Uhhh when they wrote that they not only had slaves, which were required because frankly there wasn't enough backs to do all the work, but they had hundreds upon hundreds of miles of open country, minus the Indians they slaughtered of course.
Today for every one you have climbing the fence to look for a job (which honestly I've had more than a dozen Americans ask to cut my mom's grass because they can't find any work, its fricking bad in the flyover states folks) you have probably a dozen criminals coming here to ply their "trade" because they know with all these "safe havens" its easy to set up camp here, you have whole busloads filled with those needing ultra expensive medical treatment (its gotten so bad in some places they are basically knocking them out and slipping them on a plane or bus, look up "guy goes into coma, wakes up in Poland" for just one example) and we have H1-Bs killing any chance of Americans learning those skills because they pay less for a master's than we do for a new econo-car.
We can't even feed our own (look up "face of hunger in USA" to see how many of our citizens go to bed hungry each night) or pay our own bills, we just can't support the damned planet folks, we just can't. Meanwhile while they open the floodgates they have sent more than 42,000 FACTORIES overseas since 2001, you have nearly half the population getting handouts or aid, its just not sustainable folks, its gonna collapse and when it does its gonna be REALLY ugly, worse than NO after Katrina ugly.
Well that would still let you get another 7970 when the price drops so you'll get the crazy bling for longer. Honestly the price of CF capable boards, especially the AMD ones are so damned cheap if you want to game you are probably better off with a CF board, they can usually hold more RAM and have better options for tweaking anyway.
Being a PC fixit shop guy in a poor state and having a couple of teens that game I just can't go batshit on the cards, as any card i get for myself I'll end up having to get the boys something equal to it so we can game together so if its one thing I've learned its how to stretch out that bang for the buck and get the most for the money. that is why me and the oldest are running Thuban Hexacores and the youngest an AMD quad, by going with the AMD chips I was able to build 3 pretty damned nice PCs for less than a grand, and that is why I'll end up getting the HD7750s to replace the HD4850s we are running now as 3 of those this fall will cost less than your single card.
But if it were me I'd still stick with the x7xx and x8xx simply because with CF you can buy one card now and in six months buy another when the price is cheaper. With the x9xx cards they really don't sell those in mass quantities so the price never drops nearly as far,whereas with x7xx and x8xx you can get some crazy cheap prices if you watch out.
As far as VRAM...you ever thought about a caching SSD? i have a gaming customer running a Sandisk caching SSD and he just raves about how fast game levels and textures load, with that caching SSD working as a buffer between your HDD and your RAM/VRAM you can seriously cut down the time it takes to feed that beast of yours, but of course with you running ultra HD I'm sure nothing is gonna top insane amounts of VRAM, still if you have already bought the monster card nothing wrong with having the option to CF it down the line. It'll let you squeeze more bang for the buck without having to keep buying the insane-o priced cards constantly.
Great, while you guys quibble with semantics you are all ignoring the simple fact that PIRATES DON'T BUY LICENSES, hence why they are called fricking PIRATES!
God that kind of shit drives me up a damned wall, its like those "Oh to stop criminals we'll pass more gun laws" they DON'T FOLLOW THE STUPID LAWS YOU HAVE NOW which is why they. are.criminals. so passing more laws? fucking STUPID.
I bet my last dollar if you looked at ALL of windows piracy? you MAY have.7%, and that's not a typo, less than 1%, are using any MSDNs or technet crap because why should they pay MSFT a damned dime when they can get a bootloader hacked copy of TPB for exactly NOTHING. I swear i'd love to just bitchslap the moron that thought it was about piracy with a print out of how every. damned.version. of Windows that has EVER been made, even the offbeat shit like Embedded and WinFLP is ALREADY ON TPB so why would you buy a fricking technet?
Yeah and my dick is 14 foot long and named Leeroy, just because you scream "Its teh PIRATZES" don't make it so. I can walk down to the shop and show you what the pirates use as I had one hand me a copy to play with, its a bootloader hacked Windows 7 and 8 that doesn't need ANY damned keys and somehow they have even managed to get it to autohide any Windows updates that have anything to do with WGA, damned if i know how but they did it.
so quit buying the bullshit, its the same bullshit EA and ubisoft pulled with their "Its teh PIRATEZ" garbage and the pirates laughed their fucking ass of because they DON'T BUY RETAIL and they sure as fuck aren't buying Technet either. The ONLY ones i have ever met buying Technet were the ones that needed to pre-test the new stuff before doing SMB rollouts, the kind of places where its too small for MSDN but too large to just go COTS and all this dumbshit move will do is give 'em one more reason to talk to google. wow MSFT, you just keep raising the bar when it comes to being dumbasses!
