I need some computer building geek help, please.

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Originally Posted by mosesbotbol

Avoid the dual boot and use XP as a VM. Dual boot is outdated and not useful as it is one OS at a time.

Maximize the RAM. At the end of life cycle on a PC the RAM is a weak link.

If you have a back drive and routine, I would avoid RAID and spend of faster HDD or better video card.

Do a clean install of Win7 with Ghosting your drive at various build points and you can use Ghost as your back up routine too.

Go for the biggest monitors you can possibly use. Scrolling time and window count add up to a lot of saved time if looked over a week, month or year. Serious time savings.

That parts in bold I agree with. The rest, not so much. Installing Win 7 from a clean disk I agree with. You can sometimes buy an upgrade and pop in a Vista disk as your "source" of your old OS, but just spend the extra $50 and save yourself the headache.

RAID 1 is faster then a stand alone drive regardless what type of drives your're using. Plus if one dies, you lose no data, and won't miss a beat. There is no recovery process, you just replace the failed drive at your lesiure. Hard drives are the bottleneck of almost all computers; desktops, laptops, or servers.

SSD are a neat way to help remove that bottleneck however, they have some serious limitations. Most are limited to the number of writes. While the numbers may sounds large, these are not "File, Save" writes, but writes from say the pagefile or temporary directories. Those add up VERY fast. I would not recommend SSDs for the type of system you're building.

First, Ghost is not free. Yes you can use it to capture images, but it is not a good backup/restore tool. If you want an image of how your PC was before you started using it (aka recovery image), then yes ghost can be handy. It is usually used by desktop techs for deploying large numbers of PCs with the same configuration very quickly. It is NOT a good tool for backing up user data on a regular basis.

CAD files are rather large. With RAID 1, you are protected from simple drive failures. You are not protected from malicious software that could delete/corrupt files, human error, or a miriad of other things. To back up your data on a regular basis can be costly. If you have a high-speed internet connection you may want to consider Mozy or Carbonite. Carbonite offers secure backups of unlimited amounts of data for $59/year. Hard to argue with that. Mozy offers something similar. However, if you don't have a very good internet connection, it could take a while for those files to synch up depending on how much data you have. Barracuda offers a disk appliance (that you keep at your site) you can back data up to. It then replicates that data to two datacenters (owned/operated by Barracuda). One is on the West Coast and the other on the East Coast. You can restore data locally very quickly using the local disk appliance. If you lose the site (fire, flood, etc) you can restore from the remote datacenters. They do this for a small up front cost plus a monthly fee.

What ever way you go, make sure to safeguard your data. The majority of businesses that are forced to try and recover a primary site end up filing chapter 7. Don't be one of them.