I agree. I hate the idea of shared memory. It uses the GeForce 6150 Go chipset. But, I didn't buy this laptop to be a CPU or graphical powerhouse, either. I have my main PC for that.
Ehhh???? And you expect to convince anyone with that statement? "Well, I'm not seeing the same problem, so it's not Aero." Interesting logic you've got there. So, how are things at Microsoft's Tech Support division?
That's an average. It will be nice and low for a while then surge about every four or five seconds to about 10%. But when Aero was turned on, CPU utilization was consistently at 30% with surges to 100% -- all when playing an MP3.
Slow down on your reading speed, please. As I clearly said in my previous post, "One of the first things I do with any new hardware is to upgrade all of the drivers and firmware as applicable." At the time there were no video drivers. There has been one video driver upgrade since then, but Aero was turned off before that. I'll check on the driver version when I get home.
GeForce 6150, I believe. (I'd have to check. The laptop is at home right now.) The most that I can share out right now with respect to video RAM is 128 MB. It should allow me to double that to 256 MB once I double the RAM to 2 GB. One of the first things I do with any new hardware is to upgrade all of the drivers and firmware as applicable. The only drivers that I needed to upgrade at the time were the wireless drivers, but I was connected to my wired network at the time so the wireless network was shut off.
Um... "as opposed to about an hour with Aero active.":) I didn't get the higher-capacity battery because I won't use it on battery too often. But I've noticed a significant difference in battery life with Aero off. I guess I should have included the "YMMV" but I figured that would be implied.
I got a Compaq Presario laptop with Vista Home Premium about two months ago. It's not a killer laptop, just an Athlon Turion 64 at 2 GHz with 1 GB RAM, but it's sufficient for why I wanted a laptop. Just listening to MP3s through Media Player would shoot the CPU level up to a consistent 35-50% CPU utilization with Aero active. The battery obviously didn't last too long. I finally got so fed up with it that I shut off Aero, dropped the system back to a 2000/XP theme, and installed WinAmp. Listening to the same MP3s that way had the CPU going at around 5-10%. Even when I'm just using it for audio editing or photo editing, now I can use it for a few hours as opposed to about an hour with Aero active.
I will give Vista credit in that the laptop comes back very quickly from sleep mode whereas that never worked well for me in XP, but that's about it. Vista with Aero is the plant from "Little Shop of Horrors" -- FEED ME!!!
Can we agree that creating military rules and using them to discourage military personal from providing unclassified information to other Americans and to discourage them from espousing political opinions that are are disliked by the incumbent political party is unethical, detrimental to the US, and thoroughly opposed to the American ideal of free speech?
No! You cannot apply the freedoms to the military that you do to the general public. Period. They're in a different league all together. The fact that you can't see that is very disconcerting.
And - damn it! - get rid of the damned Slashdot template of trying to turn this into a political issue by bringing "incumbent party" into it! I read TFA and there is NOTHING in there about politics, so stop trying to inject your own! This is absolutely nothing new and is not uncommon during a time of war.
From TFA:
The U.S. military -- all militaries -- have long been concerned about their personnel inadvertently letting sensitive information out. Troops' mail was read and censored throughout World War II; back home, government posters warned citizens "careless talk kills."
If fact, if you had bothered to read TFA, which you obviously did not, the one blogger that they specifcally mentioned is a "pro-victory" blogger, hardly someone who goes against the current administration. Having read a bit of his blog, it is clear to me that he supports the idea of victory in Iraq, which IS the view of the political party that is in the White House! So, if anything this article demonstrates how this action goes against the views that are supported by the incumbent, political party! So, your little quip attempting to place blame on discouraging "them from espousing political opinions that are are disliked by the incumbent political party" is just an attempt for you to throw politics into this.
Keep your baseless attempts to make everything political out of Slashdot and move them over to Digg where they belong.
A lot of Slashdotters apparently don't know or conveniently forget that there's this little thing called the Uniform Code of Military Justice that effectively says, "You are no longer granted all of the freedoms that are granted to non-military personnel under the U.S. Constitution." The ability to say whatever you want is one of those lost freedoms once you sign on the dotted line.
But, hey, if it gives people the excuse to start spouting their holier-than-thou dogma about censorship, let's just let them do it and get that frustration out of their systems, 'kay?