What most people refuse to realize is that it was a BUBBLE, the MHz wars made even a 3 year old PC too slow to run most programs. Hell since 2007 PCs have been overpowered for what folks do with them, my GF is running a Pentium D with an HD2400 and for the stuff she does? Its fine, most of the time the CPU is slowed down because her little chats and FB games simply don't even need the power of that 7 year old CPU.
I mean when my entry builds 5 years ago was Phenom and Athlon X3s with 4Gb of RAM and 400GB HDDs? Then things are pretty well overpowered. People still buy nearly 300 million a year its just they aren't replacing the ones they have before they die and when they aren't slamming the PCs they don't die as quickly.
Sorry I have to throw a flag, bullshit on the field. One of the reasons I advised my customers against Windows 8 is how many programs i found that run fine on 7, crap themselves on 8. some of it was hardware like drivers not playing nice, some of it was software, it ended up just a mess.
That is why I hate posts that say "Oh its just 7 with Metro" because no, its really not. since i'm not on the dev team i can only guess and say that all that mobile and tweeting twits for shits changed too much of the background, all I know is that its less stable, has more stupid "senior moments", almost as bad as vista in that regard, and while the Win 7 units have been running since RTM I've had to do multiple "refresh my PC" jobs for customers which I still think that tech was added to cover for a corruption bug they couldn't nail down.
I do have to say how much I find the irony moist and delicious on how many "keyboard commanders" try to cover for the OS...which was DESIGNED FOR TABLETS and therefor in its natural state doesn't HAVE a keyboard for the commanders to try to cover up for its failings! IMHO if your OS requires you to memorize commands like its fricking 1989? You have failed at OS design and should be ashamed. This guy says it better than I can but one thing I agree on, if you need a Win 7 PC to google how to use the Win 8 PC? Its a fail of epic proportions.
Exactly, every article we get with MSFT in the title we get what I call the "FOSSie faction" which frankly live on Mars if they think the entire population is gonna deal with CLI, Googling for fixes, bi-annual death marches, and all the bullshit.
I mean I just retired a Sempron that served 9 years in the shop, that is TWO service packs and over 1500 patches and not a SINGLE driver screwed up, with windows you get the drivers working they will work for the LIFE of the OS, I have given the "Hairyfeet challenge" to a good 15 Linux distros, and I have YET to have a single one pass. You always end up with dead Wifi, dead sound, all that talk about "Oh if the driver is in the kernel its all good" is a load of horseshit as this post shows quite clear.
Believe me as a retailer there is NOTHING I want more than to have a viable third way, if you think MSFT fucks the consumers they REALLY fuck us system builders, but with every Linux out there it ends up being neither free as in beer or freedom, it ends up free as in worthless as all the time I end up wasting because some damned update shit all over somebody's laptop or put their graphics in single user mode makes the cost of Windows trivial compared to how much Linux costs.
And please don't waste your breath trying to hype LTS, or as I call it "here is some old shit that most will never get backported to" because not only is Ubuntu going rolling release (thus making LTS just marketing bullshit) but you NEVER seem to be able to just go to the store and buy a printer or wifi adapter or anything because it ALWAYS ends up needing kernel blah blah blah and you have kernel blah blah. which to me just shows how damned crappy that old driver model Torvalds refuses to let go of is, no damned reason I should have to KNOW what kernel I need just to buy a piece of hardware, all i should need to know is like whether its Debian or ubuntu, making the consumer know all this trivial shit just makes it more a PITA.
So there is a REASON why nobody has challenged MSFT in the desktop and laptop space, and that is because nobody has offered a product that is as easy to use, stay stable and have the drivers work for the life of the OS, nothing sadly comes close and believe me I've tried, you name the release I've given it the challenge, I probably blew a good $400 in bandwidth and never had a single one that could last without something shitting itself, not one.
Its the same thing that fucked the game companies...greed. They also tightened the rules on MSDN to "fight piracy" while ignoring the simple fact that PIRATES DON'T BUY SUBSCRIPTIONS!!!!
Its the same stupid shit as EA, they just fuck the paying customers while the pirates just bypass the bullshit. Pirates can get ANY version hassle free without giving them a cent, so WTF MSFT?
