Rant Stuck with P4, Advice Needed!

I'd say your best bet is to just be honest with them. If they see you're willing to work hard to earn the money to build a new pc and your still doing well in school they really can't complain. Sure it might seem like a waste of money to them, but at the same time its a learning experience. You learn to save, and the added responsibility of work can be rather character building and help put things into perspective.

Try making a deal, tell them if you get a job and they allow you to save up for you own pc that you promise to maintain your grades and continue to do well / continue to do your regular stuff around the house such as cleaning if you already do.

Show some initiative and let them know its something that you want, you want to make a career of it and what better way to gain some experience than hands on. It can also be a family thing if your father wants to help you out with it which can be really cool. My dad knows NOTHING about pc's but he was rather curious when I built mine and he actually wanted to help out even though he has no ambition to learn.

 

Thanks all of you! These suggestions are pure gold

 

Although this doesn't help you get a new PC, your P4 isn't that bad for most things. If you can ask your dad about taking some of the memory out of his spare machines and put it in you current one to up it to 1 or 2 GB then you will probably notice a significant improvement provided you are using XP. once you do that you might be able to run most applications. If you really want to play games then you would have to upgrade your graphics card. but the cost of that is not alto to be able to play most things on low resolutions with low to medium graphics. You could probably pick up a nividia 8XXX for less than £50, if you look around a bit.

 

I doubt RAM is his problem for what he does. it's not like XP would actually use the RAM in any case, as it dumps everything in page file, like if you are low in memory, in any case.

Graphic card is also not the solution.. for one, I doubt that his motherboard has PCI-E. He most likely has AGP. And assuming it works, a P4 will severally bottleneck the Geforce 8000 series.

 

Hmm. I could do that, but I doubt it will make that much a difference.

ftfy ...

 

To emphasize goodbytes opinion... you can only polish a turd so much, and at the end of the day it's still a turd. Bit harsh but yea. Any luck talking to your parents yet?

 

Hmmm, a 2Ghz P4 with a clean windows XP install should NOT stutter in Word (if you use that)
I have a 600 Mhz Celeron that runs Word without a glitch. (not much else though)
If it's broken, that might be a reason to switch it

Ignore the rest of this Post, as it is not advice!

Cool...wrong, but cool.

Yeah. Suggest giving up computer gaming for motorcycle riding...guess what he's going to say then

Ah...yes, that explaines the "Absurdistan" you're right 17 up.
You can get a "Brommer" though...and tune it... and race it with your tattooed friends...drunk...on the way to holland to get crack.

Gee, wouldn't computer gaming be a nice hobby (that improves computer skills as well)

 

Yes, I know, it's strange...
In Word, one moment he's fast (= no lag between typing and onscreen ), and the other he lags like hell. Sometimes (when I'm feeling brave) Winamp is running in the background though, but even when that's not running it still lags

 

Have you downloaded the ultimate boot CD? If not go get it from here
Write the ISO to CD.
Reboot your P4 bad boy from the CD and run tests on CPU, memory, HDD, anything you can find. If all comes back ok make sure your drivers are all to date, especially chipset.
It sounds like something is a bit screwy. P4 machines are the staple at my place of work and they are pretty good machines. They aren't going to break any records, but they work.
Worth a try bud.

 

+1

And you've got a heap of spare parts apparently, so if anything turns out to be faulty, no probs!
Also, it should be easy to add another one or two of the biggest hdd's from these spare pc's? You can also max out the mobo with the fastest and biggest ram chips, and pick the best out of all the gpu's, or just buy or beg for an old agp card from someone.

P4's overclock well, especially if you whack a cheap heatpipe cooler on it
I'd pick the best psu out the spares aswell, and I bet the vents are those crappy restrictive ones - if so, they are easily fixed with some long nose pliers, and twisting the wide vent grills 90 degrees

You can polish this turd Adding ram, better gpu, and overclocking all make a significant difference btw.

 

Any mod makes a significant difference

 

Hmm. Thanks, I will try that...

I could switch cards with my brother's pc (don't think he would even notice ).
It's a GeForce 6200 but it has some weird issues and gets incredibly hot so I think I'll leave it like this (+ my brother would be mad at me (if he notices... ))

 

Hah, the most typical thing just happened!
My dad came past my room and saw my current wallpaper. (this one if you'd want to know: http://2kgames.com/cultofrapture/features/wallpapers/1959_2560x1600.jpg)
Very interested he comes closer to me to ask what it is.
I tell him, but as soon as I spoke the word 'game' he didn't want to know any more about it, so he lets me finish, says 'oh' and walks away...
Why this aversion for games and everything around them (even a goddamn wallpaper!)?
I guess I will just need to avoid the subject 'gaming' when I talk with him about a new pc...

 

Hmmm... I have no idea frankly..
I just have 2 thoughts... either he thinks you will be addicted to games, thanks to Mr. Media.
Or he felt he was addicted, or caused him to move aside his responsibilities for a game, which caused him in facing the consequences and he doesn't want that happen.

The problem with your father behavior, is the fact he doesn't want you play games... make you starve more to explore this field (human nature), and can result in exactly what your father tried to prevent... meaning once you game, psychologically you won't stop to game, as you starve for such entertainment and you won't know when you'll game again.. so you take every minute as critical. I am not a psychologist... so take what I just said as a grain of salt.

 

Well there's only one thing left to do.

Get a safe.

 

+1

 

And print off his Yahoo chat logs and blackmail him!

 

Hmm. I could even start a new thread about that!
That would be a nice evolution indeed...

Now back on topic:
It's just an idea, but what if I buy him a good game? (nothing too demanding though, he has the same pc as me)
For good manners he will at least play a little bit on it. Maybe then he'll see that not all games are crap and understand better why I sometimes want to play a game.
Could that work?

 

I heard Command and Conquer is pretty cheap nowadays.... I'm sure he won't get sucked in

 

Get Civilisation... believe me the "Just... One... More... Turn..." mentallity has caused many PC's to require upgrading as gaming becomes an addiction. >.<