Compaq. Somewhere along the way Compaq's marketing dept really screwed up.
• Consumer Reports did a write up on customer satisfaction with major computer companies a few months back. Compaq came in last. As the owner of a broken Compaq laptop that was going to cost $1100 dollars to fix, I can't imagine why.
• Personally, with a desktop I'd rather build it myself, that way I know what went into the machine, quality-wise. If the video card craps out after a year, it's my fault for getting that brand. Unfortunately there's not any way I am aware of to get a DIY laptop, so I have an HP. (Oddly enough, HP and Compaq are the same hardware, and yet Compaq is thought of as worse. Strange.) With the profit margin shrinking on hardware it's not worth getting a name brand system any more. Especially with the reliable companies like IBM selling off their hardware divisions. Take Dell, for example. Their current crop of computers are not only crap in terms of hardware (3, count them, 3 hard drive failures in mission critical machines, all within 1 year of purchase!) but their design is so godawful they're practically useless (how the hell can you have a USB port on the front of the machine that not only has the ports in UPSIDE DOWN, but also features a plastic shield offset just enough that 80% of the USB devices we try to plug in can't be pushed far enough in to make proper contact?) So no shame in buying the eMachine. Better to spend $300 on a computer that might be crap than to spend $3000 on a computer that you're certain is crap.
• So i got the memory from best Buy for $40, and it works totally fine. Bad news: upgrading memory did not solve the problem, which was audio and video "hiccups" when printing to Dv tape from vegas Video. If anyone can shed any light on this I will be impressed and appreciative... I am starting to think it's the camera: I open the task manager when printing to tape, and nothing is maxing out. I can do everything else fine, including render to a video file like wmv. But every time I print to tape there are at least a few audio drops. Any hints? (and please dont say "get a Mac and Final Cut", I dont have the $3000)
• I'm not sure how it would effect printing out to tape, rather than editing, but the biggest cause of video glitches when working on computer is slow hard drive access. For reliable video work you want at least two hard drives, with the video footage on a separate physical drive from that containing your operating system and any applications you're running (i.e. Vegas Video, etc). Ideally you'd want at least two drives for the video itself - one for sourcing and one for saving edited files. The video hard drives should be 7200rpm or faster. A few hard drives or cheap motherboards might still fail to manage reliable playback even at that speed. How are you attached to the DV camera? I've also known a couple people who had problems with incompatible firewire1394 cards causing problems of this sort. Firewire is supposed to be standardized, but it's not unusual for editing software and/or camera manufacturers to only test with one or two brands of card.
• I have a Firewire hard drive (not sure of speed, but its a Maxtor and very new) where the footage is (although Vegas tends to put the render files on the C: drive and doesnt want to stop even when I tell it to put them on the external) The camera is also attached via Firewire. I am going to try with a different camera b/c the one I am using now is old and getting weird in its old age. As I said there are never glitches during editing or rendering to a file, just printing to tape...
• although Vegas tends to put the render files on the C: drive and doesnt want to stop even when I tell it to put them on the external Now that's quality. Hopefully changing cameras will do the trick. It's probably the next most logical step. Unfortunately after that you're left with mediocre software on a cheap computer. The best next step if you still have problems is changing computers and software packages, but that's hardly an easy solution.
• vegas is a perfectly fine software- the porblem lies in my ignorance in how to use it. I actually did find the preference for where to render, hidden under "file" rather than "preferences." I dont want this to degenerate into a Mac vs PC battle, but my friend has Final Cut and as far as I can tell vegas does all the same things, at least for my relatively modest purposes. I certainly cant deny I am using a cheap computer. Nevertheless it is a cheap NEW computer and should have more than enough power to do this job right, hence my frustration....
• Video editing is one of the few things any more that can really show the quirks in a standard computer setup. Keep in mind that most computer applications handle hiccups without a problem. A bit of data doesn't read or write as quickly or accurately as it should, things just slow down a bit or the computer tries again. Some data calculates improperly, it gets caught by error checking and the computer re-calculates. Nothing's 'real time'. It doesn't matter if it gets delayed for a re-try. Video's different. It is basically 'real-time'. If there's a delay or hiccup, frames get dropped and you can see the effect. The computer can't go back and redo the missed frames. It just isn't set up that way. Keep in mind I'm just talking generally here. I'm not trying to slam your system or Vegas Video, which I'm not familiar enough with to have a true opinion.
• I take no offense at slamming this computer I'm using- as I said before I literally bought the cheapest one in the store. And I have to thank you b/c I just finally got it to work! Rendering to the external hard drive did the trick!