Meh most of the guys i know ended up either going MSDN or just getting pirate version, hell the pirate versions of some of their stuff is frankly better than what they offer (they really need to hire the guys that make the "Tiny" versions, stomps the hell out of their embedded products) so it won't be a GREAT loss, but it does show just how far disconnect has infected their company. They seem to be cutting their noses to spite their face and burning bridges where frankly it doesn't make any damned sense. technet was not only a site for software but for tools and "how to" instructions so losing a one stop shop for no real reason just doesn't make sense.
Technet was great for testing OSes though, you could try just about any MSFT OS, desktop or server, and you'd have enough time to really put it through its paces. Also having it all at a single place makes it easier, losing Technet is frankly gonna suck.
Dude get a CF board, you want to crank out the bling at crazy resolutions you REALLY need to be using CF. Look up the benches and see how say 2 HD7770s push compared to your 7970 and you'll see you can get damned close without spending even half what you did.
But of course if you get a CF board you can wait until the 7970s hit the below $150 range (but in the future I'd avoid the x9xx cards, sure they are insanely fast but they are a lot rarer than the x8xx cards so the price never drops as far) and slap a second one to get totally insane-o frame rates. Nice thing about CF is you can buy cheaper cards and get equal or better performance.
And I have to say kudos to the Windows dev that thought it up, its fricking BRILLIANT and fixed one of the major problems I always had with Windows upgrades which was legacy software. With SxS if some older piece of software demands that an older version of a.DLL needs to be installed SxS instead reroutes it to the SxS directory so that at runtime that program "thinks" the old.DLL is installed when in reality its coming from SxS, its great when you have some older software that needs to be run. It also makes it trivial if you need to roll back an update for some reason, no more "please insert your XP Service Pack 3 disc now" kinda crap which is handy if you have a client that has boned his system.
So I personally would MUCH rather have SxS and give it some extra space than I would have to deal with programs having conflicts or refusing to run because X needs DLL rev Y and program B needs the same DLL to be at version Z.
Well he seemed to be implying that he had money issues and frankly the "legacy" drivers run great on Windows 7 and Windows 8 so I don't really see that as a problem. Hell I picked up an HD2400XT and slapped it in my GF's PC and it runs Windows 7 solid as hell and its not like you are gonna want Windows 8 on a non touchscreen device anyway.
But anybody worried about having "legacy" drivers should just pick up an HD7750, you can get those for less than $80 at Amazon and if they stick to their previous timelines that should get at least another 3 years worth of driver updates. Personally if the drivers are solid i have NO problem with them only putting out drivers if there is a bug to fix, putting out a monthly driver just to say you put out a driver is kinda dumb and they have already squeezed every drop of performance they are gonna get out of the 2xxx-5xxx cards at this point. I'm still gaming on an HD4850 and i have no problems with the latest games and the driver is solid as a rock under windows 7, no worries.
She is suddenly able to talk again, its the damnedest thing and all I get from docs is "Your guess is as good as mine" which is frustrating as hell but what can you do? Just enjoy these periods and hope they last, all I can do really.
See? That is what I'm saying, this whole "If I had $200+ to spare" doesn't really apply anymore, it really doesn't. The only reason to spend that kind of money is for ePeen bragging rights. Me personally I'm waiting for the HD7770 to hit the $70 mark (which I figure it will by this fall) that way i can get a couple and try the CF on my board but from what I've seen the HD7770 by itself is gonna smoke so it'll only be so I can say I got CF, not because i really need it.
I have to say congrats, I have heard of spelling nazis, and grammar nazis, never heard of math nazis before. And sorry if you don't like it but that is a really old southern expression and while some of our little sayings may not make perfect logic (for example I have never taken the temp of a welldigger's ass so i have no idea how cold it is) they are a part of our culture so they tend to stick around.
Dude what year is this? 1998? Who cares when you can get a TB drive for like $60? and my Win 7 install is a total of 27Gb and a LOT of that is WinSXS which is frankly brilliant, no more having programs write over each others common 'DLLs,
And what dock? Win 7 doesn't come with a dock, i think you are getting your OSes mixed up man. I personally have a dock on mine because i like rocketdock but that is a personal taste, and as far as looks go you can make it anything you want pretty much. i personally use Vista Black (the only thing I liked about Vista) on the gamer box and win 7 basic on the office system but if that isn't enough go get the 30 day trial of astonshell and you can make it look like anything from OSX to win9x.
