Just wanted to do a quick post back. I ended up going with the Nvidia GTS450. Had some problems getting it in, not so much getting it in as anchoring it down. My case has slide bars and quick clips that hold things in place. The new graphics card has a case around it and clip wouldn't fit back over it. I just put some screws in it and the the other card.

BTW, how do I know what the other card is for? Is there some mark on it that identifies it's purpose?

Don't know if this will help anyone else, but it did put an end to the screen doing the time-out, black out thing.

network card looking at photos you posted before

And what exactly does it do???? I don't have a network, or do all PC's have them?? The card I mean.

What is this RAID thing and what does it look like?? I though that might be what that was, no such luck. So much for my passing on "internal identification"
Hope William ain't looking

Every post anyone makes on this forum gets emailed to me:P

I'm ALWAYS watching.


RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

still reckon mine was better

http://www.beyourownit.com/forum/adv...what-raid.html

with your old card in looks like there were two empty slots then network card could be the onboard has messed up in the past or its been added to connect it to a network of other computers
http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o...ckofcard-2.jpg

Wow you guys really used to go at it.

Hey William

Thanks for the heads up. Nice to know someone is watching over us idiots

A small excerpt from the course I'm writing


RAID
RAID technology is intended mostly for server environments but many home users have started using it also. Redundant Array of Independent Disks comes in 4 flavors for the average user with many more types being available for enterprise use. They all have 1 thing in common; they are designed to enhance aspects of the hard disk drive by combining them in multiple ways.

RAID 0
This technique is known as striping. You install 2 hard drives in the RAID volume and the RAID controller treats them like a single hard drive and interleaves or “Stripes” data across them. This means that each drive has exactly half the data. What this means is that if the controller is good you will almost double your read and write speeds. This technique can be expanded to more drives but generally most average users of RAID 0 stick to 2 drives. The bad news is that you have now increased your likelihood of failure. Now if 1 drive goes down your whole system is down with no way to rebuild it. If you are running RAID 0 for performance you better have a good backup.

RAID 1
This technique is called mirroring. You install 2 or more drives and set them up as a mirrored RAID volume and the other hard drives will copy the data written to your primary hard drive. Contrary to popular belief this does not make your data any less likely to be lost to a catastrophic event. Anything that happens on one drive happens on the other, such as data corruption or virus infections. What this RAID does provide is availability. If your hard drive dies you will not have to stop working as a new one shows up. You won’t lose the data either, but it should still be backed up elsewhere. When a drive dies you can insert a new one and have the RAID rebuild itself to restore the RAID.

Raid 5
Raid 5 is a technique that uses parity bits and striping to achieve higher levels of performance with a higher degree of safety. Raid 5 mirrors data and embeds parity files across the array. What this means is that the RAID is at block level instead of disk level. Each disk contains its own data as well as the parity information for a block of another disk. RAID 5 will operate at high speeds and is still available as long as more than 1 disk does not fail at the same time. This being said, there is no limit to the number of disks to use in a RAID 5, but the likelihood of double failure increases with the more disks that are used. Only enthusiast chipsets tend to have RAID 5 support.

RAID 10
RAID 10 is not a 10, it is actually RAID 1 + RAID 0. This technique combines 4 or more drives where half of them are striped and the other half are copies of the stripes. This effectively mirrors all striped drives to provide performance and availability at the cost of more drives and data space taken.

Thanks but its really nothing special, I do it at work, Popeye does it on his own time and slays the mighty spam beasts when they appear. He just killed Doubleagents who filled my inbox over the weekend with

"HEY CHECK OUT MY NEW SOFTWARES!"

Thank him instead.

I read what RAID is I just don't know WHERE to find it. What does it look like. Is it a card, or a chip or what? Where is it located and do I need to be concerned about it when I put the new drive in?