Trying to help them along too, pre-installed their windows demo version on over 100 customers PCs so far, lets push the indie devs to make more great games that are worth paying for:)
Oh, for the record, I build pre-install environments for windows, I am not hacking or anything stupid to do this.
Its because you don't need to run it at uber rez to see how well crafted the game is, its perfect and very worth the price (cheaper than a 2h trip to the movies, and more fun).
We have them available in aus, a wireless router with a 3g (using telstras NextG) modem built in, just add power and you have your own portable hot-spot anywhere*.
*being limited by telstras NextG network of course, which, without a good aerial on the sucker, will be rather limiting.
Giving 7 a whirl on my media centre machine, so far so good.
Missing core NV chipset drivers, so I downloaded and installed the vista64 (running 7-64) ones, they bricked windows.
Checked with NV, they say "we have supplied all the drivers to microsoft for download via windows update", well apparently not for the 780a chip-set, leaving me with a machine scoring 6.5+ for everything but hard drive because of the lack of drivers for it.
If the interface wasn't so damn easy to use I would leave vista on that machine, but damn it, microsoft have actually made some good improvements.
Yeah, in fact there's a little util called "sbbypass" that MS put out that will download and install all the windows updates from the command line, downside is it requires the machine to have "sysprep" running (factory mode tool).
Yes, they do have the ability, its actually rather painless to have these install while windows is installing, I am not a great programmer, and I managed to script it for where I work.
See my other posts in this thread for a list of what I add to windows, sure it bloats the install a little, but taking an extra 3G out of a 500G HDD is not a problem, and I throw a "remove install info" script in if people want to reclaim the extra space (at the cost of not being able to reinstall their apps if they bork up).
If I am going to sell windows PCs to people, I try and make sure they have the tools and toys they need, sure I make less sales of MS Office (because of OO.o) and less sales of AV software (because of NoScript) but gd it, I sell more PCs this way:)
Thing that gets me, why would you fart around with flashing? takes 10 days to RMA a batch of drives, buy another "case" of drives, take one batch out swap the new ones in, RMA rinse repeat when you get your batch of replaced/flashed drives back.
IANADCG (I am not a data center geek) but that's how I did it in my WHS box, doesn't seem hard to scale that up by a factor of 10-50.
Yay for anecdotes, as a techy with over 10yrs of selling about 10-15 computers a week, I deal with about 98% seagate, 2% western digital. In that time I have installed about 15 drives not of either of those brands, and have RMAed 14 of them so far (waiting to see if the last samsung will be a homing pidgeon too).
After spending 2 weeks trying to get one of mine a firmware fix, I gave up and RMAed it.
Although in my case I was just getting CRC errors on the WHS machine (windows home server, 2003SBE based) it was all protected by drive redundancy of course (to other NON 1TB+ drives), ahh the wonders of drive pooling over a raid:)
Rainbow Six: Raven Shield is now $9.95 on steam for international purchase, one thing, update punkbuster prior to running it for the first time, or suffer the wrath of outdated driver crashes.
For the OP, stop being a cheapskate and pay for team fortress 2, its worth every cent:)
Their logic is astounding, they push a pair of 4870X2 cards rather than a tri-sli of gtx280s for the "ultimate pc" because, the pair of 4870s is 4 GPUs....
This is not to say they make no mention of adding a separate 9600gt for physX (with a flexible pci-e 1x connector you can fit it in with a tri-sli setup) or a well priced raid adapter (areca or such) to run some SSDs so they actually have the bandwidth they can supply.
All in all, a competent system builder could "build" a much better ultimate pc (way higher cost of course, but this was not about cost was it?) without thinking about it for more than about 10min.
Slashdot Mirror
As a temp fix, make a second account and just run WoG under that...
Oh for fucks sake, now your going to be able to justify a war with china by saying "its to help propel them to improve conditions for workers"?
Oh, wait, dubbya is gone and your new guy isn't a warmonger.
Go about your business.
ps, please avoid calling wars "nice"
Trying to help them along too, pre-installed their windows demo version on over 100 customers PCs so far, lets push the indie devs to make more great games that are worth paying for :)
Oh, for the record, I build pre-install environments for windows, I am not hacking or anything stupid to do this.
Its because you don't need to run it at uber rez to see how well crafted the game is, its perfect and very worth the price (cheaper than a 2h trip to the movies, and more fun).