Be careful that you're not simply writing off other people's opinions as propoganda because you don't agree with them. That could make you... eek... a republican.
While he's at it, he should probably list the trolls who automatically demonize one political party at every opportunity even when such a demonization is not germane to the discussion at hand and is in fact nothing more than an inappropriate mud-sling just to try to gain ignorant mod points by those who abuse their mod point privileges to push a political agenda.
Not that such an incident has happened in this thread, of course, nor would anyone ever do such a thing under the Anonymous Coward moniker. That would just indicate how little that person actually has the balls to stand up for his convictions.
Heh. It's $600 because of a completely different reason - Blu-Ray. If the PS3 came with a standard DVD drive, it would probably cost about the same as the Wii and still be completely hackable. Look, I'm not disagreeing with what you've said, but I don't need to tell you the major differences between a console and a PC. No matter how you hack it, a PS/3 is not a PC (as the term has come to be known) just because it can run an operating system that happens to run on a PC. It's a console that can run a different operating system. I see a huge difference. Apparently, you don't. So be it.
And the people in both of the cases you mention are not the kinds of people that necessarily give a rat's rear about Microsoft's Games for Windows push. And, no, a PS2/3 is NOT a PC for the aims of a Windows gaming thread just because it can run Linux. Oh, right! WINE under Linux on a PS2/3. Anyone who is willing to go to such lengths to avoid having to build or buy a PC on their own should have probably just bought a PC in the first place.
What the hell kind of PC are you looking at? Oooohhhh... The one that looks like an alien? Puh-leaze...
I'm building the specs for a new gaming rig, and a system with 320 GB HD, 2 GB RAM, Athlon X2 6000, and GeForce 7950GT (or a low-end 8000 series) STILL comes in less than $900! And being a PC it clearly does a hell of a lot more than playing games, downloading content, or running a Second Life wannabe. I have no idea what the hell you're buying or what you think constitutes a gaming rig, but you obviously have never built one yourself and are "wow"ed by marketing and oh-so-cool PC cases.
Wait... let me get this straight. You bought a system that is not meant for gaming and then you complain that it's insufficient for gaming! WTF did you expect? And to top THAT off, you then bitch about PC gaming with probably the broadest brush imaginable.
With the exception of high-end laptops, almost every laptop out there uses integrated video that steals - sorry, shares - memory from RAM, which automatically makes it slower than video cards with their own RAM and makes it far inferior when compared to "regular" video cards. If you want to play video games on a laptop, you can't go into Best Buy or Staples and buy one off the shelf unless the extent of your gaming stops at Bejewelled or Zuma. (Yes, I'm being facetious, but not by much.)
Please, by all means leave the PC gaming scene. You clearly have expectations that prove that your really don't have a clue about PC gaming. What's next? Buying a Geo Metro (or equivalent micro-car) and then complaining that it can't speed past a Lamborghini on the Autobahn?
Indeed! I would think that Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, and Sam and Max Hit the Road would be all that people need to jump at this!
Sam and Max would be a big magnet for this now that the duo is back in the forefront of gaming thanks to TellTale Games. Those who were not around to experience the original game that started it all can go back and play what we've been talking about for over a decade!
This is indicative of nothing. There are so many different aspects to CD/music sales and values that focusing on CD sales is somewhat ludicrous.
In my personal opinion, modern, mainstream music sucks for the most part. I've been purchasing more independent music than ever before. Are independent labels included in these numbers? I download very little in way of illicit means. I like my CDs and I have no problems buying CDs, but most of the music out there from the major labels simply doesn't interest me any more. Why is the author not taking into account the "cookie cutter" mentality that dominates a lot of the mainstream music scene?
I'm sure that there are other reasons that are not due to illegal means. It could be something like how Steve Miller was bitching about how his CD was on the top of the charts for years and years then suddenly plummeted. Uh... ever think that maybe your market had reached its saturation point, Steve? In fact, did anyone stop to think that maybe the music market itself has reached a saturation point where the majority of people who wanted to get CDs of older albums has done so?
