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Sign up for the Tiger emails friend if you are looking for a laptop, they have been having some pretty crazy sales on AMD Fusion powered systems, such as An Aspire Quad for $400 without MIRs which if I wasn't already happy with my E350 EEE netbook I would be sorely tempted, thanks to turbocore those units can ramp up pretty decently when you are using only one or two thread and that unit has dual graphics, with both a discrete and the fusion APU, nice.

And I can tell you that on the Windows front i was right there with you, ATI made great hardware but their software and drivers were just fucking TERRIBLE, they had the damned driver GUI tied to .NET of all things so if there was a problem you had to wonder, was it an ATI problem, was it a .NET problem, just a fucking mess but when AMD bought ATI and Nvidia burned me with bumpgate I can say the drivers became solid as a rock and the bang for the buck is just nuts. So I can't tell you on the Linux side other than when firing up the latest live CDs it all seems to "just work" on both my HD3xxx IGP and my HD4850 discrete, videos play smooth and the picture sharp.

Look if it were me, you got a desktop, right? Go over to Geeks or Tiger and pick up a really cheap AMD graphics card and see how she goes. I've seen low end HD5xxx going for about $20 on Tiger and Geeks has an HD4770 for $43 and an HD3870 X2 for $63. Any of those cards should give you a good taste of what you'd be looking at if you went AMD and if it doesn't work as you'd like you're not really out nothing, just throw it back in the box and send it back or sell it on Craigslist. Here is a 5450 for $22 which at that price its not gonna be any big risk to your wallet. All I can tell you is what Phoronix has been saying which is the FOSS drivers are coming up by leaps and bounds and most of the distros are supporting both the discrete and the Fusions pretty well now.

Sign up for the Tiger emails friend if you are looking for a laptop, they have been having some pretty crazy sales on AMD Fusion powered systems, such as An Aspire Quad for $400 without MIRs which if I wasn't already happy with my E350 EEE netbook I would be sorely tempted, thanks to turbocore those units can ramp up pretty decently when you are using only one or two thread and that unit has dual graphics, with both a discrete and the fusion APU, nice.

And I can tell you that on the Windows front i was right there with you, ATI made great hardware but their software and drivers were just fucking TERRIBLE, they had the damned driver GUI tied to .NET of all things so if there was a problem you had to wonder, was it an ATI problem, was it a .NET problem, just a fucking mess but when AMD bought ATI and Nvidia burned me with bumpgate I can say the drivers became solid as a rock and the bang for the buck is just nuts. So I can't tell you on the Linux side other than when firing up the latest live CDs it all seems to "just work" on both my HD3xxx IGP and my HD4850 discrete, videos play smooth and the picture sharp.

Look if it were me, you got a desktop, right? Go over to Geeks or Tiger and pick up a really cheap AMD graphics card and see how she goes. I've seen low end HD5xxx going for about $20 on Tiger and Geeks has an HD4770 for $43 and an HD3870 X2 for $63. Any of those cards should give you a good taste of what you'd be looking at if you went AMD and if it doesn't work as you'd like you're not really out nothing, just throw it back in the box and send it back or sell it on Craigslist. Here is a 5450 for $22 which at that price its not gonna be any big risk to your wallet. All I can tell you is what Phoronix has been saying which is the FOSS drivers are coming up by leaps and bounds and most of the distros are supporting both the discrete and the Fusions pretty well now.

Really? Because a "quick-search" for DDR3 Laptop Ram on TigerDirect indicates 8GB modules (2x4GB) for $39.99, or $80 for 16GB (4x4GB).
Alternately, 16GB (2x8GB) modules for $119.99.

Really? Because a "quick-search" for DDR3 Laptop Ram on TigerDirect indicates 8GB modules (2x4GB) for $39.99, or $80 for 16GB (4x4GB).
Alternately, 16GB (2x8GB) modules for $119.99.

Not to mention there are plenty of places that offer square trade with their laptops for 3 years. Had a customer that bought it and someone swinging a book bag managed to hit her laptop in the library and killed the screen, they paid for the shipping, made the system good as new, it was pretty damned hassle free. So it isn't like AppleCare is the only way to go here and you are correct about bugs and hassles no different than any other OS.

As for a recommendation it is obvious in TFA they want an Intel because they don't care about graphics (rimshot) so if it were my customer I'd recommend an Asus Zenbook as it meets all the requirements and I've had nothing but good experiences with asus. Comes with Core i5,1600x900 resolution, 128Gb SSD, 4Gb of RAM, and a 1 year accidental coverage which they can bring up to 3 years for $224 if they wish and the unit comes in at just under $1000 so even adding 3 years no questions asked will still bring them in under the $1500 mentioned in TFA. of course if it were me personally I'd prefer an AMD quad but then again I DO care about graphics, but if all they are doing is video watching the intel GPU does that very well and with great battery life so overall a very nice unit that is thin and light and matches the desires in TFA.

Why not just use a non-wireless router and a couple powerline adapters in an apartment building. It might be slightly more expensive, but if you only need to hook up a couple computers it would likely be worth it. You'd also have the option of putting in a wireless repeater/range extender in a given room for guests et al.

Nope, too expensive for too small a screen for a kitchen PC. As someone who has actually set a few of these up for customers I would recommend something like the HP or Gateway all-in-ones. You can get them anywhere from 19-24 inches, they have both AMD Fusion and Intel i3 units (Personally I like AMD Fusion as the price is lower while having excellent hardware acceleration for video and very low heat generation) and you can basically choose from units starting at around $350 going all the way to $800 just depending on what features you want.

so I'm sorry but the iPad isn't a good choice in this situation. Not saying there is anything wrong with it, in fact I recommend them myself for doctor's office and warehouse inventory as you can't really beat the size in those applications, but in a kitchen you want something big enough you won't have to go past the stove when you are cooking and with large enough icons you can just pop them with a knuckle in case your hands are a little messy. Just not the right device for this situation IMHO. If he wants to look at them last I checked Tigerdirect had a large selection although with the shortages of Fusion chips most of theirs are Intel i series just as this really nice Gateway for $699 which would give him a nice 23 inch 1080p with enough hard drive space you could load it with movies (great when you are stuck in the kitchen) and with built in Wifi and webcam it would be easy to integrate into his existing system and do video chat as per TFA.

I have set up several machines using 2gb and 3Gb with a 64bit OS for future proofing and can tell you that you can see the difference thanks to the 64 bit registers. Although personally with RAM as cheap as it is anybody would have to be nuts to hamstring performance by going with less than 4gb of RAM, especially if you are planning to use it as a desktop replacement. hell even my netbook has 8gb simply because the upgrade was so cheap it was rather pointless to go less.

Now since i don't know your budget i'll just give you a couple of suggestions, if money is not tight an i5 with an SSD as an i5 is currently the sweet spot on the Intel side when it comes to price/performance whereas if money is tighter then go for an AMD A6 or A8 again with an SSD. For what you are wanting to do the SSD along with plenty of RAM will give you the biggest performance increase, something like this with an SSD in place of the HDD would probably be the best bang for the buck.

Tiger Direct

New Egg

Hannspree HZ281HPB 28" Class Widescreen LCD Monitor - 1920 x 1200 Price: $279.99
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=835615&CatId=3774

triple core WITH SSD is $199 after MIR, if you look around you can find an OEM Win 7 HP for around $60-$70, an HD4850 at geeks is $50. That leaves me roughly $60 for putting it together which with the software installs being unattended takes less than an hour. and that $499 ipad is worthless without all the other crap, the docks and adapters and keyboards and crap, and while you can slap on Steam and have literally hundred of F2P games you ain't getting shit worth having in Appleland for free.

