Dell 8200 HD problems:

Mark Twain wrote:
Actually, since I'm returning the 760
I have a little time to consider do I
want a refund, or store credit because
I've looked at others.

https://www.google.com/#q=dell+compu...m= shop&spd=0

and from the link above:

http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-38...8&isredir=true

Inspiron 3847 - $450
4th Generation Intel Core i5-4460 4C/4T 3.2GHz base clock $187 Intel price

http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/3...000-series.jpg

You certainly get lots of CPU for the price. A quad core.


http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/in...b6671:c&ven2=:

https://www.google.com/#tbm=shop&q=c...7+professional

http://www.staples.com/Refurbished-D...Fcdhfgod5CUJFA

$150
Refurbished Dell 755 MT
C2D-2.33GHz, E6550 FSB1333, 2 cores, 2.33GHz, 65W, year 2007
4GB Memory,
1TB Hard Drive,
COMBO Drive with Windows 7 Professional 64bit

Looks conventional inside. Probably low profile video card slot.

http://cungcapmaytinh.vn/images/prod...755MT%2003.jpg

Can't find any mention of leaking caps for Dell 755, about two years
after capacitor plague was a big issue for Dell.

Could be GMA3100 Northbridge graphics. A little weak perhaps.

And there might only be room for a half length video card.
Slot takes a 6.6" long video card.

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global..._techspecs.pdf

On the 780, the slot has room for a 7.8" long card. Still
not long by gamer video card standards.

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global...idebook_en.pdf

OK, this card is 6.2" long. And at a reasonable price for
a bottom-end card. So this isn't going to be an issue,
finding something to shop for. I see a bunch more
that are about that long.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130602

The 780 had closer to a 3GHz Core2 Duo. Which is a bit stronger.

http://www.staples.com/Refurbished-D...FYRrfgod-KAKdg

http://www.staples.com/Refurbished-D...FY17fgodzRINPA

What do you think?

Robert

The Core2 Duo at 2.33GHz, would be about as low as I would go.

My recommendations in 2016

Minimum dual core processor
Minimum 2.0GHz CPU (Core2 or better as a type, not a P4)
Win7/8/10 should not be run on single core processors

I'm just basing my concerns, on the trends I see in browser
design, and how they waste performance and expect machines
like your Inspiron example at the top of the article as
a typical machine. That's why I'm hedging my bets a bit.
If we were using browsers from 7 or 8 years ago, I wouldn't
be quite as concerned about using weaker CPUs.

And why I'm keeping my eye on that video slot, is
for when the day arrives that the motherboard video
is too weak for a decent user experience. On the
Lenovo, so far the only part that looks a bit
goofy is the hard drive mounting method.

http://www.staples.com/Refurbished-L...roduct_2072640

There's a picture of the inside of the Lenovo here.

http://www.ctsestore.com/lenovo-thin...7517-tower-crc

Paul

Mark Twain wrote:
I did do a search for Dell 780
leaking caps and I found this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

so quite a few computers were
affected.

Robert

Yes, but there was quite a bit of variation
as to which companies were affected. Some of
them (computer makers) seemed to have a knack
for picking just the wrong capacitor.

Nichicon (Japanese) is one of the nicer brands
of caps. But somehow, they got roped into this mess.
(You'll probably see at least one report, with their
name on the affected capacitors.) I don't know if a
Nichicon plant in China was involved, or how that
electrolyte formulation got into one of their products.

Most of the time, the leaking caps are the no-name
brands. Brands you wouldn't normally recognize
(until you did a search and found they made
some bad ones).

Abit motherboard company had quite a bit of trouble.
There was a class action suit against them. Abit
is no longer in business, but there might be more
than one reason for that.

For the most part, Asus managed to escape. I don't
recollect anything they made for retail, having
a 100% failure rate.

I have two Antec power supplies here, actually made
by Channelwell, which have the leaking caps inside them.
One made a little puff of smoke, signaling it needed
help :-)

For Dell, stuff like perhaps the GX260 or so, that might
have been one of the bad ones. You would have to compare
when people were taking legal action against Dell, versus
the year of introduction of the Dell 760 or Dell 780, to
have some idea whether you're past the worst of it.

The power supplies, could follow a different path. In that,
some OEM power supplies, used bad caps for years after
the initial discovery.

