The motherboard usually will detect the maximum capability of your AGP card and will allow this setting in the BIOS settings. If you,ve got a 512MB AGP card, then its very likely it should be capable of AGPx8. But, if you have an old motherboard, it may not allow anything faster than 4x. There may be a BIOS update that may allow 8x setting, but it can be risky updating a motherboard BIOS. You bought a new 700W PSU. Although its unlikely that your PC will stress this PSU, a powerful PSU is always a good idea. FM 2009 runs flawlessly, its only WIC that gives you problems. See if there is a patch available for WIC. Also, update your AGP card's drivers to the newest version and see if that makes a difference.

I think RAID 5 will be sufficient. I have worked with many servers and RAID 5 has in all cases been sufficient. I have come across failed disks and in most cases if you replace the failed disk, the RAID hardware will rebuild the array in a number of hours. If you are going to start using RAID, then you should try a few experiments with your RAID card with small arrays, just to see exactly how your RAID card behaves when a disk fails(by deliberately removing one)and what the procedure is to replace with a new disk. Note these results carefully. The reason for this is because the instructions that come with these itemscan have fewdetails on what to do if a disk fails. It will be difficult to answer these questions under a real life situationand one mistakemay cause you the loss of all the data.The safest scenario is a RAID 5 with an external backup of sufficient size to backup all critical data. Even if the RAID totally failed, you could recover all/most of your data from the backup. So, instead of RAID 10, RAID 5 + external backup is my recommendation.

If you reduce the partiton from 100GB to 50GB, will you still haveat least 3GBfree space left over on the reduced size partition? Resizing partitons is not a trivial thing to do, any mistakes in the process whether by you or the process can render your entire disk corrupted.

Hmmmm... most routers will easily do port forwarding, but resticting bandwidth I think will be a feature found only on professional devices like Cisco.

Where are you getting your temperature readings from? PC switching completely off is usually caused by CPU or PSU. Possibly might be a virus.

Ahh right desktop... That Vaio name got me thinking it was a laptop. Anyway, at least now you know what to do, should you ever get into this situation with a a Vaio laptop....:)

Good to hear you got it going.

Yes. GHz definitely matters. More GHz=more speed, definitely. The main thing to remember though is you need to compare like to like, ie AMD X2 to AMD X2 or X3 to X3 or Intel Exxx to Intel Exxx or Qxxx to Qxxx. If you want to compare for example Athlon X3 to Intel Q or something., then you need to study the CPU architectures also and in that scenario, GHz becomes one of many factors that need to be considered and not the sole factor as it can be when talking about same types of CPU.

Hah. Lots of people dont realise what a difference a CPU upgrade can make. They all think itsmostly GFX card. It can be, but in some games, like this one, its equally as important. I remember when I upgraded my system last:

SYSTEM before upgrading: Athlon X2 4600, 7900GTX, 2GB RAM

UPGRADED Geforce 7900GTX to Geforce 9800GTX RESULT: 3DMark 2K1 from 24000 to 26000 3DMark 2K6 from 5500 to 8000

UPGRADED AMD X2 4600 to Intel E8400 RESULT: 3DMark 2K1 from 26000 to 56000 3DMark 2006 8000-13500

Hi, heh. Thats your laptops boot options menu. Dont worry, its a menu from which you can select the device you want to boot from. In this case, we want to boot from your hard disk, as normal. When you get into this menu, what you need to do is, and timing is critical,select your hard disk, and immediatelystart pressing F8 again. If you time this correctly, you should get into the Windows Boot options menu. Remember to look out for the option to startup in VGA mode.

Hope this helps

Could be lots of stuff. The usual causes for intermittent freezing is either memory settings are wrong or your CPU mmay be overheating. The last point will be reinforced by noting that freezing occurs mostly with lots of video or especially gaming activity. One thing you can do, if you dont wish to useor dont have a BIOS temp monitor is to download a utility called Sandra which wil lshow you too much info about your system, but more specifically, it will also show you your CPU and chipset temperatures. Have a look at that and see what your CPU temp is. It should not be over 60C at any time. On the other hand, if its memory, than you will need to go into BIOS and check what the settings for RAM are. The best settings , unless you know what you are doing, is to have them all set to auto detect. If you have more than one RAM module, you can try and run with one RAM module.

Hope this helps