Dude BUY NOW as Tiger is selling off the last of their Thuban X6 units crazy cheap, we are talking about a fully loaded PC, just add OS, for $289 after MIR delivered. For a fricking 6 core! I snatched one of the 1035T chips for myself and i can tell you its a fricking monster, VMs, transcoding, gaming, you name it it'll chew through it like it was nothing and when using single threaded apps turbocore really gives them a kick in the pants. Normally I'm a "if it ain't broke" kinda guy but I gave my quad to one of my kids and snatched one because i knew you simply aren't gonna see chips that powerful for THAT cheap for a hell of a long time if ever. And if you decide later you "feel the need for speed" I decided just to see how far she'd go without a voltage increase since the Asrock board i have has killer OCing tools and I managed to get to over 3.4Ghz on air with a turbocore of 3.8. And that's without bumping the volts! These babies are the sweethearts of the thuban line, the 95w envelope gives them OCing room like you wouldn't believe and still keeps the chips nice and cool.

So if you are running a dual I highly recommend you snatching one of those x6 barebones while you can as they won't last long and having that kind of power you'll easily be able to go to 2020 and beyond with the unit. I've built 2 of their x6 kits so far and not only is the setup so simple your grandma could do it but the MSI boards they are packing with them are real nice with solid caps and well cut traces, just good solid units. snatch one while you can friend because a company being this stupid when it comes to price don't happen every day. I paired them with a $50 HD4850 from geeks and at $550 a pop I had those units gone before i could even get them put in the window, just a truly sweet unit with tons of power and features. get it friend you will NOT regret it.

Well there is that rumor that valve is gonna put out a "steam box" which will basically be a stripped down OS just running steam on COTS hardware, but hell if you are gonna do that why not just slap yourself together a dirt cheap HTPC? The AMD AM3 and AM3+ chips are really cheap, with the Athlon X3 at $70 and if you catch the sales the Thuban X6 has been selling at tiger for $109 and the boards for those are again dirt cheap with nice Asrock boards for around $40, you can pick up brand new HD4850 cards at geeks for $51 now and while not the top of the heap anymore they are still insanely powerful, finally add the HDD of your choice and Win 7 HP and tada!

Or if you'd like even easier here is a 6 core monster for $320 and I can say as i own that chip that it kicks major ass both in gaming and transcoding, just slap that HD4850 I mentioned and Win 7 along with your choice of wireless controller (X360, PS3 style, flightstick, etc) and you have a machine that will not only kick some major ass gaming but will do just about any job you can come up with, be it streaming, downloading, office work, media tank, websurfing, you name it it'll do it for many many years to come.

In the end that's why i gave up on the consoles and went full time PC, sure the consoles have some nice specs when they first come out but they are so DRMed that frankly they quickly become useless for anything but consuming approved content in approved ways. My 2.5GHz P4 that I was gaming on a decade ago is now my mom's netbox where she plays her match 3 games and shops, the 2008 era Pentium duals my nephews were gaming on I recently sold for enough I was able to upgrade them to AMD triple cores (both I was able to successfully unlock) so they'll be good for awhile and I have no doubt the most I'll have to do with this AMD 6 core is change out the GPU for another $60 card in a year or two when the 6850s are as cheap as the 4850s are now. That's the nice thing about PCs, when they are no longer powerful enough for gaming they can be re-purposed and continue to be useful. In fact my very first gamer PC, a 100MHz Pentium, is actually still running 5 days a week at a lumber mill. they bought it and my 233Mhz to run an old C&C lathe that only runs on an ISA card. You'd be surprised how long a PC will last with just a little care.

I could probably use my old ATI Rage (Pro? 128? ) from '98 .... would the old video card support its 1920 x 1080 resolution ... But if I hadn't upgraded the videocard a 2 years ago, I don't think any of my older ones would have supported the max / native resolution

FWIW, yes, it would support it: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2174312&CatId=695

Sorry for the poor choice of sites for specs... was the first google links that had them.

ATI Rage 128PRO 32MB Video Card - PCI
Maximum Resolution: 1920 x 1200 @ 85hz

Same for a "Rage 128", non pro.
The "Rage XL" and "3d Rage Pro" would not do 1900xanything - they max at 1600x1200, and that's probably only because there were no 1900x1200 screens then.

Let da feet help you out friend, if you want recent chips look under used on Amazon and if you want older chips, i'm talking going all the waaaay back to socket 754 and earlier then Starmicro is your friend. they have both Intel and AMD and those cheap Phenom I quads i've found make damned good cheap renderboxes or HTPCs and my office customers just love 'em, the E chips only use 65w while letting them multitask like crazy without dragging down the machines, perfect for secretaries,factory floor, or slap it with a Hyper N212 or N520 for a nice quiet HTPC that does transcoding.

That said friend take my advice, Tiger is selling the Thuban 1035t for just $130 for the retail unit. Take that HSF that comes with it, go "whoosh" right over your shoulder, hook that bad boy up with a Hyper N520 and you have a fricking monster! Just for shits and giggles since I have a killer Asrock board that OCs easily (A770DE+, great board if you have plenty of DDR 2 lying around like the 8Gb I had and has CF) and I managed to get her up to around 3.1Ghz and STILL had plenty of headroom before i thought "Why?" and dropped it to default clocks. With turbocore she'll jump up to 3.1GHz anytime I am doing anything that needs 3 cores or less and having 6 cores cranking at 2.6GHz she chews through video transcoding and disgital multitracking, and you know what my idle is? fricking room temp! No shit its room temp and tops out at 108F and that's after 3 hours of Prime95. man you slap that chip with that cooler? its a fricking sweeeeet combo man and you can't beat the price. Snatch one while you can man, snatch one while you can.

Uhhh...I didn't say there wouldn't be ANY guys that could use this, I'd said there would be very little because frankly most are playing BF3 and not a hardcore FS. Have you LOOKED at the Steam hardware survey lately? I mean you may have triple 2500 resolution monitors but that just makes you 0.01 percent of the population. The biggest settings are 12x10, 16x9, and 16x10 last i checked, the majority were dual cores but quads were climbing while we 6 core players are still a tiny minority (which when you can get a full AMD 6 core barebone for $299 at tiger i have no idea why more don't jump on, but that's another story) and the VAST majority are on single cards in the $100-$150 range.

So while you might want to spend the bones on a card that fast because you have a niche case, just like those guys that buy triple 5xxx cards for bitcoin mining that doesn't change the fact its a niche case. Frankly at the resolutions the majority of gamers (myself included at 1600x900) are playing at even my $60 HD4850 can go high to max on most games and not stutter.

BTW if you are doing a commercial FS on your own do me a favor, could you add the armed version of the Loach chopper? you never see anybody do those cool fast and light choppers, always the big bitches that are complex as fuck like the Blackshark or Hind or Apache, but there is something to be said about a fast and light run and gun that's just plain fun. Oh and if you can have an arcade mode for those of us that don't have time to go to virtual flight school that would be nice, thanks.

Put a cablecard into any mATX case (there are several that look like TiVos) along with win 7 HP and tada! Easy Peasy. Windows media center frankly kicks ass as a DVR, I've been running my cable into it since Oct 09 and its as simple and easy as one can get. I can tell it to record a show or record a series with a single click, it automatically downloads two weeks worth of scheduling and keeps itself updated (I have mine set to 7AM, it turns the PC on from sleep, updates and then goes back to sleep) and makes it butt simple with homegroups to share with the rest of my machines.

So just do it yourself friend, it couldn't be simpler. modern boards come with fricking pictures so you don't even have to Habla English to put together a PC, there are plenty of nice mATX cases that are perfect for HTPCs, you can use one of the new AMD E-350 boards (which last I checked are like $90 from Newegg) if you want it ultra low power with hardware decode or for $10-$15 more depending on which HSF you choose you can get a Phenom I quad ( just go to Starmicro.net and pick one out) for $55 and an AM2+ board is beyond cheap. then just load it out any way you like with regards to RAM and HDD, hell if you don't mind a standard black case (I've built a couple of them and they look quite nice in a slot in the entertainment center and most of the customers i'd found would rather have more power than a baby case) you can go nuts and get a 6 core for $300 after rebate with everything you'll need and more than enough power to transcode any format you wish. You could even slap in a cheap refurb HD4830 or HD4850 along with the wireless X360 controller and make a pretty kick ass game machine. I have a customer that went that route and all his friends just drool when he fires up Batman:AA or Just Cause II on that fat 50 inch TV. Go DIY and you save a ton and can have it YOUR way with what YOU want.