And with more and more people learning about (and despising) DRM-laden, digital music, I'm not shocked at all to learn that on-line stores like iTunes are not offsetting CD sales drops. I refuse to buy music with any kind of DRM out of principle (yes, I know about analog loopback to strip off the DRM), but stores like eMusic and Magnatune don't have the artists that I'd like. If iTunes dropped the DRM, I'd buy a ton of songs from them, and I think that a lot of people have the same mentality.
Oh, well. I guess it doesn't matter. If we're not following the greed-laden will of the record industry, we're automatically pirates no matter what we say or do, aren't we?
No, the pentagram didn't mean anything. Ultima 8SUCKED. The game was its own PR disaster. Having played the Ultima series since Ultima III I found U8 to be abysmal, especially in gameplay. I had more fun with -- and I can't believe I'm saying this -- Ultima: Ascension. I treat Ultima 8 like I do Galactica 1980 -- it didn't happen. When I do reference it, I unashamedly refer to it as "Ultima 8: The Arcade Game". I don't think that you could be further off the mark by attributing the pentagram to a bad PR move. Just my two one-hundredths of a dollar.
And, by the way, a pentagram is nothing more than a symbol that has been usurped by the symbol-minded. Same thing with the swastika . Both are millennia old. The swastika, for example, was woven into American Indian clothing before Columbus. It's just a symbol.
People who freak at a pentagram must have a hell of a time (no pun intended) with children drawing stars. "I'm so glad that you didn't put a circle around that star or else I'd have to look on your head for a 666!" "You mean, a circle like this?" {draws circle around star } "NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!"
I know you're saying that to be a smart ass, but actually that's a really cool idea. Make it a dual-boot system at power-up. Hold down the C= key at power-up to immediately boot into an emulator-on-a-chip that could be upgraded as necessary -- full C64 BASIC that could access.d64/.t64 images over a FAT-formatted USB drive or floppy disk. Otherwise, if you don't press the C= key it will boot up like any other PC.
For the people who grew up using the C64 back when it was in its prime, it would probably be enough nostalgia to sway a lot of them to buy it.
Big flipping deal. These PCs are not the Commodore that I knew and loved from my teenage years.
The only way I'll buy another Commodore computer for gaming is if it's a PC in an original-looking Commodore 64-style case. There have been PCs-in-a-keyboard for a while now, and the C64 was a hefty-sized unit. Modding a PC into a C64-style case should be completely possible, barring some necessary key changes, like F1-F12 keys instead of the C64's F1-F8. Slim-line DVD drives and 2.5" hard drives should make it that much more likely to be a successful mod. Put USB ports where the joyticks ports were, ExpressCard port or extra PCI slot where the cartridge port was, and so on. Hell, I wouldn't doubt if someone's already done it.
Needless but appropriate extras like a Commodore emulator and C64-like startup screen would be great, kitsch add-ons. I know, these can be added by some downloads from numerous places, but it would be cool to add it.
Otherwise, the only people who are old enough to remember the golden days of the C64 are most likely building their own PCs and therefore have no need for these "Commodore" computers. Don't bother whistling Bach's Invention #13. This is a Commodore in name only.
I'll assume that you meant PC vs. console.:) There are several games where friends and relatives of mine have a mixture of PC and console versions and would love to hook up together.
I know that EA is at least considering the idea. I subscribe to several, on-line surveys. Last year I got one that was specific to EA asking me a bunch of questions regarding my feelings about connectivity between consoles and PCs -- what kinds of games would I play in such an environment, how often would I play, the obligatory question on whether I'd pay more to go on-line against console users as well as PC users, and so forth. All of the questions were specific to on-line connectivity between various architectures.
But even before that, some friends of mine and I were wondering why PC/console connectivity hasn't really become an option yet. As long as the maps and gameplay are the same and both the PC and console use the same "language" to talk to each other, there's no reason why it couldn't happen.
I use Ventrilo every weekend with my nephew about 20 miles away and friend about 500 miles away during our network gaming nights. The sound is really good, it's completely "in conference" where anyone who knows the IP address could join in, and I've never heard the drop-offs or digital skipping that occurs frequently in Skype or Google Chat.
Apparently, Ventrilo also allows different sampling rates, so you might be able to pump through a higher bitrate to make the vocal quality better; however, I've never played with that function, so take that with a grain of salt. The default setting works well enough and doesn't sound like a telephone.
It's also available on several platforms. I run the server on my Sun Blade 100 with Solaris 9, but the three of us use the Windows clients for gaming.
