Comments

jrazz wrote on 11/12/2005, 10:19 AM
It depends on what you mean by "good (inexpensive)". You could go here http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=1087
and take a look. I don't know if you are wanting two VGA connections or two DVI or split, but you can always get a converter at the expense of some quality. As for a secondary hard drive, they (if you buy them from a store) come with a disk utility on a cd that you would run to set it up. If you don't buy a new one or it doesn't come with it, look it up on the products website to see if there is a downloadable utility you can use for that brand.

j razz
ScottW wrote on 11/12/2005, 11:02 AM
For the hard drive, click Start, right click on My Computer, select Manage, click on Disk Management - at this point XP will see the new hard drive and will take you thru a wizard to format the drive. If you have the option of formatting with NTFS vs. FAT32, select NTFS.
rmack350 wrote on 11/12/2005, 1:14 PM
You should never need to run one of these utilities if your computer is fairly modern-like less than 5 years old.

You should be able to partition and format a disc in win2k or XP following Scotts good instructions but there are a couple of tiny caveates to note:

--It is possible to set a system up such that it won't run the wizard. In that case you can dig a little deeper in this contol panel and set the disc up.
--If it is a Parallel ATA disc drive then you need to be sure that the jumpers are set properly. Cable Select works fine these days but you could set them as master and slave. The master drive is the one at the end of the ribbon cable, the slave is the one in the middle.
----SATA drives don't have jumpers so you don't need to worry about them if you're installing an SATA disc.

Rob Mack
rmack350 wrote on 11/12/2005, 1:22 PM
I bought an nvidia card for about a hundred bucks last winter when my matrox g450 finally died. I was sorry to see it go since it never gave me any trouble.

Vegas isn't terribly demanding of a video card so i'd think that anything in your price range would be fine. I hear more complaints about ATI than Nvidia.
Other applications may use the 3d features of a card so when you shop try to take those into account.

The DVI connectors on a graphics card carry both the digital and analog signal so if you are looking at a card with all DVI connectors then you can use adapters. Check to see if the card includes them, if not then you might need to buy them. At this point I'd go with an all DVI card because eventually I'll own LCD screens.

Rob Mack