As for TFA....uhhh....who cares? XBMC isn't going anywhere, and you also have MediaPortal and of course WMC to go along with it, so it isn't like we don't have a wealth of choices here. If anything I'd say its never been easier to go HTPC, there is a ton of software, you can get cases in any shape and style, if you stick with AMD you can get insane horsepower for dirt cheap, for those of us that want to use our PCs for TVs or DVRs life is good.

Yep fraid so, it was announced Dec 5th by the CEO himself. The skinny is they are having such a run on Bobcat and Bulldozer (Bobcat has become the "go to" chip for the OEMs, its in everything from netbooks to HTPCs to all in ones, and the A series is getting sucked up by HP and Gateway for quad laptops) that GloFlo and TSMC can't keep up with production of those AND the AM3s, so instead of losing their higher profit chips they just killed the AM3s. I originally read it through the email daily links I get from El Reg but here is an older link that says they planned to end them in 2012, so they only upped their plans by a couple of quarters.

Sorry I can't find the original link but I'm kinda swamped with the silly season ATM. you might want to try the reg as i'm pretty sure that is where I read it and they confirmed that it IS officially the end of AM3, all that is left is the last chips that came off the line and what is in stock. i know that after i heard the news i went shopping for a Thuban and it took me three Etailers before i found a 95w Thuban left, the rest was sold out. if I'd have known ECS were lying bastards and i'd have to change my board i'd have gotten a 125 watter, but with this 1035t idling at 72 f and under load less than 100 f I really can't complain. but if you want one of the new chips better pull the trigger friend, because they won't last long!

BTW if you have a board that can take it these Thubans are fricking swwwweeeeet dude! Six cores of creamy goodness, turbo for when you aren't using all six cores, and actually seems to use less power and generate less heat than my Deneb did. With this new Asrock board (which I also recommend highly BTW, this baby has features I've only seen on $200+ boards) its just too nice. Anyway here is the chip and here is the cooler and I can tell you the three fit together like hand in glove. i had 8gb of DDR 2 RAM already so I figure I'm set for a good 5 years or more easy, since i haven't even OCed yet.

But if I was you and I wanted one i'd pull the trigger, because as you can see on the chart i linked to they were planning to kill AM3 by January anyway so its only a month off original roadmap, and man these chips are nice dude, damned nice. Score you a good 6 or quad and you'll be set for awhile, otherwise you'll be looking at the board needing replaced as well.

Yep fraid so, it was announced Dec 5th by the CEO himself. The skinny is they are having such a run on Bobcat and Bulldozer (Bobcat has become the "go to" chip for the OEMs, its in everything from netbooks to HTPCs to all in ones, and the A series is getting sucked up by HP and Gateway for quad laptops) that GloFlo and TSMC can't keep up with production of those AND the AM3s, so instead of losing their higher profit chips they just killed the AM3s. I originally read it through the email daily links I get from El Reg but here is an older link that says they planned to end them in 2012, so they only upped their plans by a couple of quarters.

Sorry I can't find the original link but I'm kinda swamped with the silly season ATM. you might want to try the reg as i'm pretty sure that is where I read it and they confirmed that it IS officially the end of AM3, all that is left is the last chips that came off the line and what is in stock. i know that after i heard the news i went shopping for a Thuban and it took me three Etailers before i found a 95w Thuban left, the rest was sold out. if I'd have known ECS were lying bastards and i'd have to change my board i'd have gotten a 125 watter, but with this 1035t idling at 72 f and under load less than 100 f I really can't complain. but if you want one of the new chips better pull the trigger friend, because they won't last long!

BTW if you have a board that can take it these Thubans are fricking swwwweeeeet dude! Six cores of creamy goodness, turbo for when you aren't using all six cores, and actually seems to use less power and generate less heat than my Deneb did. With this new Asrock board (which I also recommend highly BTW, this baby has features I've only seen on $200+ boards) its just too nice. Anyway here is the chip and here is the cooler and I can tell you the three fit together like hand in glove. i had 8gb of DDR 2 RAM already so I figure I'm set for a good 5 years or more easy, since i haven't even OCed yet.

But if I was you and I wanted one i'd pull the trigger, because as you can see on the chart i linked to they were planning to kill AM3 by January anyway so its only a month off original roadmap, and man these chips are nice dude, damned nice. Score you a good 6 or quad and you'll be set for awhile, otherwise you'll be looking at the board needing replaced as well.

Questions: Which unit did you go for? What are the temps? Did you OC? Because having previous exp with the bigger air coolers I figured that to get decent cooling to fit in this plain jane mid tower box I have, just an average black box with no extra fans other than the 120mm on the PSU, I'd end up having to break out a dremel but I was frankly surprised how much smaller and lighter some of the new units are.

I ended up having to go a little cheaper on the HS than I wanted thanks to having to change out the board (Lying ECS, saying their board would take a 6 when it wouldn't!) but frankly I was amazed when I fired the Coolermaster Hyper N520 up for the first time. When you look at the pics you'd think it was this monster but actually it fit quite easily in this mid tower and I've had the 6 core slammed all night doing video transcodes and my current temp is....damn, 86 degrees F! Hell that is lower than my Deneb idled at with stock clocks and I have the Thuban slightly OCed and the arctic silver hasn't had time to settle yet!

If any of the coolermaster guys read this? Thanks, its the little things that you remember, like how you provided a nice little socket with flathead adapter for bolting on the cooler, had instructions in actual English and a video on the website making it beyond simple to set up, and i don't know how they did it but these 3 pin fans are quiet as quiet can be, even with the CPU cranking out videos I can't even hear the unit running! That's nice, I think from now on i'll be including these babies as standard on my builds.

But I'm really interested in what unit you went with and how high you went as far as speed as i have a few 'must win teh benches!' customers and anything that will let those speed demons get a few more MHz is always of the good. I think for ordinary folks this Coolermaster will be all she wrote though, $35 and it keeps a chip THIS cold? While I like the idea of liquid cooling even the units in TFA won't fit your average mid tower so they are right out. Most mid towers only take 92mm exhaust fans so these units simply won't fit.

I had a P4 that made an excellent coffee warmer, does that count?

Seriously if you need a good cooler that isn't gonna break the bank I can't recommend more highly the one i just got, the Coolermaster Hyper N520. the thing was only $35, easy to install, works on pretty much ANY Intel or AMD CPU, and right now I have a modest OC on my AMD 6 core, bumping it up to 2.8GHz with a turbo of 3.3GHz, and with all 6 cores slamming doing a video transcode and without the arctic silver settled yet (don't use anything else, nothing beats the silver IMHO) the machine is barely hitting 86 degrees F without even having an exhaust fan. The combination of a pusher AND a puller fan (comes standard) along with the copper heatpipes really sucks the heat away from the CPU and surprisingly even though the fans are 3 pin this thing is quiet as a churchmouse.

So while I may be trying to get more aggressive on my OC after the silly season thanks to how chilly the coolermaster keeps the CPU (and the fact the new Asrock has an excellent OC utility built in) frankly I couldn't be happier, hell it even managed to fit nicely in a mid tower without needing to break out a dremel tool. Frankly for $35 USD I don't see how you could ask for more in a CPU cooler.

Slightly OT but not really since we ARE talking about CPUs and some of my fellow /.ers may not have heard, but on Dec 5th AMD announced due to the fact that they were getting more orders for the Bobcat and Bulldozer APUs than they can fill (from what i heard the Bobcat really threw them, the OEMs went nuts for that chip and threw it in everything from netbooks to all in ones to HTPCs and blew through their stock, although HP and Gateway is also cranking laptops with the A-series quad like it's going out of style) they have halted production of ALL AM3 chips to give the capacity to Bobcat and Bulldozer. so all you guys that have been eyeing some AMD chip? BUY NOW. I had to go to three different eTailers before i could find a 95w Thuban, the 6 cores and the BE are going quickly and when the stock on hand is gone that's it friends.

I figure with this coolermaster and easily OCed Thuban loaded into an Asrock with 8gb of RAM and 3Tb of HDD space i'm set for the next 5 years, maybe longer barring some new killer app that actually needs more than 6 cores. So with that let me leave you with my new happy song! We Wish You A Merry Thuban, We Wish You A Merry Thuban, We Wish You A Merry Thuban, And A Happy Six Cooooorrrres! Yee haw!