Yeah, billion have them too, but these ones have the modem built in, its a nifty little box you just add power to, no extra leads, no dongles.
I am still selling them :)
We have them available in aus, a wireless router with a 3g (using telstras NextG) modem built in, just add power and you have your own portable hot-spot anywhere*.
*being limited by telstras NextG network of course, which, without a good aerial on the sucker, will be rather limiting.
No, DSL....
Post deleted by google due to copyright violation.
Giving 7 a whirl on my media centre machine, so far so good.
Missing core NV chipset drivers, so I downloaded and installed the vista64 (running 7-64) ones, they bricked windows.
Checked with NV, they say "we have supplied all the drivers to microsoft for download via windows update", well apparently not for the 780a chip-set, leaving me with a machine scoring 6.5+ for everything but hard drive because of the lack of drivers for it.
If the interface wasn't so damn easy to use I would leave vista on that machine, but damn it, microsoft have actually made some good improvements.
Now I gotta go back and look at that damn gallery, thanks a lot.
And yes, I AM at work :P
Hehe, latest seagate came back, brand new drive (not green label refurb), CC1H firmware (not one of the ones affected).
The refurbs come with latest firmware loaded :)
Yeah, in fact there's a little util called "sbbypass" that MS put out that will download and install all the windows updates from the command line, downside is it requires the machine to have "sysprep" running (factory mode tool).
Yes, they do have the ability, its actually rather painless to have these install while windows is installing, I am not a great programmer, and I managed to script it for where I work.
See my other posts in this thread for a list of what I add to windows, sure it bloats the install a little, but taking an extra 3G out of a 500G HDD is not a problem, and I throw a "remove install info" script in if people want to reclaim the extra space (at the cost of not being able to reinstall their apps if they bork up).
Err, thats called the WPK (Windows Pre-installation Kit), it is downloadable from MS...
And for the record:
Firefox
Java
OpenOffice
CCCP
VLC
World of Goo (demo)
And the customer can chose to add:
TrendMicro PcCillin (trial)
Kaspersky (trial)
NoScript
Nero
ImgBurn
If I am going to sell windows PCs to people, I try and make sure they have the tools and toys they need, sure I make less sales of MS Office (because of OO.o) and less sales of AV software (because of NoScript) but gd it, I sell more PCs this way :)
Thing that gets me, why would you fart around with flashing? takes 10 days to RMA a batch of drives, buy another "case" of drives, take one batch out swap the new ones in, RMA rinse repeat when you get your batch of replaced/flashed drives back.
IANADCG (I am not a data center geek) but that's how I did it in my WHS box, doesn't seem hard to scale that up by a factor of 10-50.
Just do what I do, RMA the damn things, I gave up waiting and it only takes about 10 days to RMA them.
And they don't cut out bits they think will be inappropriate for western "target" audiences.
Yay for anecdotes, as a techy with over 10yrs of selling about 10-15 computers a week, I deal with about 98% seagate, 2% western digital. In that time I have installed about 15 drives not of either of those brands, and have RMAed 14 of them so far (waiting to see if the last samsung will be a homing pidgeon too).
After spending 2 weeks trying to get one of mine a firmware fix, I gave up and RMAed it.
Although in my case I was just getting CRC errors on the WHS machine (windows home server, 2003SBE based) it was all protected by drive redundancy of course (to other NON 1TB+ drives), ahh the wonders of drive pooling over a raid :)
I thought his word was...
"Excellent!"
Link plz!
Oh, and grab some registry cleaning apps, just google for "reg clean" and download and install all the ones off the first page.
Rainbow Six: Raven Shield is now $9.95 on steam for international purchase, one thing, update punkbuster prior to running it for the first time, or suffer the wrath of outdated driver crashes.
For the OP, stop being a cheapskate and pay for team fortress 2, its worth every cent :)
You ain't missing much :)
Their logic is astounding, they push a pair of 4870X2 cards rather than a tri-sli of gtx280s for the "ultimate pc" because, the pair of 4870s is 4 GPUs....
This is not to say they make no mention of adding a separate 9600gt for physX (with a flexible pci-e 1x connector you can fit it in with a tri-sli setup) or a well priced raid adapter (areca or such) to run some SSDs so they actually have the bandwidth they can supply.
All in all, a competent system builder could "build" a much better ultimate pc (way higher cost of course, but this was not about cost was it?) without thinking about it for more than about 10min.