There were several billion bad caps made. And more than one
company is likely to have "drained their inventory" of them,
into consumer products. I doubt anyone drove a truck up
to the landfill, and threw out a couple million caps
with bad electrolyte formulas.

If accelerated life testing can catch these, for the
larger companies they may be able to screen incoming
inventory. But that likely takes time, and in a JIT
world, isn't that practical. Cutting off purchases from
the known-bad sources, would certainly help. Leaving
the bad capacitor makers with the only option being
counterfeiting, to move their goods.

Electrolytic caps received such a bad reputation, some
of the bad companies started packaging electrolytics
in polymer capacitor cans. To "fool" people into thinking
they were getting a quality product. You'd be surprised
at the lengths they went to. If one of those polymer cans
had the stress relief lines stamped in the top, then
the packaging technique is just fine. However, if they
used a polymer can, filled it with an old electrolytic design,
and didn't have a pressure relief mechanism, that's dangerous
for anyone working inside the open computer.

I've had one capacitor blow, back when I was a teenager,
and it ricocheted off the plaster walls of the
room I was in. That was one of the tantalum caps
in epoxy dipped housing. Which is about as "close to
a bullet design" as you can get :-) I stopped using
those after a while :-) All it takes is a little
reverse bias, to blow those up. And that's a capacitor
issue from a different era. And when you're picking
capacitors, you're supposed to take the application
into account. I thought what I was doing was OK,
but since I didn't have an oscilloscope back then,
I couldn't really be sure whether some small reverse
bias was being applied to them.

*******

When you're doing your Google search on "leaking caps",
make sure to verify the model number identified by
the people in the thread. As a Google search returns
99% inappropriate results now, and you have to provide
the "filter" to find the real info.

I find for some of my searches, I may have to try over
a one or two day period, to be absolutely convinced there
isn't some info hiding out there that I haven't seen.
Sometimes, you have to change search terms, change your
approach to the search, to "get the goods". So when I
do a quick first search, and tell you I haven't seen
anything, it might take me several days until I wander
into a thread by accident and find some bad news.

Paul

I had no idea caps were so lethal!

However, being refurbished would they not
replace the caps? Even so, I could
never be absolutely sure whatever
computer I buy doesn't have them.

It seems that between 2003 and 2005 Dell
shipped millions of bad PC's and the 780
was made after that I believe.

The Lenovo HD does seem a little
weird.

The Inspiron is a little more than I
want to spend but it's newer with a quad
core. So maybe,.. and from Dell vs Staples.

Robert

nah,. that's anther $300.00!@

I'll go with the 780

Mark Twain wrote:
I had no idea caps were so lethal!

However, being refurbished would they not
replace the caps? Even so, I could
never be absolutely sure whatever
computer I buy doesn't have them.

It seems that between 2003 and 2005 Dell
shipped millions of bad PC's and the 780
was made after that I believe.

The Lenovo HD does seem a little
weird.

The Inspiron is a little more than I
want to spend but it's newer with a quad
core. So maybe,.. and from Dell vs Staples.

Robert

Refurbishers don't replace caps.

They generally try to move the goods,
in their original condition.

Some off-lease machines, refurbishing is relatively
easy. You select the "factory restore" option,
the OS is reinstalled in sealed state, and the
computer behaves like it is brand new when it
arrives (even if the hard drive has thousands
of hours of wear on it). It asks for an account name,
a password, and the like.

But some off-lease machines, the big company
getting rid of them, removes the hard drive. The
refurbisher has to put another hard drive in it.
(The hard drive could be a Seagate refurb.)
Then, install a SLIC-activated OS from a DVD.
(You could even clone a set of hard drives
for this.) So it takes a bit more time. If you
look at the machines Staples is selling, you
might note a mismatch between the original disk
size (250GB) and the drive in it today
(1TB).

But other than that, it would cost too much
to repair even well-known issues on a refurb.
Nobody can be bothered doing that.

*******

If you were the unhappy owner of one of those
GX models with the bad caps, you will find
a number of sellers offering "capacitor kits",
so you could do the repair yourself.