Tiger has a Seagate 2Tb external for $120 with free shipping and a nice Samsung 1Tb 2.5in internal for $130 so it looks like they can find them. I wonder if they have better deals set up with the distributors than the OEMs that are bitching?

If you have a laptop those samsung drives run real nice and the 32Mb cache almost makes them as fast as 7200RPM thanks to its intelligent caching, at least in my own benchmarks. i'd be snatching but i already have 320gb in my netbook and 6tb in my desktops so i don't think I really need any more space for awhile. enjoy!

Tiger has a Seagate 2Tb external for $120 with free shipping and a nice Samsung 1Tb 2.5in internal for $130 so it looks like they can find them. I wonder if they have better deals set up with the distributors than the OEMs that are bitching?

If you have a laptop those samsung drives run real nice and the 32Mb cache almost makes them as fast as 7200RPM thanks to its intelligent caching, at least in my own benchmarks. i'd be snatching but i already have 320gb in my netbook and 6tb in my desktops so i don't think I really need any more space for awhile. enjoy!

Uhhh...dude? Why would you go with Atom when you can have a Brazos board for the same price and have a BETTER CPU and GPU? i've have built a few brazos HTPCs as well as sold Brazos netbooks and all in ones (I was so impressed with the netbooks I sold my MSI Wind and got a EEE Brazos for myself) and frankly Brazos stomps the living shit out of Atom.

With atom you are limited to 2Gb whereas Brazos will take 8Gb (great for video buffering BTW, watching HD video with 8Gb on my netbook is sweet!) and Intel still hasn't made a decent GPU for Atom and cut their noses off to spite their face by cutting out nvidia from making new ION whereas with Brazos you have a Radeon HD6250 built in that accelerates ALL the major formats including DivX and flash as well as H.26x, max wattage is only 18w for the dual core 1.6GHz so no real need for fans and the Brazos is an out of order CPU instead of the crappy in order you get with Atom.

So if you were building an HTPC while saddle it with a craptastic Atom when you can get a nice brazos board for $80 after rebate and it even comes with a PCIe X16 in case you want more performance later or want to go hybrid crossfire.

I have to agree on Via though, never have seen their drivers be anything but flaky and their boards iffy. they just don't seem to be well engineered and tend to screw up more, at least from what I've seen.

I've had good luck with customers and the Velocity Cruz and Archos tablets. Sure they're not speed demons, but we are talking grandma and he is worried about price. they start at $99 for the 7 inch Cruz but if its for grandma I'd probably look at the 10 inch Archos for $169.

As someone whose grandma passed away this yer I wish you all the luck in the world. We were lucky that mine was a spirited little thing that managed to stay on her feet right up until that last week of her life when she passed right after her 96th birthday.

I learned one thing though...I don't EVER want to live to be THAT old! all your friends are gone, more of the people that you knew are below ground than above, she had even lost one child and one grandchild by the end. Personally I'd rather bite the farm before everybody i know does, thanks.

I've had good luck with customers and the Velocity Cruz and Archos tablets. Sure they're not speed demons, but we are talking grandma and he is worried about price. they start at $99 for the 7 inch Cruz but if its for grandma I'd probably look at the 10 inch Archos for $169.

As someone whose grandma passed away this yer I wish you all the luck in the world. We were lucky that mine was a spirited little thing that managed to stay on her feet right up until that last week of her life when she passed right after her 96th birthday.

I learned one thing though...I don't EVER want to live to be THAT old! all your friends are gone, more of the people that you knew are below ground than above, she had even lost one child and one grandchild by the end. Personally I'd rather bite the farm before everybody i know does, thanks.

Actually if you have been keeping up with events of late AMD has been selling so many chips that the only thing holding them back has been trouble from the manufacturing getting up to speed on the latest die shrink so I really doubt marketing when you are selling out of chips already is REALLY needed that much, do you?

I mean look at the AMD Brazos line, they have those things in everything from netbooks (here is the one I personally sold my MSI Wind for after picking up a few for customers, it hold 8Gb of RAM and is sweeeet, both on performance and battery life) to laptops like this one with B-Ray to cool HTPC designs to these really awesome all in ones which I found make pretty killer SOHO/small business and family PCs.

So actually I'd say AMD was on the right track when their CEO announced that they were slowing their desktop output to ramp up mobile chips to try to fill the demand. Frankly even if they hadn't had the problems with the supply chain I doubt seriously they'd be needing much in the way of advertising ATM. Right now with the economy down prices trumps just about everything and the bang per buck was in the AMD camp even before the APUs hit, now you have machines that'll play WoW and smooth HD video at frankly insanely cheap prices and get 6 hours on the battery for the mobiles and not heat up the house on the HTPC and all in one. Seems like a good combo to me.

Of course this isn't even bringing up the next "big thing" from the AMD camp which most of the number crunchers and programmers here ought to be drooling over and that is the switch from VLIW to vector in their APUs and GPUs which should bring floating point math a hell of a speed boost. Oh and for all you FOSS lovers out there AMD is switching to Coreboot so you'll have a system that can be open and modified from the BIOS layer on up.

I do have a question about TFA though....what was wrong with R600? Sure the 2xxx and 3xxx series didn't slaughter Nvidia but they also didn't crank the living hell out of the heat nor did they have the whole "bumpgate" issue Nvidia had at the time. Their IGP version of the 3xxx was also quite nice for HD video and the HD38xx was pretty sweet and was easy to crossfire. So while I wouldn't call it a second coming or Nvidia killer it certainly wasn't up to the level of the Nvidia 5xxx, aka the Hoover card fiasco.

Actually if you have been keeping up with events of late AMD has been selling so many chips that the only thing holding them back has been trouble from the manufacturing getting up to speed on the latest die shrink so I really doubt marketing when you are selling out of chips already is REALLY needed that much, do you?

I mean look at the AMD Brazos line, they have those things in everything from netbooks (here is the one I personally sold my MSI Wind for after picking up a few for customers, it hold 8Gb of RAM and is sweeeet, both on performance and battery life) to laptops like this one with B-Ray to cool HTPC designs to these really awesome all in ones which I found make pretty killer SOHO/small business and family PCs.

So actually I'd say AMD was on the right track when their CEO announced that they were slowing their desktop output to ramp up mobile chips to try to fill the demand. Frankly even if they hadn't had the problems with the supply chain I doubt seriously they'd be needing much in the way of advertising ATM. Right now with the economy down prices trumps just about everything and the bang per buck was in the AMD camp even before the APUs hit, now you have machines that'll play WoW and smooth HD video at frankly insanely cheap prices and get 6 hours on the battery for the mobiles and not heat up the house on the HTPC and all in one. Seems like a good combo to me.

Of course this isn't even bringing up the next "big thing" from the AMD camp which most of the number crunchers and programmers here ought to be drooling over and that is the switch from VLIW to vector in their APUs and GPUs which should bring floating point math a hell of a speed boost. Oh and for all you FOSS lovers out there AMD is switching to Coreboot so you'll have a system that can be open and modified from the BIOS layer on up.

I do have a question about TFA though....what was wrong with R600? Sure the 2xxx and 3xxx series didn't slaughter Nvidia but they also didn't crank the living hell out of the heat nor did they have the whole "bumpgate" issue Nvidia had at the time. Their IGP version of the 3xxx was also quite nice for HD video and the HD38xx was pretty sweet and was easy to crossfire. So while I wouldn't call it a second coming or Nvidia killer it certainly wasn't up to the level of the Nvidia 5xxx, aka the Hoover card fiasco.

Actually if you have been keeping up with events of late AMD has been selling so many chips that the only thing holding them back has been trouble from the manufacturing getting up to speed on the latest die shrink so I really doubt marketing when you are selling out of chips already is REALLY needed that much, do you?

I mean look at the AMD Brazos line, they have those things in everything from netbooks (here is the one I personally sold my MSI Wind for after picking up a few for customers, it hold 8Gb of RAM and is sweeeet, both on performance and battery life) to laptops like this one with B-Ray to cool HTPC designs to these really awesome all in ones which I found make pretty killer SOHO/small business and family PCs.

