I am just wondering why people put the specifications of their hardware into their signatures.

Why do people do that?

Does it make any difference to a "mplayer won't compile"-problem? Or is it just a status symbol? (In that case, of course, nearly ALL of you could go to hell, for I am owning a dual-CPU system )

Why do people show us CPU-frequencies? Or sizes of RAM? It doesn't make any difference that would be of greater importance. Also, a fast CPU (or two fast CPUs ) don't make a good computer. A bad mainboard burns much performance of a CPU, a bad power supply may burn the CPU itself And why do people show us their graphics cards? I know some people owning a Superdruber3D-II or so, and use those nifty 14"-Monitors... E.g. for gambling, where is the difference if I play tuxracer on a 500Mhz or a 2.5GHz-CPU? Also, harddrives are a very much limiting factor, if you got an IDE-disk, forget it, SCSI is much faster. And so on and so on.

But you won't find such specs. You'll always find: Graphics card, CPU, RAM. But why?

My thoughts are that, should they need to post a hardware related question then they wont need to keep posting specs.
There is also it lets other members and beginners know which hardware runs under Linux.
(Although we have the HCL for that now)
And of course there is always simply just to show off,, but Im guessing its the above 2.

I like to brag about my state of the art 233 with 128 megs of ram....

i have a 1.3ghz athlon 256kb cache
and 512megs of DDR ram..
and a 6 gig hard disk..
and..
and..
and a 100Mbit net card....
and ..
and.. lol, im joking.

its almost useless.
sometimes it is needed.

for example, if some idiot wants to know why Ut2004 doesnt work, and they have not read the documentation, you can smite them down if there hardware specs say somthing like "product xyz graphics chip" cos we all read the documentation, and we all know how hardware specific ut is right ? no ? well.. okay, i did :P

who cares? dont read if you dont like it.. I would of asked the question this way though.. why do people use signatures anyways?

Having your hardware specs in your signature makes answering questions a millions times easier on the people trying to help you. It saves you from having to waste posts giving out your hardware specs, too. I can't count how many times I've typed out my entire system config; its just easier to have it available to whoever reads your posts, rather than having to hand it out a thread-by-thread basis.

I used to hate it when people posted their hardware specs in their sigs, I used to think: "Showboating bastards." I'm sensing that you've got a similar disposition.