Suggestions for a small hardware jump to improve MWLL performance

[Mitchpate]

I tell you, if terroristst were to get a nuke and decided to use it wisely on a tech target like that it could send the western world into a dark age.  CPUs, GPUs, hard drives, RAM, motherboards, chipsets, all are vulnerable to this sort of thing.  The US and Western Europe needs to get aggressive with tax incentives to get these critical technology components back into "safe" territory or at the very least get enough back to prevent a complete shut down like we're seeing now.

[sleepysheep]

I tell you, if terroristst were to get a nuke and decided to use it wisely on a tech target like that it could send the western world into a dark age.  CPUs, GPUs, hard drives, RAM, motherboards, chipsets, all are vulnerable to this sort of thing.  The US and Western Europe needs to get aggressive with tax incentives to get these critical technology components back into "safe" territory or at the very least get enough back to prevent a complete shut down like we're seeing now.

Yeah and it's not like alot of people give two thoughts about some countries, yet we rely on them WAAAAAY too much. Pretty scary when you think about it.

[Spooky]

Didn't relise this either. Holy cow.....Talk about having all your eggs in one basket...

Not all those 'eggs' are in one basket. The hard drive manufacturers have production places in other locations as well, but those in Thailand are one of the major ones and their closure naturally have an impact on their overall production rate.

[d3jake]

For HDDs... I have a 500GB SATA drive that a friend gave me. I'm thinking of nabbing a pair of ~120-150GB SATA drives and throwing them into RAID0, and repartitioning the 500GB drive so I can throw an NTFS partition on it.

How much will a copy of Win7 run me? I'm a student at a community college, so should I be able to land some sort of discount? Should I go straight to MS to purchase a copy?

Thanks for the continued information!

[Mitchpate]

As a student you *might* have access to MSDNAA, depending on your major.  If you do, Windows7 Pro will be free.  If not you're probably stuck getting it through the bookstore.  Some bookstores have huge discounts, others have huge markups, it all depends on the licensing contract your school has with Microsoft.

Compare the college bookstore prices to this:
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit - OEM - $100
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit - OEM - $140    <---Recommended
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit - OEM - $190