So actually I'd say AMD was on the right track when their CEO announced that they were slowing their desktop output to ramp up mobile chips to try to fill the demand. Frankly even if they hadn't had the problems with the supply chain I doubt seriously they'd be needing much in the way of advertising ATM. Right now with the economy down prices trumps just about everything and the bang per buck was in the AMD camp even before the APUs hit, now you have machines that'll play WoW and smooth HD video at frankly insanely cheap prices and get 6 hours on the battery for the mobiles and not heat up the house on the HTPC and all in one. Seems like a good combo to me.

Of course this isn't even bringing up the next "big thing" from the AMD camp which most of the number crunchers and programmers here ought to be drooling over and that is the switch from VLIW to vector in their APUs and GPUs which should bring floating point math a hell of a speed boost. Oh and for all you FOSS lovers out there AMD is switching to Coreboot so you'll have a system that can be open and modified from the BIOS layer on up.

I do have a question about TFA though....what was wrong with R600? Sure the 2xxx and 3xxx series didn't slaughter Nvidia but they also didn't crank the living hell out of the heat nor did they have the whole "bumpgate" issue Nvidia had at the time. Their IGP version of the 3xxx was also quite nice for HD video and the HD38xx was pretty sweet and was easy to crossfire. So while I wouldn't call it a second coming or Nvidia killer it certainly wasn't up to the level of the Nvidia 5xxx, aka the Hoover card fiasco.

Actually if you have been keeping up with events of late AMD has been selling so many chips that the only thing holding them back has been trouble from the manufacturing getting up to speed on the latest die shrink so I really doubt marketing when you are selling out of chips already is REALLY needed that much, do you?

I mean look at the AMD Brazos line, they have those things in everything from netbooks (here is the one I personally sold my MSI Wind for after picking up a few for customers, it hold 8Gb of RAM and is sweeeet, both on performance and battery life) to laptops like this one with B-Ray to cool HTPC designs to these really awesome all in ones which I found make pretty killer SOHO/small business and family PCs.

So actually I'd say AMD was on the right track when their CEO announced that they were slowing their desktop output to ramp up mobile chips to try to fill the demand. Frankly even if they hadn't had the problems with the supply chain I doubt seriously they'd be needing much in the way of advertising ATM. Right now with the economy down prices trumps just about everything and the bang per buck was in the AMD camp even before the APUs hit, now you have machines that'll play WoW and smooth HD video at frankly insanely cheap prices and get 6 hours on the battery for the mobiles and not heat up the house on the HTPC and all in one. Seems like a good combo to me.

Of course this isn't even bringing up the next "big thing" from the AMD camp which most of the number crunchers and programmers here ought to be drooling over and that is the switch from VLIW to vector in their APUs and GPUs which should bring floating point math a hell of a speed boost. Oh and for all you FOSS lovers out there AMD is switching to Coreboot so you'll have a system that can be open and modified from the BIOS layer on up.

I do have a question about TFA though....what was wrong with R600? Sure the 2xxx and 3xxx series didn't slaughter Nvidia but they also didn't crank the living hell out of the heat nor did they have the whole "bumpgate" issue Nvidia had at the time. Their IGP version of the 3xxx was also quite nice for HD video and the HD38xx was pretty sweet and was easy to crossfire. So while I wouldn't call it a second coming or Nvidia killer it certainly wasn't up to the level of the Nvidia 5xxx, aka the Hoover card fiasco.

If you don't mind DIY check out the AMD barebones on Tigerdirect. you can get some crazy cheap nice machines there and most can be easily upgraded to 6 core down the road. my own machine has gone from an Athlon dual to a Phenom II quad and after Xmas i'll be 6 core bound and all it'l cost is the chip. I picked up a sweet HD4850 for $50 and while they are definitely hot runners (I added a nice aftermarket cooler) the framerate is top notch. And of course if you run Linux AMD has opened up their drivers so they are getting better by the day.

Oh and you might enjoy this page at GOG of games that run great on Linux. Personally I prefer Win 7 myself but the nice thing about GOG is there is plenty to choose from and dirt cheap. Hell many of them will probably run on your netbook. I'm sure my AMD Brazos netbook would probably run everything there but who'd want to game on a 12 inch screen?

But definitely check out the sales at tiger. Now that the new F1 socket is out the AM3 machines are cheaper than ever and lets face it, games haven't been CPU bound in quite awhile. plus if you are into programming I hear OpenCL is gonna be big and being able to split the load between CPU and GPU has to be pretty cool from a programming perspective. And you just gotta love being about to get a fully loaded X6 for less than $400. just add a sweet GPU and you'd be blasting away!

I'd add the new Brazos netbooks like this EEE I picked up SERIOUSLY rock hard.

Looks nice, except for the seesaw touchpad buttons, I will never understand why ASUS uses that crap for their laptops all the time, that's the only reason I don't buy ASUS.

I'd add the new Brazos netbooks like this EEE I picked up SERIOUSLY rock hard. Frankly after messing first with atom netbooks (too damned slow) followed by an MSI wind with an Athlon dual (nice but a little power hungry) i wasn't sure what to think when I got the Brazos but it really is a sweet chip. I get about 6 hours on a battery in windows 7 HP or around 8 hours in Expressgate, even after running 5 hours solid it was cool to the touch, the Radeon 6310 GPU makes for some smooth HD video, oh and it'll hold 8Gb of RAM which I can't wait to get here!

all in all I really can't think of a bad word to say about Brazos. I've done multitrack editing in audacity, a little light video editing, and so far no matter how much I threw at it it still felt nice and responsive, more like an Intel CULV than an atom netbook. and who can't love a netbook with bluetooth, 320Gb HDD, USB 3, HDMI, and a nice bright 12.1 inch screen that gets 6 hours on a 6 cell and with the 8Gb RAM upgrade cost less than $340 shipped? I'd say AMD has a real winner on its hands with those APUs, they truly are nice chips.

Actually at 12.1 it really isn't all squished like the 10 inchers. Check it out as you can see they put a smaller trackpad to give the keys more room and instead of taking space with all the extra function keys they put those on a little strip above the keyboard.

Personally i think its sweet. it only weighs 3 pounds with a 6 cell, the Brazos chip handles more like a CULV than an Atom, while it says that it holds 4Gb a bunch of guys on Amazon have loaded it up with 8Gb and even provide the links (just ordered mine, with my gift card I got 8Gb for it for $33, sweet!) so it'll handle whatever you can throw at it, and depending on what you are doing you can get around 6 hours on win 7 or around 8 on Expressgate.

Plenty of space, speed, graphics, memory, bluetooth support built in, and the whole smash for $340 with 8Gb of RAM? dude that's just too sweet. But comparing it to the old MSFT claky keyboard I use on my desktop she really isn't much smaller, you cut about 1 inch off the really wide backspace and enter keys this old claky has and it would be about even. If you have a Best buy nearby they carry the Atom version, its the 1215N instead of B but both are the same FF so you should be able to see how it fits you. I can say i like it a hell of a lot better than the MSI Wind it replaced. Its keys are more comfortable for my big meathooks and with a wireless mouse seems to be the perfect size of ultrportable for me, but YMMV.

In reality land one can get a Barebone for $200 follow the little pictures or the nice little video where they walk you through putting it together (I swear they hold your hand so much now a grandma could do it) ...

CPU: 3.1GHz dual-core; will struggle with modern games, won't play new games
Fan: noise will keep you awake at night (18.5dB at idle, prob 22dB)
DVD: customer will request bluray support
Mem: overpriced for this bundle (1.5 vdimm, 9-9-9-24 timings)
Case: 0 USB3 ports
PSU: 400W rated; prob 250-300W continuous draw, 400W maximum; limited overcurrent protection; won't power a dedicated GPU; no surge protection; liable to explode
M/B: no USB3 support, only 100Mbit LAN

I suppose you get what you pay for: crap.