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I agree. I hate the idea of shared memory. It uses the GeForce 6150 Go chipset. But, I didn't buy this laptop to be a CPU or graphical powerhouse, either. I have my main PC for that.
Ehhh???? And you expect to convince anyone with that statement? "Well, I'm not seeing the same problem, so it's not Aero." Interesting logic you've got there. So, how are things at Microsoft's Tech Support division?
That's an average. It will be nice and low for a while then surge about every four or five seconds to about 10%. But when Aero was turned on, CPU utilization was consistently at 30% with surges to 100% -- all when playing an MP3.
Slow down on your reading speed, please. As I clearly said in my previous post, "One of the first things I do with any new hardware is to upgrade all of the drivers and firmware as applicable." At the time there were no video drivers. There has been one video driver upgrade since then, but Aero was turned off before that. I'll check on the driver version when I get home.
GeForce 6150, I believe. (I'd have to check. The laptop is at home right now.) The most that I can share out right now with respect to video RAM is 128 MB. It should allow me to double that to 256 MB once I double the RAM to 2 GB. One of the first things I do with any new hardware is to upgrade all of the drivers and firmware as applicable. The only drivers that I needed to upgrade at the time were the wireless drivers, but I was connected to my wired network at the time so the wireless network was shut off.
I got a Compaq Presario laptop with Vista Home Premium about two months ago. It's not a killer laptop, just an Athlon Turion 64 at 2 GHz with 1 GB RAM, but it's sufficient for why I wanted a laptop. Just listening to MP3s through Media Player would shoot the CPU level up to a consistent 35-50% CPU utilization with Aero active. The battery obviously didn't last too long. I finally got so fed up with it that I shut off Aero, dropped the system back to a 2000/XP theme, and installed WinAmp. Listening to the same MP3s that way had the CPU going at around 5-10%. Even when I'm just using it for audio editing or photo editing, now I can use it for a few hours as opposed to about an hour with Aero active.
I will give Vista credit in that the laptop comes back very quickly from sleep mode whereas that never worked well for me in XP, but that's about it. Vista with Aero is the plant from "Little Shop of Horrors" -- FEED ME!!!
No! You cannot apply the freedoms to the military that you do to the general public. Period. They're in a different league all together. The fact that you can't see that is very disconcerting.
And - damn it! - get rid of the damned Slashdot template of trying to turn this into a political issue by bringing "incumbent party" into it! I read TFA and there is NOTHING in there about politics, so stop trying to inject your own! This is absolutely nothing new and is not uncommon during a time of war.
From TFA:
If fact, if you had bothered to read TFA, which you obviously did not, the one blogger that they specifcally mentioned is a "pro-victory" blogger, hardly someone who goes against the current administration. Having read a bit of his blog, it is clear to me that he supports the idea of victory in Iraq, which IS the view of the political party that is in the White House! So, if anything this article demonstrates how this action goes against the views that are supported by the incumbent, political party! So, your little quip attempting to place blame on discouraging "them from espousing political opinions that are are disliked by the incumbent political party" is just an attempt for you to throw politics into this.
Keep your baseless attempts to make everything political out of Slashdot and move them over to Digg where they belong.
A lot of Slashdotters apparently don't know or conveniently forget that there's this little thing called the Uniform Code of Military Justice that effectively says, "You are no longer granted all of the freedoms that are granted to non-military personnel under the U.S. Constitution." The ability to say whatever you want is one of those lost freedoms once you sign on the dotted line.
But, hey, if it gives people the excuse to start spouting their holier-than-thou dogma about censorship, let's just let them do it and get that frustration out of their systems, 'kay?
Be careful that you're not simply writing off other people's opinions as propoganda because you don't agree with them. That could make you... eek... a republican.
While he's at it, he should probably list the trolls who automatically demonize one political party at every opportunity even when such a demonization is not germane to the discussion at hand and is in fact nothing more than an inappropriate mud-sling just to try to gain ignorant mod points by those who abuse their mod point privileges to push a political agenda.
Not that such an incident has happened in this thread, of course, nor would anyone ever do such a thing under the Anonymous Coward moniker. That would just indicate how little that person actually has the balls to stand up for his convictions.
