How much have you spent this year on tech hardware?

If we are talking about January till now, then nothing, as I voted.
If we are talking about the last 12 months, then about £2500+

 

Well under 500, I've only bought a second 24" LCD to replace my massive Sony CRT.

Don't expect to be buying any tech stuff in the next year.

 

Well under the $500 I posted in the poll............ the dogs and cats have to eat too, you know?

 

From January until now I have spent around 700 bucks.

 

I'm guessing you're using USD as the measure, as I can't imagine many people spending £5000 on PC stuff in a year.

Hmm, my spending checklist on PC stuff for the last year?

£140 on a Acer X223HQ 1080p Monitor
£170 on a Intel C2Q Q9400
£150 on a Sapphire HD4870
£20 on a SATA DVD Writer drive
£20 on an Audigy 2 ZS

And £200 on an Asus GTX275....Wait, No I didn't

 

I think he purposely left out the measure of currency.

If you look at what you can actually buy, £5000 doesn't get you nearly as much more than $5000 USD as you'd expect from the currency conversion.

 

thats true,,,, but if you really consider it,,, £5000 is a lot here, £1 is BWP13, that a load of cash!.. esp if your gonna import stuff...

 

About 60 euros on the ikari that's all.

 

uhh..... i spent about $24 bucks this year

 

way too much :bleh:

 

Well below 500....Oh wait, I bought the PS3 after christmas but thats it.

 

Spent the relatively big bucks last year - less than $500 this year - odds and ends, and $140.00 on cat food already :duh:!

 

Exactly £0.00 due to no job.

 

Well, for the moment i don`t work. My boss fired me and he still pays himself like 3500$ a month, while i was there with 300$. That sucks. That`s why this year...and probably next one....no money for hardware.

 

From January till the present I've spent about $2650.

That's for a P45 motherboard, 4GB of DDR2-1066 memory, a 4870 w/1GB, and a case. Purchased independently, but all in the Feb/Mar timeframe.

Last week I bought a Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser AIO...

Then last Monday I ordered a case, p/s, CPU, motherboard, memory, heatsink/fan, and video card, for new Core i7 system.

It sounds like allot to me now. But it should only take a few months to pay down that credit card. In fact, all of the items before the Printer are paid off now. I can't stand being in debt!!

Sadly the HD4870 and the P45 board will go up for sale on Craigslist. I'm really dissatisfied with ATI's drivers lately (getting constant errors when I try to start the CCC...). And the Foxconn P45 board has consistently failed to impress (please! don't get me started on Foxconn's Tech Support...). So what will become my secondary system will revert to a 780i board with SLI 8800GTs (that might later be "upgraded" to GTS260s). The downside to this is that I don't like the hit I take in hard drive performance with the 780i. But the upside is that since I have to do a clean install it might as well be the 32-bit version of Windows 7. (On the new Core i7 system I'll install the 64-bit version of Windows 7... I'm hoping that "64-bit" becomes more mainstream and gets better support. But since the memory kit I bought is 6GB there's no point in only using half!)

 

I have a 4870X2 and never had a driver issue. Perhaps it is a mainboard issue or you just need to do a clean installation (ie reformat)

I added another site I visit regularly on facebook and now I get every single "post" on my home page AND I see them again when I visit the site lol. Pointless really...For myself that is.

 

if i get a ati ccc error or any issues ... i usually check my settings and find the cause.... and if everything checks out.. it's usually a installation error i've made or a faulty product....

 

Well, in regard to my ATI driver issues, I contacted ATI's Tech Support. They had me uninstall the drivers, run Driver Sweeper to clean out the registry and old files in the Windows directory, then reinstall the 9.5s. The Errors persist! And ATI has no other suggestion to offer me.

I do know this much, I get these errors more frequently after a cold boot. Once the system has been running for several hours they are far less frequent. The catch is that, since dual display no longer wants to function like I want, the only way I can change it is to open the CCC. (Which really means I have to try, several times, till I can get the CCC to come up.) However, that is getting to be frustrating.

It could be the Foxconn (ELA) motherboard. I know it does have other issues. Yet I'm stymied by the fact that Foxconn's Tech Support doesn't seem very competant. For instance: the manual is unclear about how SATA drives are ordered. I run 3 hard drives, and two of them are the same make and model. So I was having issues getting the boot files on a separate hard drive from the OS. I contacted Foxconn's Tech Support by phone. And though the guy supposedly looked at a copy of this board to verify, what he told me was wrong! Later I discovered that even though I had the onboard sound disabled in BIOS, it was in fact not disabled. This time I contacted their Tech Support services in Tiawan, via email. They took 2 weeks to tell me that they were unsure about my problem. So I've given up on Foxconn "helping me".

At the same time, I don't over-clock at all. Even my memory, which is designed to run at 1066 is just running at 800MHz. And the only deviation from an utterly stock configuration is that I have my hard drives set up in ACHI mode. But maybe something is wrong with the board. I bought it because it was PCIe 2.0. And I try to avoid mixing ATI video cards with Nvidia chipset boards, and visa versa.

However, IF I'm going to be forced to do another clean install. I have a good 780i board, and 2 8800GTs, in the closet. Plus that will give me an excuse to try Windows 7 RC1. And that leaves the "almost new" HD4870 in the closet, when I feel it would be better to try and get something out of it. Then throw in the Foxconn board to "sweeten the deal".

Yes, I realize that "next month" the ATI drivers might resolve all my issues. But I've learned from painful experience that I can't count on that happening. All I can do is try to deal with the "here and now".