Hello time traveler from 96, let me tell you about 9/11 and fukushima. In reality land one can get a Barebone for $200 follow the little pictures or the nice little video where they walk you through putting it together (I swear they hold your hand so much now a grandma could do it) and add a $100 copy of Win 7 HP along with a nice cheap mid range game card and voila! Gaming PC for $380. Or if you don't want to DIY you can just pick up a prebuilt for $550 that is plug and play, or you can just go to any mom&pop shop and hire a guy like me that will put together any design your little heart desires.

Anybody that pays $900 for a gaming PC has a very tiny penis and is trying to make up for it with an ePeen. That or they are one of these idiots that think they have to do everything on a laptop, even if they don't actually go anywhere with the damned thing so are just spending a shitload of money on a really compact desktop with higher priced shittier parts.

As for TFA...do they have purple ponies and She Ra in candyland where OnLive lives? because I would like a ride. in case they haven't gotten the memo the greedy bastard ISPs are going to caps which kinda kills their magical service deader than Dixie. hell in my area neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch or upgraded shit in damned near a decade, and that is with a huge college right in the middle of town. That would cut into profits you know!

It doesn't matter we already paid to the tune of 200 billion for nationwide broadband and all we got was a nice picture of Goatse from the CEOs who pocketed the cash or spent it on coke and hookers, or that in areas like mine (and large chunks of the country) that only have a monopoly or duopoly we are being royally ass raped on prices as it is (in my area it is now up to $75 for 2Mbps cable or $135 for the bundle with TV and phone) because they have to show Wall Street they can make iMoney and keep those profits rolling don't ya know?

OnLive trying to get this service off the ground now would be like offering a car for the masses that gets 5 MPG. The era of unlimited broadband, at least in the states, is coming to an end, it is like 8 tracks and muscle cars a thing of the past. Sadly I've seen the future and it is teeny caps and $1.50 per Gb if you go over, which means just one gaming session could cost you more than just going out and buying the game if you go over your cap.

Hello time traveler from 96, let me tell you about 9/11 and fukushima. In reality land one can get a Barebone for $200 follow the little pictures or the nice little video where they walk you through putting it together (I swear they hold your hand so much now a grandma could do it) and add a $100 copy of Win 7 HP along with a nice cheap mid range game card and voila! Gaming PC for $380. Or if you don't want to DIY you can just pick up a prebuilt for $550 that is plug and play, or you can just go to any mom&pop shop and hire a guy like me that will put together any design your little heart desires.

Anybody that pays $900 for a gaming PC has a very tiny penis and is trying to make up for it with an ePeen. That or they are one of these idiots that think they have to do everything on a laptop, even if they don't actually go anywhere with the damned thing so are just spending a shitload of money on a really compact desktop with higher priced shittier parts.

As for TFA...do they have purple ponies and She Ra in candyland where OnLive lives? because I would like a ride. in case they haven't gotten the memo the greedy bastard ISPs are going to caps which kinda kills their magical service deader than Dixie. hell in my area neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch or upgraded shit in damned near a decade, and that is with a huge college right in the middle of town. That would cut into profits you know!

It doesn't matter we already paid to the tune of 200 billion for nationwide broadband and all we got was a nice picture of Goatse from the CEOs who pocketed the cash or spent it on coke and hookers, or that in areas like mine (and large chunks of the country) that only have a monopoly or duopoly we are being royally ass raped on prices as it is (in my area it is now up to $75 for 2Mbps cable or $135 for the bundle with TV and phone) because they have to show Wall Street they can make iMoney and keep those profits rolling don't ya know?

OnLive trying to get this service off the ground now would be like offering a car for the masses that gets 5 MPG. The era of unlimited broadband, at least in the states, is coming to an end, it is like 8 tracks and muscle cars a thing of the past. Sadly I've seen the future and it is teeny caps and $1.50 per Gb if you go over, which means just one gaming session could cost you more than just going out and buying the game if you go over your cap.

Hello time traveler from 96, let me tell you about 9/11 and fukushima. In reality land one can get a Barebone for $200 follow the little pictures or the nice little video where they walk you through putting it together (I swear they hold your hand so much now a grandma could do it) and add a $100 copy of Win 7 HP along with a nice cheap mid range game card and voila! Gaming PC for $380. Or if you don't want to DIY you can just pick up a prebuilt for $550 that is plug and play, or you can just go to any mom&pop shop and hire a guy like me that will put together any design your little heart desires.

Anybody that pays $900 for a gaming PC has a very tiny penis and is trying to make up for it with an ePeen. That or they are one of these idiots that think they have to do everything on a laptop, even if they don't actually go anywhere with the damned thing so are just spending a shitload of money on a really compact desktop with higher priced shittier parts.

As for TFA...do they have purple ponies and She Ra in candyland where OnLive lives? because I would like a ride. in case they haven't gotten the memo the greedy bastard ISPs are going to caps which kinda kills their magical service deader than Dixie. hell in my area neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch or upgraded shit in damned near a decade, and that is with a huge college right in the middle of town. That would cut into profits you know!

It doesn't matter we already paid to the tune of 200 billion for nationwide broadband and all we got was a nice picture of Goatse from the CEOs who pocketed the cash or spent it on coke and hookers, or that in areas like mine (and large chunks of the country) that only have a monopoly or duopoly we are being royally ass raped on prices as it is (in my area it is now up to $75 for 2Mbps cable or $135 for the bundle with TV and phone) because they have to show Wall Street they can make iMoney and keep those profits rolling don't ya know?

OnLive trying to get this service off the ground now would be like offering a car for the masses that gets 5 MPG. The era of unlimited broadband, at least in the states, is coming to an end, it is like 8 tracks and muscle cars a thing of the past. Sadly I've seen the future and it is teeny caps and $1.50 per Gb if you go over, which means just one gaming session could cost you more than just going out and buying the game if you go over your cap.

Oh but you could OC the living shit out of the Celery back then! With a good air cooler and a little luck a Celery could be OCed by a good 30% to 35%. Man in those days there really was a reason to replace your gear every 3 years or even less, the innovations on both sides of the aisle were just like two heavyweights duking it out....then Intel bribed all the OEMs and won through deceit what they couldn't when fairly, boo hiss.

Meh the big story as far as AMD goes isn't gonna be BD, frankly IMNSHO as a PC builder frankly PCs have been "good enough" on the CPU side for quite awhile which is one of the reasons my customers are quite happy I put my money where my mouth is and became an all AMD shop. No the really BIG STORY in 50 foot neon letters is gonna be the switch from VLIW to Vector Based GPUs, both in the discrete and in the APUs.

Imagine a chip that can not only crank out graphics like nobody's business but can actually work like a hyper FP on top of that with VERY little penalty. Today you are lucky if you get 1/4th the performance on double FP but with the new chips that will be cut down to less than half for the first bunch with the goal of native speed double FP in the next gen. I bet the math geeks are drooling at that prospect right now. And for those that switch to the APUs it'll mean an all new hybrid Crossfire where the APU can take over physics while handing off rendering to the discrete for some truly insane graphics. Sounds pretty damned sweet to me.

I just hope more geeks here at /. do as I do and give AMD some business. Unless you are one of those that literally slam your CPUs right to the bleeding edge (which admittedly there are more of those type here than on average) frankly the bang for the buck has been firmly in the AMD camp for some time now. you can get better quality boards with damned good IGPs for cheaper, The huge length of support time on the AM socket means you can go from dual to quad to six core without replacing anything but the CPU, the quads are dirt cheap right now, they just make really damned good, solid as a rock, long lasting systems.

I mean how can you not love a company that lets you get a fully loaded Black Edition dual kit for $200, a triple core kit for just $250 which BTW kicks ass as an HTPC, just swap the case for one of the "VCR style" cases and a dirt cheap 4xxx or 5xxx GPU, or a quad for $270? Oh and for those that have older machines I'd suggest a trip over to Starmicro where you can pick up cheap chips to upgrade older machines, both Intel and AMD. In my shop the Phenom X3 and the Pentium Ds are both quite popular upgrade paths for those with older AM2s or LGA775s respectively. Enjoy and go AMD!