And PCB designs can either make the repair hard,
or make the repair easy. I've experienced both.
I had a vacuum desoldering machine at work,
and some electrolytic capacitors with "interference
fit" leg design (legs barely fit into solder holes),
and those are just about impossible to get out.
And there usually isn't the clearance in the
area needing the work, to use violence on the
caps. I've tried that method too (on a practice
PCB). You would need a tool specially designed,
to chew the top off a cap and do it cleanly.
Most cutting tools tend to jam up as they
chew through a cap.

Capacitors are installed flush with the PCB, to
give the legs some protection. If you leave a cap
a quarter inch off the PCB (so you could get diagonal
cutters underneath), the legs could be bent easily.
In fact, when they do amplifiers that live inside
speakers (like on $300 computer speakers), they
take glue and glue a bunch of capacitors standing
next to one another, together. That makes the
capacitors more rigid, and capable of taking a
lifetime of low frequency vibration. They don't need
to do that on the motherboard, because the environment
in the computer is a bit more benign.

I learned about the vibration issue early in life.
I designed a flashing light circuit for my bicycle
(tail light) when I was a teenager. I placed it on
my bike and drove the bike for a week - when one
of the legs on the single electrolytic in the circuit,
snapped off. My "design" just couldn't take the vibration.
When I designed a light for my bicycle just two years
ago, that one is rock hard, and can take any abuse :-)
I learned my lesson well about electrolytics. The
new light uses ceramic caps. Those are surface
mount, and have no legs. The caps cost more than
the part that makes the light...

They do occasionally make motherboard VCore circuits
with ceramic caps, instead of electrolytic. There
is an example here. It's OK on such a motherboard,
to continue to use the cylindrical shaped capacitors
for bulk energy storage - as if one of those fails,
it generally doesn't "smoke" something else. So if
the cylinders are just used for that kind of purpose
(filtering DC), the motherboard is more likely
to survive. The VCore isn't likely to fail on this
motherboard.

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/wp-co...edSR-2_131.jpg

(http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/evga-...motherboard/7/)

HTH,
Paul

I'm following along but it's way past
my skills to this type of thing and I
suspect most people.

I like your good recommendation of the
780 and from the reviews and it seems
allot of people are happy with their
purchase and its well within my budget.

http://www.staples.com/DELL-780-Towe...#/revs_content

I would like a larger HD but it's sufficient
for a backup and certainly much larger than
the 8200 it replaces.

Speaking of the 8200, 16 years isn't a bad
record for a computer. It probably could be
fixed and made to work again but its beyond
me and I need to upgrade in any case.

I do have one question since I've been seeing
duo and quad cores on older machines how is
it that the 8500 only has a single core but
is extremely fast?

Oh, btw, Frontier pulled the Internet plug on
me for 3 days while they switched everything
over from Verizon.

Robert

Mark Twain wrote:
I'm following along but it's way past
my skills to this type of thing and I
suspect most people.

I like your good recommendation of the
780 and from the reviews and it seems
allot of people are happy with their
purchase and its well within my budget.

http://www.staples.com/DELL-780-Towe...#/revs_content

I would like a larger HD but it's sufficient
for a backup and certainly much larger than
the 8200 it replaces.

Speaking of the 8200, 16 years isn't a bad
record for a computer. It probably could be
fixed and made to work again but its beyond
me and I need to upgrade in any case.

I do have one question since I've been seeing
duo and quad cores on older machines how is
it that the 8500 only has a single core but
is extremely fast?

Oh, btw, Frontier pulled the Internet plug on
me for 3 days while they switched everything
over from Verizon.

Robert

The XPS 8500 isn't that weak :-)

If we take an example from here.

http://www.cnet.com/products/dell-xp...-032-tb/specs/

"CPU

Intel Core i7 (3rd Gen) 3770 / 3.4 GHz --- speed when all cores in usage

Max Turbo Speed 3.9 GHz --- Speed when lightly loaded, and not overheated

Number of Cores Quad-Core

It's actually 4C/8T, meaning four cores with Hyperthreading
on each core, allowing eight threads of execution simultaneously.
There are two register banks per core, and the CPU switches to the
second bank, if the first bank current state prevents "forward progress".
This allows 10% more performance than just four cores.
So you might get 4.4 Cores performance from a 4C/8T processor,
versus 4.0 Cores performance from a plain 4C processor.

http://ark.intel.com/products/65523/...up-to-3_90-GHz

The Lenovo machine (the $250 refurb), is a plain 4C machine,
without Hyperthreading.