Finally if all you care about is tiny size and squeezing every cycle out of the system? get a hold of Win 7 Tiny, it stomps even XP and a full install is like a gig and a half. Takes all of 3 minutes after install to turn back on UAC and there ya go, the increased security without any extra space, hell it even has aero if you want. Personally with 3TB of space i honestly don't care about a teeny tiny 27GB, I use more than that on temp files with the multitrack.
and you don't even want to get me started about Linux, its driver model is a fucking joke, NOBODY will touch that driver model, not BSD, Solaris, hell OS/2 has a better driver model than Linux. if you want to play bi-annual death march and google for fixes? Knock yourself out, me I've had Win 7 running since aug 09 and not a single driver failure, not a single crash, it just keeps going and going and going, year after year. Now THAT is what matters to me and I'm sorry but Linux isn't even up to Win2K in that regard and frankly won't be as long as Linus "I'm an arrogant asshole" Torvalds is at the helm. That man has stuck with the same shitty driver model he has had since the mid 90s, everybody else grew up, Torvalds didn't.
That would be true of Win 7, hell even Vista, but XP had a serious flaw you just can't easily fix, and that is the entire OS and ecosystem expecting you to be running as Admin 24/7/365 which is just BAD design friend.
With XP there are just too many programs, hell too many drivers, that expect admin and will choke and pitch a fit if not outright crash if you try to run as a limited user and even if you manage to get it working the number of permission pop ups will drive you nuts, it'll make Vista look quiet in comparison.
Look I get wanting to keep some of the old stuff, i really do, but XP is just waaaaay past its prime. its had patches on top of patches, 3 service packs, you can run a clean install for a week and then run something like CCleaner or Comodo system cleaner and find the registry already starting to pile up the orphan links and crap,its just not that good to begin with and now that hardware has passed it by (hell the $100 specials at a lot of places have more RAM than XP can handle without hacks) it really is time to let it go.
I mean for the love of Pete we are talking 14 fricking years by the time MSFT pulls the plug, in OS terms it might as well have come on 8-track.
Hell you should have come to me bro, old Hairy would have set you straight.
You see the trick with AMD/ATI is knowing what the card is made for and sticking with that. Take my GF for example, she watches movies, does a little video chat, plays FB games, so any of the low end chips, the 24xx,34xx,43xx, those all work great, solid as a rock.
Now for your mor games that aren't gonna be filling the sky with splosions? The x5xx and x6xx cards really do well there, again you just can't crank the AA and AF and expect it to run smooth, its more for your WoW type players. finally if you want to play anything with plenty of bling? then x7xx and x8xx are the cards for you, hell I'm still gaming on an HD4850 and it just rocks, I had the bling cranked to 11 in Just Cause II and I NEVER dropped below 37FPS in the demo runs, not once. in the actual game it runs even better, I have filled the screen with so many fireballs and pieces of debris i couldn't even see where the road i was driving on was.
But while I can't comment on all of your games I have NOLF 1 and 2 and the youngest has Psyconauts and on these HD4850s? great, smooth as butter, and like I said look around, you can find those cards in the $35 range so its not like you have a real investment here. Good rule of thumb? stay a version or two behind, you'll save money while getting the most stable drivers. Like I said you can get the HD7750 for less than $80 at amazon, it beats the HD6850 cards in a lot of benches while pulling so little power that it can just run off the PCI-E bus, no external power required. I bet if you were to try one you'd see that all those games would just smoke, I've been selling them to customers for a couple of months now and nothing but happy results.
But if you got the HD4250 there is your problem, that was one of those "turbo-cache" cards that both ATI and Nvidia experimented with where they would put a shitty little amount of RAM on the card and supplement it with system RAM. There is a GOOD reason why neither makes those anymore, they found trying to keep two different RAMs running at different speeds synched equaled a crashy mess, which is what it sounds like you went through. if you are gonna be doing more than FB games I wouldn't recommend anything lower than an HD4650, but as i said with the HD4850 at $35 and the HD7750 at $75 there really is no point in getting any smaller than that.
Thank you and I do NOT sound like a damned 13 year old, watch any of those god damned reality shows featuring teens to see how they talk like fricking aliens.
And the P3 was EASILY the most popular CPU when XP was released by a long shot, at the time i stayed pretty damned close to the cutting edge and i had a P3 running at a blistering 1100MHz. The office boxes i was working on at the time were new enough they had WinME stickers on them (needless to say I got a LOT of work wiping ME for XP) and the average was between 650MHz to 900MHz depending on the OEM line and RAM was 128Mb pretty much across the board.
I know people were shocked as hell to see mine had a full 512Mb because that was practically unheard of at the time but I got lucky and knew a guy that could get me RAM at cost and it was still a pretty penny for 2 256Mb chips my friend.