Oh but you could OC the living shit out of the Celery back then! With a good air cooler and a little luck a Celery could be OCed by a good 30% to 35%. Man in those days there really was a reason to replace your gear every 3 years or even less, the innovations on both sides of the aisle were just like two heavyweights duking it out....then Intel bribed all the OEMs and won through deceit what they couldn't when fairly, boo hiss.

Meh the big story as far as AMD goes isn't gonna be BD, frankly IMNSHO as a PC builder frankly PCs have been "good enough" on the CPU side for quite awhile which is one of the reasons my customers are quite happy I put my money where my mouth is and became an all AMD shop. No the really BIG STORY in 50 foot neon letters is gonna be the switch from VLIW to Vector Based GPUs, both in the discrete and in the APUs.

Imagine a chip that can not only crank out graphics like nobody's business but can actually work like a hyper FP on top of that with VERY little penalty. Today you are lucky if you get 1/4th the performance on double FP but with the new chips that will be cut down to less than half for the first bunch with the goal of native speed double FP in the next gen. I bet the math geeks are drooling at that prospect right now. And for those that switch to the APUs it'll mean an all new hybrid Crossfire where the APU can take over physics while handing off rendering to the discrete for some truly insane graphics. Sounds pretty damned sweet to me.

I just hope more geeks here at /. do as I do and give AMD some business. Unless you are one of those that literally slam your CPUs right to the bleeding edge (which admittedly there are more of those type here than on average) frankly the bang for the buck has been firmly in the AMD camp for some time now. you can get better quality boards with damned good IGPs for cheaper, The huge length of support time on the AM socket means you can go from dual to quad to six core without replacing anything but the CPU, the quads are dirt cheap right now, they just make really damned good, solid as a rock, long lasting systems.

I mean how can you not love a company that lets you get a fully loaded Black Edition dual kit for $200, a triple core kit for just $250 which BTW kicks ass as an HTPC, just swap the case for one of the "VCR style" cases and a dirt cheap 4xxx or 5xxx GPU, or a quad for $270? Oh and for those that have older machines I'd suggest a trip over to Starmicro where you can pick up cheap chips to upgrade older machines, both Intel and AMD. In my shop the Phenom X3 and the Pentium Ds are both quite popular upgrade paths for those with older AM2s or LGA775s respectively. Enjoy and go AMD!

Oh but you could OC the living shit out of the Celery back then! With a good air cooler and a little luck a Celery could be OCed by a good 30% to 35%. Man in those days there really was a reason to replace your gear every 3 years or even less, the innovations on both sides of the aisle were just like two heavyweights duking it out....then Intel bribed all the OEMs and won through deceit what they couldn't when fairly, boo hiss.

Meh the big story as far as AMD goes isn't gonna be BD, frankly IMNSHO as a PC builder frankly PCs have been "good enough" on the CPU side for quite awhile which is one of the reasons my customers are quite happy I put my money where my mouth is and became an all AMD shop. No the really BIG STORY in 50 foot neon letters is gonna be the switch from VLIW to Vector Based GPUs, both in the discrete and in the APUs.

Imagine a chip that can not only crank out graphics like nobody's business but can actually work like a hyper FP on top of that with VERY little penalty. Today you are lucky if you get 1/4th the performance on double FP but with the new chips that will be cut down to less than half for the first bunch with the goal of native speed double FP in the next gen. I bet the math geeks are drooling at that prospect right now. And for those that switch to the APUs it'll mean an all new hybrid Crossfire where the APU can take over physics while handing off rendering to the discrete for some truly insane graphics. Sounds pretty damned sweet to me.

I just hope more geeks here at /. do as I do and give AMD some business. Unless you are one of those that literally slam your CPUs right to the bleeding edge (which admittedly there are more of those type here than on average) frankly the bang for the buck has been firmly in the AMD camp for some time now. you can get better quality boards with damned good IGPs for cheaper, The huge length of support time on the AM socket means you can go from dual to quad to six core without replacing anything but the CPU, the quads are dirt cheap right now, they just make really damned good, solid as a rock, long lasting systems.

I mean how can you not love a company that lets you get a fully loaded Black Edition dual kit for $200, a triple core kit for just $250 which BTW kicks ass as an HTPC, just swap the case for one of the "VCR style" cases and a dirt cheap 4xxx or 5xxx GPU, or a quad for $270? Oh and for those that have older machines I'd suggest a trip over to Starmicro where you can pick up cheap chips to upgrade older machines, both Intel and AMD. In my shop the Phenom X3 and the Pentium Ds are both quite popular upgrade paths for those with older AM2s or LGA775s respectively. Enjoy and go AMD!

Don't forget wireless which still royally sucks the big wet titty on Linux. More and more of my customers are giving up running wires in their homes and simply buying a cheap wireless card for any new PC they add and if you've ever dealt with Linux wireless you know your ass better damned well be fucking great at forum hunts and terminal bullshit if you want it to work.

Oh BTW they're whole plan basically sucks. you don't ever buy parts separably, that is where you get a big old bite out of your ass. you buy a barebone kit like this one which gives you a black edition CPU PLUS a DVD burner for the same price after $30 MIR. Hell if you throw in a few more bucks you can go triple core with TB drive and no MIR.

If you keep an eye out on the sales you can frankly get a truly awesome PC fully loaded with Windows 7 for less than $500. I just finished up an Athlon X4, 4Gb of RAM, 500Gb HDD, an HD4830 for transcoding and gaming, and Win 7 HP X64 with a nice case to put it in all for $465 and that is after paying me to put the thing together and load all the software. hell when he gets his MIR that price will drop to just $435 and that is for a machine that will easily last him until Win 7 is EOL in 2020. He has it plugged into a 32 inch 1080p and frankly it gets great performance, smooth video, plenty of space for his music, just all around a really nice experience.

So I'd say it comes down to what you want to do. if you are a neckbeard that just wants something to run his term and IDE? Sure Linux works fine there, works great as a server OS or for embedded too. If you want to actually be able to just "plug and play" and not have to research like it is the fricking SATs, only to end up having to play hardware roulette and end up possibly with worthless hardware? Or easily run all the software that comes with your stuff? Then I'd suggest sticking with Windows.

Don't forget wireless which still royally sucks the big wet titty on Linux. More and more of my customers are giving up running wires in their homes and simply buying a cheap wireless card for any new PC they add and if you've ever dealt with Linux wireless you know your ass better damned well be fucking great at forum hunts and terminal bullshit if you want it to work.

Oh BTW they're whole plan basically sucks. you don't ever buy parts separably, that is where you get a big old bite out of your ass. you buy a barebone kit like this one which gives you a black edition CPU PLUS a DVD burner for the same price after $30 MIR. Hell if you throw in a few more bucks you can go triple core with TB drive and no MIR.

If you keep an eye out on the sales you can frankly get a truly awesome PC fully loaded with Windows 7 for less than $500. I just finished up an Athlon X4, 4Gb of RAM, 500Gb HDD, an HD4830 for transcoding and gaming, and Win 7 HP X64 with a nice case to put it in all for $465 and that is after paying me to put the thing together and load all the software. hell when he gets his MIR that price will drop to just $435 and that is for a machine that will easily last him until Win 7 is EOL in 2020. He has it plugged into a 32 inch 1080p and frankly it gets great performance, smooth video, plenty of space for his music, just all around a really nice experience.

So I'd say it comes down to what you want to do. if you are a neckbeard that just wants something to run his term and IDE? Sure Linux works fine there, works great as a server OS or for embedded too. If you want to actually be able to just "plug and play" and not have to research like it is the fricking SATs, only to end up having to play hardware roulette and end up possibly with worthless hardware? Or easily run all the software that comes with your stuff? Then I'd suggest sticking with Windows.

I don't understand where you're going with your first point.

As for the second, PCs cheaper than the Android Optimus V are quite easy to find. Either drop by your local white box builder or visit Tiger Direct.

The funny part is if anything I find Spinrite even MORE useful now than under the days of the DOS, thanks to how shitty Seagate drives have gotten. You'd be surprised how many times I've had to use Spinrite 6 to "fix" a Seagate drive long enough to get the data off. When I heard that Samsung was selling out I wanted to cry, they and Hitachi were the "go to" sources for drives of late as Seagate has turned into shite on a crusty roll. If you spot one snatch yourself a Samsung EcoDrive as I have the 1Tb model and at 5900 RPM stomps the dogshit out of the Seagate 7200RPM it replaced. really top notch gear.

