Camera Labs

One of the most frustrating problems I had with a PC in the past was dodgy RAM. It kept coming up with all sorts of strange errors and took me ages to diagnose. Now it's one of the first things I check if a machine is acting strange...

Bad sectors in the HDD are more likely to be the cause than damaged RAM. With the later, you'd surely get errors in every OS, not just in 7. Disk errors, however, can remain unnoticed until you try to do stuff like erasing/recreating/reformatting drives etc. Most of the time the problem would show up right during the OS install. I strongly recommend a thorough inspection of the HDD as well.

RAM can of course be damaged.

Do also try a PS2 mouse/kb. I have seen Microsoft panic with these in MANY different versions of their OSes. PS2 is guaranteed to work in ALL platforms. Why waste a USB port anyway? The more USB devices you use, the slower they all will be, and errors are more likely to happen.

Just my 2 cents

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SX10IS
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I formatted my hard drives before installing windows 7 without problems.

I am 100% sure it was my ram.

USB is faster than PS2 and enables you to have macro keys on the mouse, higher refresh rates, etc.

I know usb is faster, but I think there are other devices which deserve the bandwidth more (given it is split up among all), like printers, card readers, the camera itself, webcam, portable drives etc. Higher refresh rates are nice for monitors and display adapters - not so much for mouse/kb. It would definitely be nice to have a lot of faster devices, even mouse/kb, but the point is that the benefit is really not worth the extraordinary amount of pain it brings. It eats up the speed of your really important devices, and causes problems. In your case, the RAM may be the culprit, but usb is infamous in this regard. It has known to cause intermittent headaches to a lot of geeks I know...

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SX10IS
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I agree, usb is normally a pain.

But in FPS gaming, sniping them worthless other team players you do notice the higher refresh rate and macro keys.

At least I did. But I do keep a PS2 mouse just incase the SHTF.

Hey, I'm a big fan of FPS too But I usually enjoy the single-player ones more. I do like LAN party though. But online gaming is dependent on a lot of more vital factors for smooth, fast gameplay. Apart from quality hardware, the d.servers, locations of the servers, player count, congestion, and a LOT of other things dictate the overall experience. I used to develop/mod games at one time. I've been into this for more than a decade. In my experience, PS2 mouse is barely a problem. USB mouse, however, has been a severe problem on many occasions, in a wide range of pc configurations, usually leading to a hang.
Anyway, I don't want the topic to stray away too far. I'm very happy with my 32-bit intel setup. Everything just works out-of-the-box...

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SX10IS
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I have to agree, I normally play with a 80-120ms network lag. My ISP is naughty.

Macros on mouse are still awesome though. Not only for games but for web browsing too.

I'm doing good with my 3-button scroll mouse, ain't I? And I always win ( ) in the SP missions...

Kidding aside, I do want a smooth pressure device for photoshopping... (Hmmm, why not? Have to find some time...)

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SX10IS
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