Man the sad part to me is there was all these great OSes that did NOT lose because MSFT was Darth Vader but because the ones owning the OS didn't have a damned brain. VMS? great, BeOS? great, OS/2? great, I ran all three at one time and when they were in their prime they were better than what MSFT had out at the time by a pretty big margin but they were just handled sooooo badly.
That is why I have this theory that so far has proven true time and time again, that all that "EEE" and "shoot 'em in the head" bullshit by MSFT was just bravado covering up what the REAL source of their fortune was, which could be summed up in "And then the other guy did something REALLY dumb". You look into the history of VMS,BeOS,OS/2 and time and again you'll see them do just boneheaded shit that opened the door wide and gave MSFT a free pass.
But I wouldn't be surprised if there is still a LOT of backend that behaves like VMS, guys here can say what they want but NTFS is pretty damned solid and most of the early NT work was all Cutler and the man knew his stuff.
Dude you ain't telling me nothing, my ex was a phone operator that sold vacation packages and I swear I would be sitting there waiting for her to get off work and I'd hear over her headset "Hey yuse guys gotta hear this gal talk, she sounds like them gone with the wind chicks!" or something to that effect, I swear she made more sales up north strictly because they loved to hear her thick southern belle voice.
But I wouldn't live up north on a bet, I have heard just about every accent known to man and yankee accents are just grating on the ear, its waaay too clipped and fast, not musical at all. I can deal with west coast, FLA, but yankee accents to me are like fingernails on a chalkboard so i don't know how you stand it.
Exactly, I might as well have said "And the fleegal goes to the flimjam" for all the good simply saying "its on somebody else's PC" would be.
I mean do ANY of you know how many God damned times i have to give the "CPU,Memory,HDD" speech? I'd say to this very day you probably have a good 80% of computer users that has at least one, if not all three of those WRONG and will do something like ask me to add memory when they meant HDD or think that adding a bigger HDD will make their PC faster.
So I don't think the guys here really realize how little people know about a PC, to them its a magical black box that only exists when its on and disappears when its off. Don't even get me started on the whole "legal,grey area,illegal" thing because you don't know how many people think if they type the name of a movie in the theater and it pops up with a link on Google? why it HAS to be okay, why Google says so!...facepalm.
Riiight, and maybe you can pay a couple hundred bucks so i can sit around for a few hours giving lectures to all these people that can't even tell the difference between a keyboard port and a mouse? thought so.
High minded idealism is all well and good when you make 6 figures and have a college degree, i work with ordinary folks, the guys you probably wouldn't give the time to on a bet, and they don't have the hours to spare nor do i have the hours to give teaching how fricking DNS works when simply warning them about the dot three can kill a LOT of phishing dead.
Dude pick up an ATI HD4850, you can pick those up for like $35 if you look around. I am running one and I can tell you all my games run GREAT in Win 7, I can fire up Just Cause II and do the whole "cool guys don't look at explosions" bit, Batman AA and AC run great, the Borderland series run fine, its no problem.
If you want something faster and have a little bit more green an HD7750 runs close to the 6850s while using half the power and again runs great in windows 7. XP is nearly 14 years old man, hell it can't even take a full 3GB of RAM if you have a decent amount of VRAM on your GPU, if my GF's Pentium D can run Win 7 (slapped in an HD2400XT,cost a grand total of $9) then so can your PC.
A final bit of advice, go to Starmicro and pick up a dual core if that board will support it, hell I've had pretty decent luck getting AM2 boards to take the MOR Athlon 64 X2s even if the board's chiplist don't show one and their chips are cheap enough you can afford to take the chance. I've been buying from those guys for years, great bunch and they'll have a chip for just about any socket. You'd be surprised how little money it takes to turn your system into a pretty kicking Windows 7 machine, and the increased security and extra features are WELL worth the upgrade. When I use XP now I feel like I've gone back to Win95, how I lived without jumplists and breadcrumbs is beyond me. Well worth a few bucks friend.
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Uhhh when they wrote that they not only had slaves, which were required because frankly there wasn't enough backs to do all the work, but they had hundreds upon hundreds of miles of open country, minus the Indians they slaughtered of course.
Today for every one you have climbing the fence to look for a job (which honestly I've had more than a dozen Americans ask to cut my mom's grass because they can't find any work, its fricking bad in the flyover states folks) you have probably a dozen criminals coming here to ply their "trade" because they know with all these "safe havens" its easy to set up camp here, you have whole busloads filled with those needing ultra expensive medical treatment (its gotten so bad in some places they are basically knocking them out and slipping them on a plane or bus, look up "guy goes into coma, wakes up in Poland" for just one example) and we have H1-Bs killing any chance of Americans learning those skills because they pay less for a master's than we do for a new econo-car.
