Hard drive speed would not matter at all. When the EXE for the trainer is executed, it gets instantiated into memory which will be dependent on your RAM speed (unless you have a horribly low amount of RAM and have to rely on the page file).
Thanks guys, I appreciate the info.
As to the Ram, it will have 32GB 1866MHZ DDR3 so I hope that will be more than plenty for at least a few years anyway. I always try to spec them a little overboard for now so that they will last me hopefully 5-6 years down the road with typically one or two grafix cards updates. But who knows what all advances we'll see in technology the next few years.
Agreed. You are no doubt correct. After 5 years in this 32 bit machine with its 4gb max ram, my intent is to future proof a new one as much as possible for another 5 years of use. I'm really looking forward to running games and trainers without having to go thru the Task Mgr shutting off items to squeeze out another few K of free ram all the time.
So i'm over-correcting. The cost between 16gb and 32gb is approximately 3.5% the total. I can't have Banana Splits anymore these days, so I'm getting too much ram instead.
Just make sure you have a good power supply (PSU). From both personal experience and research, having all your RAM slots filled can cause voltage issues with the cheaper PSU's. Some of the cheaper PSU's do not provide a steady voltage to the RAM. This can cause your system to be unstable. I prefer Silverstone or Corsair in my builds. I too run 32gb of RAM in my rig. While I do not see a performance gain in gaming, I see it when I encode video. As long as I am using a program that is 64-bit itself.
As far as the Operating System goes, I know I am going to get some flak about this, I suggest Windows 8. The move for me from Windows 7 to Windows 8 reminded me of the move from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. Everything is there, I know the "Start Menu" isn't, it is just in a different place. If you are a die-hard "Start Menu" person, I recommend purchasing Start8 from Stardock software. I have not had any problems both running games and their respective trainers in Windows 8. I have also found that Windows 8 is very stable. I have been using it since release on 4 computers and nary a blue screen of death among them. Normally, with earlier iterations of Windows, I would have seen a couple of BSOD's.
I hope this helps. Good luck an enjoy your new machine!
[Edited by linesma, 5/14/2014 12:00:59 PM]