real battery terminals make a differnce?

Im ghetto and lazy i know.  My power wire and alt wire is connected to my lightning audio battery with a wing nut.  I was thinking of getting some real terminals, but does it make a big differnce?  I am trying to solve my dimming lights.  I got a 150amp alt 4ga power wire for amps and 4ga wire for alt to battery.  I was told to upgrade my grounds for my battery and alt.  I ran some 8ga wire from the negative terminal to various parts of the engine compartment.  Grounding the alt, i couldnt figure out.  So are the battery terminals a good place to start?

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Memphis MC-1300
2 12" JLw6v2
Diamond audio M3 6x9
Diamond audio M3 5.25 components
Audio control Matrix
Carputer

It probably is not going to SOLVE for the dimming lights, but it certainly can't hurt. A better quality terminal will give you better connections, which means less loss, in addition to looking pretty. It will also make your connections last longer, which means less maintenance in the long run.

As far as the alternator cable is concerned, did you connect it directly to your battery, or is it connected to your primary (underhood) fuseblock? It should be right to the battery. The alternator is grounded to the engineblock, which you said you grounded to in several places. Does that mean you connected several #8 to several places under the hood and back to the battery, (preferred) or one #8 to several places and back to the battery, as in daisy-chaining?

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It all reminds me of something that Molière once said to Guy de Maupassant at a café in Vienna: "That's nice. You should write it down."

My alt is connected straight to the battery.  Yeah i connected a few 8 ga wires from the battery to differnt parts of the engine bay.  But it is really ugly so i think im going to change it and just run one 0 ga and replace the factory ground.

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Memphis MC-1300
2 12" JLw6v2
Diamond audio M3 6x9
Diamond audio M3 5.25 components
Audio control Matrix
Carputer

Do the lights dim even when your engine is at a good RPM (try putting it in neutral and revving to like 4k). If so, skip to the next paragraph. You can try running the amp wire straight to the alternator. But chances are that you're not going to solve your problem with that. If you don't spin your engine way fast (I'm talking like 7-8 grand) then get an overdrive pulley for the alternator so it spins faster. Many HO alternators actually give less power at idle.

To ground the alt, you ground the engine block. The alt is grounded to the engine, which should then go to the chassis. If you want, you can ground the chassis again from one of the alternator mounting bolts, but you don't need to.

If your lights are only dimming a very small amount (at idle), then you can try a cap.

and what does your "carputer" consist of? Computers can draw quite a bit of current, up to probably 25-30A @ 12V if it's a good computer. You may just need an alternator that is better still. By the way, if you're having problems supplying enough power to your car, then I wouldn't run a computer in there 'til I got those power problems fixed.

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2009 Pontiac G8 in planning stage
HU: ?
Speakers: ?
Amps: ?

An overdrive pulley might be a help, check with Alterstart to see if you can do that without voiding your warranty.

Dragonrage, where are you getting THAT kind of current draw for a computer? PC's of today don't use that much power... Even if he was using an AMD Thunderbird core, I am willing to bet that 8 to 10 amps is a more likely number... 30A at 12v is 360 watts, and I have a dual processor 2400+ AMD with 2G of RAM, and 5 hard drives (one of them a 15K spin Cheetah), and a Radeon 9800 Video card on a 300 watt power supply, so I really think that is an exceptionally high guesstimate for power demands.

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It all reminds me of something that Molière once said to Guy de Maupassant at a café in Vienna: "That's nice. You should write it down."

My computer is already istalled and everything so taking it out means leaving me without any tunes.  But it consistts of :

epia m1000 motherboard, soundblaster audigy 2 nx usb sound card,usb gps reciever, 20gig 2.5" laptop hard drive, latptop dvd/cd-rw, 7" vga touchscreen. 512 megs of ram, video is intergrated.  60w power supply and ITPS DC-DC regulator.  I think that is about it. 

My lights dim when my engine is at normal driving 2500-3000rpms the alt is supposed to put out 150amps at 1500rpms.  They do not dim too bad at all, but they do dim and can get pretty bad when im really cranking on the stereo.  I do not listen to the stereo at that volume all the time but i would like to be able to and not have my lights dim.  I was just going to add a batcap ( here good things about these) because of it ablitly to discharge high amps for long periods of time and to stablize my system voltage.  I will call alterstart tomorrow to see what they have to say.

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Memphis MC-1300
2 12" JLw6v2
Diamond audio M3 6x9
Diamond audio M3 5.25 components
Audio control Matrix
Carputer

Well, with his computer, it's not so bad. That's why I asked what it was. If he even had a 200W power supply, at 12V, 85% efficiency, that's about 20A. It really depends on the computer setup. But using the Epia stuff and a laptop drive, it is indeed much less.

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2009 Pontiac G8 in planning stage
HU: ?
Speakers: ?
Amps: ?