Here's what I'm working with.

GA-965P-DS3 Motherboard
Kentsfield Q6600 Processor
Running Windows XP Home Edition

I figure the rest of my hardware is negligible for buying my RAM. I was looking at getting some Patriot Extreme performance RAM. I know it can be up to DDR2 800 RAM, so that's what I'm planning on getting, and I know that XP limits the amount of RAM to 2 gigs, so I won't go overboard and get more than that (unless I'm wrong and it limits it to 4 gigs?).

The only question I had was that Newegg has both a Cas Latency of 4 and 5 for two different sets (and likewise, each has timings of 4-4-4-12 and 5-5-5-12 respectively). Which set would be better for me to get?

32 bit operating systems have a limit of ~4gb of ram. 64 bit limit is somewhere in the terabytes I think. Windows XP 32bit has a limit of 4gb of ram, including the video card ram. So if you have a video card with 512mb of memory, windows can only use 3.5gb of system ram.

The lower the Cas Latency, the better, but the average user really wont notice a difference. I think Anonymous did a test using different Cas Latency ram a while back and only got a few FPS difference. If theres less then a $10 difference in the latency's, then get the lower one, other then that it may just be a waste of money.

Defiantly stick with DDR2 800 or higher though.

Oh, sweet. XD

In that case, there's a 4 GB combo of Extreme Performance Patriot RAM with 4 sticks of 1 GB each for only $85 or so. Is spreading it out to 4 sticks better than getting 2 sticks of 2 GB each?

And I was considering upgrading to Leopard, but this is just my family's computer anyway, so for now I'm okay with 32 bit Windows. When I buy a new computer, I'm going for the Mac Pro - unless you think it's possible to build a faux Mac Pro cheaper? I need it for music editing to use Pro Tools and whatnot. Probably have 2 TB of space on there or so... I dunno, suppose that's a topic for another thread.

I'd rather go with 2x 2gb, but once again I dont think it makes that big of a difference.

Technically, in order to run a mac operating system, you have to own an apple computer. You can install OS X on a PC, but its not easy and can be unstable.

Wat? Then why would they sell this if you couldn't just build a computer and install it?! That's awfully tricky. =[

So that you can buy it and install it on an Apple computer.

quote System Requirements

Mac computer

lololol

Oh.

And so what are the drawbacks of hacked copies? Do many people find that they're unstable, or are they safe enough to use? I mean, this will be my livelihood on a computer, so I want it not to fail me!

I would not recommend it as as primary operating system to a novice user. Depending on the setup, they can range from being completely unusable to very stable. I have it on my laptop, and after about 2 weeks of working on it, I got everything to work except my wireless card, which currently is incompatible with OSX.

It may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to get it stable, but once you do it works pretty well until it messes up. I recommend you at least have a spare computer to use for when it messes up or while your installing it. The most common problem is video and audio not working.

Do you have any basic programing experience? If you dont know anything about how to use a command line then that will make it 5x harder to do.

My command line experience goes about as far as learning how to open files and change directories in my Comp. Science class. I wrote my code in the terminal, but that means nothing as far as using commands in it.

However, I mean... I wouldn't call myself a NOVICE user. I'm certainly not advanced, so I suppose that makes me an intermediate computer tech dude. I built the computer I'm using now, have fiddled with my BIOS configuration a few times, installed different OS's on here, finally figured out how to make my hard drives run in a RAID configuration... Just nothing as far as actually telling my computer what to do via command line, and not a lot of DOS work.

You might be able to do it then. I would get 2 hard drives for it though; one for windows and another for OS X.

Nifty. XD I'll definitely look more into all of this soon, when I have a job again...

Just correcting a few misconceptions here. First of all, a 32 bit operating system can only detect about 3.3GB of RAM. Any extra memory, such as going to 4GB will show that it exists, but will slow the system down and not use the extra. (64 bit systems can detect up to 128GB.) I recommend dual channelling two 1GB and two 512 MB RAM cards, or otherwise go the 64bit route.

Cas Latency's difference in performance is negligable between 4 and 5. Tom's Hardware did benchmarks that showed little performance differences unless overclocking is involved. Cas 4 is great for overclocking, but if you aren't planning to overclock memory, either is fine.