Heh. It's $600 because of a completely different reason - Blu-Ray. If the PS3 came with a standard DVD drive, it would probably cost about the same as the Wii and still be completely hackable. Look, I'm not disagreeing with what you've said, but I don't need to tell you the major differences between a console and a PC. No matter how you hack it, a PS/3 is not a PC (as the term has come to be known) just because it can run an operating system that happens to run on a PC. It's a console that can run a different operating system. I see a huge difference. Apparently, you don't. So be it.
And the people in both of the cases you mention are not the kinds of people that necessarily give a rat's rear about Microsoft's Games for Windows push. And, no, a PS2/3 is NOT a PC for the aims of a Windows gaming thread just because it can run Linux. Oh, right! WINE under Linux on a PS2/3. Anyone who is willing to go to such lengths to avoid having to build or buy a PC on their own should have probably just bought a PC in the first place.
What the hell kind of PC are you looking at? Oooohhhh... The one that looks like an alien? Puh-leaze...
I'm building the specs for a new gaming rig, and a system with 320 GB HD, 2 GB RAM, Athlon X2 6000, and GeForce 7950GT (or a low-end 8000 series) STILL comes in less than $900! And being a PC it clearly does a hell of a lot more than playing games, downloading content, or running a Second Life wannabe. I have no idea what the hell you're buying or what you think constitutes a gaming rig, but you obviously have never built one yourself and are "wow"ed by marketing and oh-so-cool PC cases.
Wait ... let me get this straight. You bought a system that is not meant for gaming and then you complain that it's insufficient for gaming! WTF did you expect? And to top THAT off, you then bitch about PC gaming with probably the broadest brush imaginable.
With the exception of high-end laptops, almost every laptop out there uses integrated video that steals - sorry, shares - memory from RAM, which automatically makes it slower than video cards with their own RAM and makes it far inferior when compared to "regular" video cards. If you want to play video games on a laptop, you can't go into Best Buy or Staples and buy one off the shelf unless the extent of your gaming stops at Bejewelled or Zuma. (Yes, I'm being facetious, but not by much.)
Please, by all means leave the PC gaming scene. You clearly have expectations that prove that your really don't have a clue about PC gaming. What's next? Buying a Geo Metro (or equivalent micro-car) and then complaining that it can't speed past a Lamborghini on the Autobahn?
OW! OWWW!! Pain! Major flashback ... brain hurts ... ow ...! Actually, I was more high-tech than that -- SoundBlaster + WaveBlaster. w00t! :)
Indeed! I would think that Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, and Sam and Max Hit the Road would be all that people need to jump at this!
Sam and Max would be a big magnet for this now that the duo is back in the forefront of gaming thanks to TellTale Games. Those who were not around to experience the original game that started it all can go back and play what we've been talking about for over a decade!
This is indicative of nothing. There are so many different aspects to CD/music sales and values that focusing on CD sales is somewhat ludicrous.
... ever think that maybe your market had reached its saturation point, Steve? In fact, did anyone stop to think that maybe the music market itself has reached a saturation point where the majority of people who wanted to get CDs of older albums has done so?
In my personal opinion, modern, mainstream music sucks for the most part. I've been purchasing more independent music than ever before. Are independent labels included in these numbers? I download very little in way of illicit means. I like my CDs and I have no problems buying CDs, but most of the music out there from the major labels simply doesn't interest me any more. Why is the author not taking into account the "cookie cutter" mentality that dominates a lot of the mainstream music scene?
I'm sure that there are other reasons that are not due to illegal means. It could be something like how Steve Miller was bitching about how his CD was on the top of the charts for years and years then suddenly plummeted. Uh
And with more and more people learning about (and despising) DRM-laden, digital music, I'm not shocked at all to learn that on-line stores like iTunes are not offsetting CD sales drops. I refuse to buy music with any kind of DRM out of principle (yes, I know about analog loopback to strip off the DRM), but stores like eMusic and Magnatune don't have the artists that I'd like. If iTunes dropped the DRM, I'd buy a ton of songs from them, and I think that a lot of people have the same mentality.
Oh, well. I guess it doesn't matter. If we're not following the greed-laden will of the record industry, we're automatically pirates no matter what we say or do, aren't we?