We can't even feed our own (look up "face of hunger in USA" to see how many of our citizens go to bed hungry each night) or pay our own bills, we just can't support the damned planet folks, we just can't. Meanwhile while they open the floodgates they have sent more than 42,000 FACTORIES overseas since 2001, you have nearly half the population getting handouts or aid, its just not sustainable folks, its gonna collapse and when it does its gonna be REALLY ugly, worse than NO after Katrina ugly.
Well that would still let you get another 7970 when the price drops so you'll get the crazy bling for longer. Honestly the price of CF capable boards, especially the AMD ones are so damned cheap if you want to game you are probably better off with a CF board, they can usually hold more RAM and have better options for tweaking anyway.
Being a PC fixit shop guy in a poor state and having a couple of teens that game I just can't go batshit on the cards, as any card i get for myself I'll end up having to get the boys something equal to it so we can game together so if its one thing I've learned its how to stretch out that bang for the buck and get the most for the money. that is why me and the oldest are running Thuban Hexacores and the youngest an AMD quad, by going with the AMD chips I was able to build 3 pretty damned nice PCs for less than a grand, and that is why I'll end up getting the HD7750s to replace the HD4850s we are running now as 3 of those this fall will cost less than your single card.
But if it were me I'd still stick with the x7xx and x8xx simply because with CF you can buy one card now and in six months buy another when the price is cheaper. With the x9xx cards they really don't sell those in mass quantities so the price never drops nearly as far,whereas with x7xx and x8xx you can get some crazy cheap prices if you watch out.
As far as VRAM...you ever thought about a caching SSD? i have a gaming customer running a Sandisk caching SSD and he just raves about how fast game levels and textures load, with that caching SSD working as a buffer between your HDD and your RAM/VRAM you can seriously cut down the time it takes to feed that beast of yours, but of course with you running ultra HD I'm sure nothing is gonna top insane amounts of VRAM, still if you have already bought the monster card nothing wrong with having the option to CF it down the line. It'll let you squeeze more bang for the buck without having to keep buying the insane-o priced cards constantly.
Great, while you guys quibble with semantics you are all ignoring the simple fact that PIRATES DON'T BUY LICENSES, hence why they are called fricking PIRATES!
God that kind of shit drives me up a damned wall, its like those "Oh to stop criminals we'll pass more gun laws" they DON'T FOLLOW THE STUPID LAWS YOU HAVE NOW which is why they. are.criminals. so passing more laws? fucking STUPID.
I bet my last dollar if you looked at ALL of windows piracy? you MAY have .7%, and that's not a typo, less than 1%, are using any MSDNs or technet crap because why should they pay MSFT a damned dime when they can get a bootloader hacked copy of TPB for exactly NOTHING. I swear i'd love to just bitchslap the moron that thought it was about piracy with a print out of how every. damned.version. of Windows that has EVER been made, even the offbeat shit like Embedded and WinFLP is ALREADY ON TPB so why would you buy a fricking technet?
Yeah and my dick is 14 foot long and named Leeroy, just because you scream "Its teh PIRATZES" don't make it so. I can walk down to the shop and show you what the pirates use as I had one hand me a copy to play with, its a bootloader hacked Windows 7 and 8 that doesn't need ANY damned keys and somehow they have even managed to get it to autohide any Windows updates that have anything to do with WGA, damned if i know how but they did it.
so quit buying the bullshit, its the same bullshit EA and ubisoft pulled with their "Its teh PIRATEZ" garbage and the pirates laughed their fucking ass of because they DON'T BUY RETAIL and they sure as fuck aren't buying Technet either. The ONLY ones i have ever met buying Technet were the ones that needed to pre-test the new stuff before doing SMB rollouts, the kind of places where its too small for MSDN but too large to just go COTS and all this dumbshit move will do is give 'em one more reason to talk to google. wow MSFT, you just keep raising the bar when it comes to being dumbasses!
What most people refuse to realize is that it was a BUBBLE, the MHz wars made even a 3 year old PC too slow to run most programs. Hell since 2007 PCs have been overpowered for what folks do with them, my GF is running a Pentium D with an HD2400 and for the stuff she does? Its fine, most of the time the CPU is slowed down because her little chats and FB games simply don't even need the power of that 7 year old CPU.