Over the years, Hyperthreading has varied a bit. The first
version was pretty weak, and occasionally, running a program
with HT enabled, it actually ran slightly slower. I expect
Intel has improved Hyperthreading over the years, but I
haven't been keeping track of the latest benchmarks. (Maybe
it causes more than a 10% bump now...)

So your XPS 8500 has about the best "desktop" flavor of
processor. If you have $7000 to spend for a processor,
you can get some with 15 cores and 30MB of cache inside,
and those are a "square inch of perfect silicon".

The 4C/8T processors happen to be the economic "sweet spot"
for Intel products, giving you good value for money.
The next level up is 6C/12T, and that costs a lot more,
for what amounts to about 5.0 Cores of performance
(i.e. only 25% faster than your machine).

So when you see the CPUs with 15 cores, they're not
"15 times faster". Those processors should tend to be
very memory constrained (cores are waiting for memory ops
to complete). You only get 15 core performance,
if the processor doesn't need to visit memory very often.
If the problem can be stored within the 30MB cache, then
it should run pretty well.

*******

If we take the one off the top of this chart, the E3-2698
frequency is low, because it would overheat at 3.4Ghz. Intel
sets a reasonable power limit, so the cooler design doesn't
become impossible. If Intel put their minds to it, it
would be possible to build 300W processors. But they would
crack if most of the heat was generated on one side of the
die. You can do 300W, if the chip design heats the die
uniformly. As it is, I don't understand how current chips
don't suffer from thermal stress. (The OS scheduler in Windows,
moves stuff around every scheduling cycle, and that may help.)

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 @ 2.30GHz Passmark = 22,197

Intel Core i7-3770K @ 3.50GHz Passmark = 9,574 --- XPS 8500 speed
Intel Core i7-3770 @ 3.40GHz = 9,341

Intel Core2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz Passmark = 2,180 --- from another page
on that site.
Dell 780 soeed.
Intel Pentium 4 1.80GHz Passmark = 160 --- Approx 8200 speed

The last one, might be similar to your 8200. I
don't know the exact speed off hand, might be
1.8GHz or 2.0GHz.

The E8400, was in one of the Dell 780. And
the E8400 is in the machine I'm typing on.

The 3770K should be similar to what is in
your XPS 8500. There is also a non-K version.
The K means the multiplier can be programmed
by the user. The non-K, you can't overclock
using the multiplier alone.

The top entry, is to show you what money buys.

http://ark.intel.com/products/81060/...Cache-2_30-GHz

# of Cores 16 \___ 16C/32T , four times your 8500, yet
# of Threads 32 / only a bit over 2x the Passmarks

Intel Smart Cache 40 MB --- lots of cache to store running programs

TDP 135 W

Amazon price = ~$3500

Stuff like that is used on Internet servers. It's 4X the processor,
2X as fast, at 10X the price. Not at the "sweet spot". Intel likes
to sell those.

HTH,
Paul

I always enjoy reading your posts, so
informative@! So it's better to have
more cache than RAM or do they go hand
in hand?

I love the 8500,. very fast, in passing
I don't know if I told you before but
with so many ports on both computers I
made plugs for them out of fiberboard
cut to fit. That way it keeps the dust
out.

I have and off topic question though;
I've uploaded some family pics via
Tinypic and it just occurred to me
can everyone online also see those
pics??

If so, can I delete them?

Robert

Mark Twain wrote:
I always enjoy reading your posts, so
informative@! So it's better to have
more cache than RAM or do they go hand
in hand?

I love the 8500,. very fast, in passing
I don't know if I told you before but
with so many ports on both computers I
made plugs for them out of fiberboard
cut to fit. That way it keeps the dust
out.

I have and off topic question though;
I've uploaded some family pics via
Tinypic and it just occurred to me
can everyone online also see those
pics??

If so, can I delete them?

Robert

Surprisingly, in a test, I found little difference
due to cache.

Cache only matters when you run 7ZIP. There, the bigger
cache might mean it runs 50% faster. It makes a difference
to SuperPI (a benchmark), which also has a relatively
large data footprint, and having more cache means
going out to main memory a little bit less.