But its nice to see someone still remembers the old days of DOS hacking. I can still recall all the basic DOS commands in my sleep, as well as the old "Copy win9X in DOS and install from the drive" trick. You really could do some cool tricks in DOS back then thanks to having low level access. Now the closest I get to that is the fun of unlocking cores on AMD boxes, but frankly with Tigerdirect selling quads for $199 there ain't really a point in doing that anymore either. Hell at prices that cheap i'm building one just as a spare for my dad so when he or one of his friends bork their PC they can just use the spare quad while I fix their box.

So here is to DOS, to 486s, to hardware hacking, and all the other tricks these kids will never know or understand. Frankly it blows my mind that I can buy monster quads for less than the cost of my first HDD, which was a grand total of 5Mb and was heavy enough you could kill someone by dropping it on their head. Remember the old Bigfoot drives? Damn that bitch was heavy! The hilarious part is my very first "gamer" PC is still running 5 days a week as a C&C controller for a lathe at a lumber place. It was a whopping 60MHz 486 with a 200Mb HDD and a Voodoo I. damned thing still runs DOS 3 and does its job cranking out custom columns 5 days a week using a huge ass ISA card. They just don't build 'em like that anymore!

You've lost your touch mate. For $550 I can build a nice AMD quad with minimum 4Gb of RAM, TB HDD, DVD burner and Win 7 HP X64. That will easily last most average folks a decade and with a little forethought it will leave plenty of upgrade potential down the road. hell Tigerdirect sells a nice AMD quad kit for $250 after MIR!

I think its just you are thinking folks will be like YOU and they ain't, not by a long shot. They won't be doing major compiles, or tons of video editing, or wanting to crank up the purty on a 50 inch widescreen. Most of the average folks out there want to play a few games, do their Facebook crap like Farmville, listen to music, watch movies, check their email, just basic everyday stuff ya know?

If you DIY and are picky about part and price one can easily get a good box for that price that will last for years. I have computers I built 7+ years ago still in use, they just become "hand me downs" where they go from one relative to another.

Recently the checkout girl at the local grocery store asked if I could look at a PC given to her. She looked hurt when I suddenly started laughing when we went to her car and she showed me it until I told her "Honey I'm just laughing because I built that machine nearly a decade ago out of a tons of parts and nicknamed it "Frankenputer"" which it still had on the back. I found out from her the thing had passed through nearly a dozen relatives before ending up hers. Since she didn't have much of nothing I sold her a late model P4, motherboard and RAM cheap, loaded it into old Frankenputer, and it is surfing Youtube and helping her kids do their homework to this very day.

So I'd say your wrong, you CAN build a decent PC at that price. Sure it ain't gonna set any speed records but for the jobs most folks want a PC for? It'll last them for a minimum of 5-7 years, thanks to my "minimum triple core, 4Gb of RAM" rule on new builds. That kind of power is frankly overkill for someone like Sally Homemaker and Joe Construction worker.

But I would argue that this is because so few people know how easy it truly is. Lately I have been building quite a few HTPCs, why? Because I had one customer who wanted a new PC but couldn't afford a new screen and I said "You have that nice new 37 inch, why not just use that?" so I built him a nice AMD quad and put a nice cheap HD4830 in it, along with getting him a wireless keyboard and mouse and the next thing I know he is bragging about it to everyone who will listen and i'm getting calls "Hey, are you that guy that was able to hook Brian's PC to his TV? Can you do that for me too?"

It just goes to show despite my best efforts to be a "voice for the common man" that sometimes I can geek out too as I thought being able to hook a PC to a modern TV was common knowledge but apparently not. But with a wireless X360 controller and his keyboard and mouse wireless frankly he sees no need for a console now and the games are soooo much cheaper on PC. Now the only problem the guy has is trying to actually get to use his new PC, as his wife wants to do her Farmville on it, the kids of course love the picture for all their kid shows on Netflix, and now that there is wireless HDMI honestly if you have a PC less than three years old you can just wirelessly stream the HDMI straight to the set, no need to buy another.

But when people see how cheap I can build them a new triple most are just opting to have me build them one. Hell Tigerdirect is selling 8Gb monsters for just $300, add in another $100 for Win 7 HP X64 and $50 for a nice GPU and for less than $500 you have a machine that will easily last you a decade or more as an HTPC. Just rip all your movies to the Tb HDD so you don't have to fiddle with discs and away you go!

But I'd say TFA shows MSFT is FINALLY getting a clue that folks want integration. They want the PC, the X360, the WinPhone, all of this stuff to talk to each other while being "clicky clicky" simple. The only real stickler they have now is GFWL which frankly blows ass. They really do need to make it more like Steam as the last time I tried dealing with it (over Bioshock II) I ended up downloading the cracked version even though I bought the game because I was fighting GFWL more than the splicers! damned thing would lose connection, would say I wasn't hooked up when I was, just a royal PITA and about 180 compared to my experience with Steam. And is there an easy way to back up your games yet? One of the things I love about Steam is when I get a bigger drive I can just drop my steam folder onto it and tell Steam where it is and BOOM all my games work perfectly.

So let us hope that this means MSFT is finally getting a clue about what folks want. They have good separate components..Win 7 is good, the X360 is good, from those that I've talked to the WinPhone is nice if not an iPhone killer, so if they can tie everything together with a pretty little bow and make it all simple it should be sweet. but never underestimate MSFT's ability to cock things up so I'll wait to pass judgement.

Then it sounds to me like what you want is a gTablet as it supports flash, has a dual core 1GHz Cortex-A9 with Nvidia GPU so its plenty snappy, has plenty of room and can take MicroSD cards, and if later on your mom would like a keyboard there are plenty of bluetooth keyboards that go great with one of these.

As for TFA I just don't see having to reboot only to have just Safari as all that useful. I have a couple of Mac friends and they live by the dock, I just can't picture them happy with just Safari, especially since I don't think either orf them actually uses Safari (one uses Chrome the other FF). But hey extra features are extra features, hell I don't use half the features in Win 7 HP either but its nice to have them there just in case.

. A Nook Color with custom firmware is only slightly below a Galaxy Tab wifi version with respect to hardware for about $100-$150 less.

Uh, except for that one minor thing... a 7" multi-touch screen. I'd say between that and the other hardware difference, you've found the $100 difference.

I was referring to the 7" Galaxy Tab wifi only which retails for $349, compared to the Nook Color which can be had refurbed from Overstock for $199 right now. Same processor just clocked a little slower, and both are multitouch capacitive 1024x600 screens. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=61241

No shit. my oldest got an inkjet thrown in with his new laptop he got for college, and being the "hates to waste things" type tried to actually use it. Blew through a good $70 in a month. I calmly went out and found him a nice B&W laser on the net WITH a 5000 sheet toner PLUS a 15,000 and a 13,000 toner carts thrown in. Final cost? a hair over $100. The laser cost slightly more than he blew through in a month trying to feed the inkjet and after 6 months of printing constantly for class he has yet to go through the 5K, much less even open the 13k and 15k carts.

When you look at even the color laser printers the prices are low enough the insane inkjet cart prices just don't make sense. I have a brand new inkjet given to me by a customer who didn't know better and got a laser after I pointed out the price difference, and as soon as the black ink cart runs out it'll be headed to the dump or to my engineering buddy who likes to strip stuff for parts like gears. If you are printing so little you think an inkjet would work I can promise you you'd get better results simply having your printing done at Walgreen's or Wally World, for everyone else B&Ws start at like $40 refurb and you can often find color lasers like this wireless model for $150. Inkjets are like floppies, once upon a time they made sense and now they are just pointless designed for the dump ripoffs. The only time I recommend an inkjet anymore is when someone needs a cheap scanner/fax I tell them to get an all in one and simply use the ink up and then keep the scanner/fax. IMHO that is pretty much the only time having an inkjet makes any sense anymore, as the all in ones are cheaper than buying two devices.