I mean when my entry builds 5 years ago was Phenom and Athlon X3s with 4Gb of RAM and 400GB HDDs? Then things are pretty well overpowered. People still buy nearly 300 million a year its just they aren't replacing the ones they have before they die and when they aren't slamming the PCs they don't die as quickly.
Sorry I have to throw a flag, bullshit on the field. One of the reasons I advised my customers against Windows 8 is how many programs i found that run fine on 7, crap themselves on 8. some of it was hardware like drivers not playing nice, some of it was software, it ended up just a mess.
That is why I hate posts that say "Oh its just 7 with Metro" because no, its really not. since i'm not on the dev team i can only guess and say that all that mobile and tweeting twits for shits changed too much of the background, all I know is that its less stable, has more stupid "senior moments", almost as bad as vista in that regard, and while the Win 7 units have been running since RTM I've had to do multiple "refresh my PC" jobs for customers which I still think that tech was added to cover for a corruption bug they couldn't nail down.
I do have to say how much I find the irony moist and delicious on how many "keyboard commanders" try to cover for the OS...which was DESIGNED FOR TABLETS and therefor in its natural state doesn't HAVE a keyboard for the commanders to try to cover up for its failings! IMHO if your OS requires you to memorize commands like its fricking 1989? You have failed at OS design and should be ashamed. This guy says it better than I can but one thing I agree on, if you need a Win 7 PC to google how to use the Win 8 PC? Its a fail of epic proportions.
Exactly, every article we get with MSFT in the title we get what I call the "FOSSie faction" which frankly live on Mars if they think the entire population is gonna deal with CLI, Googling for fixes, bi-annual death marches, and all the bullshit.
I mean I just retired a Sempron that served 9 years in the shop, that is TWO service packs and over 1500 patches and not a SINGLE driver screwed up, with windows you get the drivers working they will work for the LIFE of the OS, I have given the "Hairyfeet challenge" to a good 15 Linux distros, and I have YET to have a single one pass. You always end up with dead Wifi, dead sound, all that talk about "Oh if the driver is in the kernel its all good" is a load of horseshit as this post shows quite clear.
Believe me as a retailer there is NOTHING I want more than to have a viable third way, if you think MSFT fucks the consumers they REALLY fuck us system builders, but with every Linux out there it ends up being neither free as in beer or freedom, it ends up free as in worthless as all the time I end up wasting because some damned update shit all over somebody's laptop or put their graphics in single user mode makes the cost of Windows trivial compared to how much Linux costs.
And please don't waste your breath trying to hype LTS, or as I call it "here is some old shit that most will never get backported to" because not only is Ubuntu going rolling release (thus making LTS just marketing bullshit) but you NEVER seem to be able to just go to the store and buy a printer or wifi adapter or anything because it ALWAYS ends up needing kernel blah blah blah and you have kernel blah blah. which to me just shows how damned crappy that old driver model Torvalds refuses to let go of is, no damned reason I should have to KNOW what kernel I need just to buy a piece of hardware, all i should need to know is like whether its Debian or ubuntu, making the consumer know all this trivial shit just makes it more a PITA.
So there is a REASON why nobody has challenged MSFT in the desktop and laptop space, and that is because nobody has offered a product that is as easy to use, stay stable and have the drivers work for the life of the OS, nothing sadly comes close and believe me I've tried, you name the release I've given it the challenge, I probably blew a good $400 in bandwidth and never had a single one that could last without something shitting itself, not one.
Its the same thing that fucked the game companies...greed. They also tightened the rules on MSDN to "fight piracy" while ignoring the simple fact that PIRATES DON'T BUY SUBSCRIPTIONS!!!!
Its the same stupid shit as EA, they just fuck the paying customers while the pirates just bypass the bullshit. Pirates can get ANY version hassle free without giving them a cent, so WTF MSFT?
Meh most of the guys i know ended up either going MSDN or just getting pirate version, hell the pirate versions of some of their stuff is frankly better than what they offer (they really need to hire the guys that make the "Tiny" versions, stomps the hell out of their embedded products) so it won't be a GREAT loss, but it does show just how far disconnect has infected their company. They seem to be cutting their noses to spite their face and burning bridges where frankly it doesn't make any damned sense. technet was not only a site for software but for tools and "how to" instructions so losing a one stop shop for no real reason just doesn't make sense.
Technet was great for testing OSes though, you could try just about any MSFT OS, desktop or server, and you'd have enough time to really put it through its paces. Also having it all at a single place makes it easier, losing Technet is frankly gonna suck.
Dude get a CF board, you want to crank out the bling at crazy resolutions you REALLY need to be using CF. Look up the benches and see how say 2 HD7770s push compared to your 7970 and you'll see you can get damned close without spending even half what you did.