For most other applications, I found little difference
between a Core2 Duo with 2MB cache, and one with 6MB
of cache. Even slow memory (DDR2-533) really didn't
make a perceptible difference. Just the CPU core clock
mattered.

They tell me, on AMD processors, the slow RAM makes
a bit more of a difference. I don't have any modern
processors (like Bulldozer) to know.

As for main memory, as long as you "have enough",
adding extra doesn't necessarily help. My Test Machine
has 64GB, so I'm able to study how it works.

On some OSes, the OS will waste 6GB for itself, when the system
has a big memory. Also, since Windows now has a write cache,
when the system has a lot of memory, a huge amount of
pending writes to disk can be kept in memory. Even if you
quit a tool (like quit Word), the disk light can stay
on for 50 seconds until everything in the write cache
drains out. Now, if the power were to go off during
that 50 second period, there would be data loss...
The cache fills up, if the disk drive saving the file,
cannot keep up with the write rate.

It only became evident that Windows had a write cache
like that, right after I did the memory upgrade.

It was funny, when I went to the computer store and
tried to order that 64GB RAM, the salesman asked me if
I knew what that much RAM was for, and "how it wouldn't
make my games run faster". Good lad. He asked the
right questions.

When I had 16GB of RAM, I tried to open a 25GB picture.
The results were obvious and inevitable - it took
five minutes of grinding before anything would happen.
So I decided I would put more RAM in it, rather than
have the computer just sit there for five minutes.

When I got the 64GB of RAM, the image (synthetic, not
from a camera), *still* would not open quickly. It
still took 30 seconds or so (and not due to disk speed,
just due to the program and the way stuff loads. So
the result was "satisfactory" but far from instantaneous.
I have had many many other disappointing experiences
with the RAM. And my general conclusion is, that
computers have a "natural size limit". Once the scale
of things you're doing is larger than their natural
size, they're slow.

The image editor could not malloc memory faster than
around 1GB per second. Even though the machine has a
STREAM benchmark of 17GB/sec.

And the last example was the most fun. I install
Microsoft ICE (a program for making a single image
out of panorama photographs). You could take three
photos of the Grand Canyon, shot with overlapping
edges, and ICE joins them together into a 3x wide
single photo. And it makes the edges mesh properly.
Well, I tried that, and the program wanted 80GB of
RAM. Using the 64GB machine, and a huge setting
for the page file, it took *one week* for the
computation to finish. That's what I mean by
the "natural scale" being ridiculous.

So if you build absolutely huge computers, be
prepared to be disappointed in a huge way. If
your machine only has 8GB of RAM, be happy
that while you can "only do small stuff",
you'll never wait one week for a result :-)

*******

Generally, on a photosharing site, you need
a user account to have control over deletion.

For the few sites that allow upload, with no
account information to go on, there would be no
way to control deletion.

As long as you distributed the family photo
links, to only family members, that keeps the
contents from open distribution. However, if
you post a family photo URL in a forum, then
that link (or content) will be all over the
place.

So if you want some degree of control, it means
selecting another site, where you fill out more
personal details. For example, if you use a Google
account for email, perhaps Picassa is available.

OK, according to the text here, it looks like
Google is messing around with Picassa again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picassa

That's one of the nice things about image sharing
sites. They "go under" or change purpose or direction,
removing all of their photos from view. For example,
I started using ImageShack in 2009, and all the photos
of hardware I uploaded are gone (links are bad, cannot
reach them). The ImageShack brand is still around,
but it is used for Facebook crap. Which for some reason,
required invalidating all the older links. So time
has erased my links.

Even if you don't have editorial control, given
enough years passing, it's likely to be inaccessible
eventually anyway.

Paul

Interesting about the RAM because the
only reason I maxed out the RAM in the
8500 was at the suggestion from that guy
on the malwarebytes forum that assisted
me, remember him?

So it's more the way any certain program is
written more than any hardware which
determines speed of loading? Hence a better
written program would load faster?

That was a pretty cool story about the store
and the lad asking the right questions. I'll bet
that was refreshing.

1 week !!!!!!! WOW *L* sounds like an
application I have on my Dell Imagining
called 'Stitch' although the results are usually
disappointing. *L*

I know what you mean about sites going under
I used to have an account with Geocities which
was great for building websites with various
templates and I could display my art etc. I was
sorry to see it go and still haven't found a site like
it. I did try Picassa but it wasn't the same.

