ram

Minimum these days is 1GB, but for newish games to work at full speed and full settings, 2GB seems the norm.
 
I have one gig and it doesn't do great. I recommend minimum 1.5 GB, 2GB even better. Just remember you can only put as much memory as your motherboard allows. :)

Edit: that gray box is so ugly, so enjoy some green!!! :D +1 for you
 
Yeah 250GB is a nice amount, and won't break the bank nowadays.

For my next build, I'm planning on getting 2 drives, and running them in RAID 1. No more "Oh sorry, you've lost all your data" crap, when one decides to die.
 
RAID 1 rocks!!! It's worth spending the extra cash!!! Lose something on one drive and you can transfer it. None of that striping crap!
 
It's up to you whether or not you should. It definitely helps if you can use RAID 1. That way it is like having a constant backup. If you have the extra cash, I recommend it. But you do have a tight budget.
 
If you can afford it, and you have RAID, why not?

The problem with RAID 1 though is, even though it basically mirrors one drive to another, you still only have 1 physical drive to Windows, so for example, if you got 2x 300GB HD, Windows will see one drive with 300GB.

Another problem is, if one drive got a virus and you started losing data, the other drive would follow suit.

On a good note though, it does save you from losing data if the misfortunate event of one dying happened, which I've had happen alot.

OTHER RAID

Other RAID options include RAID 0, which basically takes 2 drives, and then shares information between them, speeding things up a bit, but if one goes, you've pretty much lost your data all over again, with 2x chance of something going wrong.

RAID 3 I think, mirrors and stripes, but you need a minimum of 4 drives for this to work.
 
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