No, the pentagram didn't mean anything. Ultima 8 SUCKED. The game was its own PR disaster. Having played the Ultima series since Ultima III I found U8 to be abysmal, especially in gameplay. I had more fun with -- and I can't believe I'm saying this -- Ultima: Ascension. I treat Ultima 8 like I do Galactica 1980 -- it didn't happen. When I do reference it, I unashamedly refer to it as "Ultima 8: The Arcade Game". I don't think that you could be further off the mark by attributing the pentagram to a bad PR move. Just my two one-hundredths of a dollar.
And, by the way, a pentagram is nothing more than a symbol that has been usurped by the symbol-minded. Same thing with the swastika . Both are millennia old. The swastika, for example, was woven into American Indian clothing before Columbus. It's just a symbol.
People who freak at a pentagram must have a hell of a time (no pun intended) with children drawing stars. "I'm so glad that you didn't put a circle around that star or else I'd have to look on your head for a 666!" "You mean, a circle like this?" {draws circle around star } "NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!"
I know you're saying that to be a smart ass, but actually that's a really cool idea. Make it a dual-boot system at power-up. Hold down the C= key at power-up to immediately boot into an emulator-on-a-chip that could be upgraded as necessary -- full C64 BASIC that could access .d64/.t64 images over a FAT-formatted USB drive or floppy disk. Otherwise, if you don't press the C= key it will boot up like any other PC.
For the people who grew up using the C64 back when it was in its prime, it would probably be enough nostalgia to sway a lot of them to buy it.
Okay, I missed that in the article. My bad. It still doesn't make these PCs Commodores.
Big flipping deal. These PCs are not the Commodore that I knew and loved from my teenage years.
The only way I'll buy another Commodore computer for gaming is if it's a PC in an original-looking Commodore 64-style case. There have been PCs-in-a-keyboard for a while now, and the C64 was a hefty-sized unit. Modding a PC into a C64-style case should be completely possible, barring some necessary key changes, like F1-F12 keys instead of the C64's F1-F8. Slim-line DVD drives and 2.5" hard drives should make it that much more likely to be a successful mod. Put USB ports where the joyticks ports were, ExpressCard port or extra PCI slot where the cartridge port was, and so on. Hell, I wouldn't doubt if someone's already done it.
Needless but appropriate extras like a Commodore emulator and C64-like startup screen would be great, kitsch add-ons. I know, these can be added by some downloads from numerous places, but it would be cool to add it.
Otherwise, the only people who are old enough to remember the golden days of the C64 are most likely building their own PCs and therefore have no need for these "Commodore" computers. Don't bother whistling Bach's Invention #13. This is a Commodore in name only.
I thought that Xbox 360 could use a USB keyboard and mouse. Yes? No? Maybe? (No, I don't own one. Can you tell?)
I'll assume that you meant PC vs. console. :) There are several games where friends and relatives of mine have a mixture of PC and console versions and would love to hook up together.
I know that EA is at least considering the idea. I subscribe to several, on-line surveys. Last year I got one that was specific to EA asking me a bunch of questions regarding my feelings about connectivity between consoles and PCs -- what kinds of games would I play in such an environment, how often would I play, the obligatory question on whether I'd pay more to go on-line against console users as well as PC users, and so forth. All of the questions were specific to on-line connectivity between various architectures.
But even before that, some friends of mine and I were wondering why PC/console connectivity hasn't really become an option yet. As long as the maps and gameplay are the same and both the PC and console use the same "language" to talk to each other, there's no reason why it couldn't happen.
I use Ventrilo every weekend with my nephew about 20 miles away and friend about 500 miles away during our network gaming nights. The sound is really good, it's completely "in conference" where anyone who knows the IP address could join in, and I've never heard the drop-offs or digital skipping that occurs frequently in Skype or Google Chat.
Apparently, Ventrilo also allows different sampling rates, so you might be able to pump through a higher bitrate to make the vocal quality better; however, I've never played with that function, so take that with a grain of salt. The default setting works well enough and doesn't sound like a telephone.
It's also available on several platforms. I run the server on my Sun Blade 100 with Solaris 9, but the three of us use the Windows clients for gaming.
Well, that is so you can drive non stop. Duh.
Please tell us the car that she drove that actually got 900 miles to a tank of gasoline. We want to know about it!