I sent the Tinypic links in a pvt message not
a forum so they're ok ? Whereas the screenshots
everyone can see those on the present site. Do I
have that correct? Like you say, either way over
time, they will disappear,....

So far it looks like its the 780 computer. The 760
will be delivered around the 11th and I'll just
take a store credit or refund.

Robert

Mark Twain wrote:
Interesting about the RAM because the
only reason I maxed out the RAM in the
8500 was at the suggestion from that guy
on the malwarebytes forum that assisted
me, remember him?

So it's more the way any certain program is
written more than any hardware which
determines speed of loading? Hence a better
written program would load faster?

That was a pretty cool story about the store
and the lad asking the right questions. I'll bet
that was refreshing.

1 week !!!!!!! WOW *L* sounds like an
application I have on my Dell Imagining
called 'Stitch' although the results are usually
disappointing. *L*

I know what you mean about sites going under
I used to have an account with Geocities which
was great for building websites with various
templates and I could display my art etc. I was
sorry to see it go and still haven't found a site like
it. I did try Picassa but it wasn't the same.

I sent the Tinypic links in a pvt message not
a forum so they're ok ? Whereas the screenshots
everyone can see those on the present site. Do I
have that correct? Like you say, either way over
time, they will disappear,....

So far it looks like its the 780 computer. The 760
will be delivered around the 11th and I'll just
take a store credit or refund.

Robert

If you send a link to a photo in a private message,
the info stays with that person unless they decide to
post the link publicly somewhere. The info is as safe
as your trust of that person.

If you post a Tinypic here, obviously it is remembered
for posterity. The link would be stored in Google Groups,
for any groups archived by Google. And there are a number
of other outfits archiving USENET. So the link if presented
on USENET stays around, but eventually Tinypic will go
under, morph into something else, and all the links
will become invalid (as happened to ImageShack).

*******

The Microsoft ICE, the low resolution result looked reasonable,
so I let it run to produce final output, and that is what
took a week. The tool has the ability to "fill in" missing
bits, so a lot of the water in this picture is "fake". The
series of map pages, basically maps the land mass and small islands.
But the vast stretch of water to make the final map rectangular,
is filled in by the tool. It's not fit to print this way (as
a wall map), as the black gaps are a bit too annoying.

http://s14.postimg.org/dyymngnwx/map.jpg

It took about 41GB of RAM to open that just now. Then I
took a screenshot to make the low resolution version,
because I wouldn't dare ask the image editor to
do that. It would probably take another week.

Even quitting the image editor in Windows 10, took
forever. I had to use a command similar to this

taskkill /f /pid 6654

to kill it. Killing it from Task Manager didn't work.
I opened an Administrator command prompt and issued
the command. And it still took about two minutes
before it was finally gone. If I hadn't ushered it out,
it would still be running tomorrow (even though the
GUI is gone from the screen, the task lived on).
A great design for an OS. And that behavior, even
prevented another program from starting properly.

So having enough RAM to swim around in, only
encourages bad behavior from all the software.

Paul

That's what I thought but just wanted to
check with you.


41GB !@! holy crap!~ I see what you mean
about the filled in water. That's pretty
serious if Task Manger can't close it.

I see there are good and bad aspects to
RAM, who know?

Had another episode with Frontier,..after
4 days of no Internet they started messing
around again and I lost my connection but
finally got it back up after resetting the
modem.

Looking forward to getting the 780

Robert

I got an email saying the 760 was
delivered so went down to return it
but it ended up being delivered at
the wrong store/city.

I ended up calling their 800 number
and at first they told me I had to
wait until the 760 was shipped back
to them before I could get a refund.

I told them that was unacceptable and
after talking to the manager and
verifying the 760 was at the other store
they issued a refund which should show up
in 3-5 days.

Thought you'd like to know what the
procedure actually was.

Robert

I finally got the refund from the 760
but am slightly delayed with the 780
but I will get it.

I was reading another post where you
said FF can balloon up and down which
would cause it to use more RAM? Really?

Robert

I ordered the 780 and should
arrive in about a week.

Question: do I have to search
for the latest BIOS version?

What else should I check or
have to do besides the usual?

Thanks,
Robert