But of course if you get a CF board you can wait until the 7970s hit the below $150 range (but in the future I'd avoid the x9xx cards, sure they are insanely fast but they are a lot rarer than the x8xx cards so the price never drops as far) and slap a second one to get totally insane-o frame rates. Nice thing about CF is you can buy cheaper cards and get equal or better performance.
And I have to say kudos to the Windows dev that thought it up, its fricking BRILLIANT and fixed one of the major problems I always had with Windows upgrades which was legacy software. With SxS if some older piece of software demands that an older version of a .DLL needs to be installed SxS instead reroutes it to the SxS directory so that at runtime that program "thinks" the old .DLL is installed when in reality its coming from SxS, its great when you have some older software that needs to be run. It also makes it trivial if you need to roll back an update for some reason, no more "please insert your XP Service Pack 3 disc now" kinda crap which is handy if you have a client that has boned his system.
So I personally would MUCH rather have SxS and give it some extra space than I would have to deal with programs having conflicts or refusing to run because X needs DLL rev Y and program B needs the same DLL to be at version Z.
Well he seemed to be implying that he had money issues and frankly the "legacy" drivers run great on Windows 7 and Windows 8 so I don't really see that as a problem. Hell I picked up an HD2400XT and slapped it in my GF's PC and it runs Windows 7 solid as hell and its not like you are gonna want Windows 8 on a non touchscreen device anyway.
But anybody worried about having "legacy" drivers should just pick up an HD7750, you can get those for less than $80 at Amazon and if they stick to their previous timelines that should get at least another 3 years worth of driver updates. Personally if the drivers are solid i have NO problem with them only putting out drivers if there is a bug to fix, putting out a monthly driver just to say you put out a driver is kinda dumb and they have already squeezed every drop of performance they are gonna get out of the 2xxx-5xxx cards at this point. I'm still gaming on an HD4850 and i have no problems with the latest games and the driver is solid as a rock under windows 7, no worries.
She is suddenly able to talk again, its the damnedest thing and all I get from docs is "Your guess is as good as mine" which is frustrating as hell but what can you do? Just enjoy these periods and hope they last, all I can do really.
See? That is what I'm saying, this whole "If I had $200+ to spare" doesn't really apply anymore, it really doesn't. The only reason to spend that kind of money is for ePeen bragging rights. Me personally I'm waiting for the HD7770 to hit the $70 mark (which I figure it will by this fall) that way i can get a couple and try the CF on my board but from what I've seen the HD7770 by itself is gonna smoke so it'll only be so I can say I got CF, not because i really need it.
I have to say congrats, I have heard of spelling nazis, and grammar nazis, never heard of math nazis before. And sorry if you don't like it but that is a really old southern expression and while some of our little sayings may not make perfect logic (for example I have never taken the temp of a welldigger's ass so i have no idea how cold it is) they are a part of our culture so they tend to stick around.
Dude what year is this? 1998? Who cares when you can get a TB drive for like $60? and my Win 7 install is a total of 27Gb and a LOT of that is WinSXS which is frankly brilliant, no more having programs write over each others common 'DLLs,
And what dock? Win 7 doesn't come with a dock, i think you are getting your OSes mixed up man. I personally have a dock on mine because i like rocketdock but that is a personal taste, and as far as looks go you can make it anything you want pretty much. i personally use Vista Black (the only thing I liked about Vista) on the gamer box and win 7 basic on the office system but if that isn't enough go get the 30 day trial of astonshell and you can make it look like anything from OSX to win9x.
Finally if all you care about is tiny size and squeezing every cycle out of the system? get a hold of Win 7 Tiny, it stomps even XP and a full install is like a gig and a half. Takes all of 3 minutes after install to turn back on UAC and there ya go, the increased security without any extra space, hell it even has aero if you want. Personally with 3TB of space i honestly don't care about a teeny tiny 27GB, I use more than that on temp files with the multitrack.
and you don't even want to get me started about Linux, its driver model is a fucking joke, NOBODY will touch that driver model, not BSD, Solaris, hell OS/2 has a better driver model than Linux. if you want to play bi-annual death march and google for fixes? Knock yourself out, me I've had Win 7 running since aug 09 and not a single driver failure, not a single crash, it just keeps going and going and going, year after year. Now THAT is what matters to me and I'm sorry but Linux isn't even up to Win2K in that regard and frankly won't be as long as Linus "I'm an arrogant asshole" Torvalds is at the helm. That man has stuck with the same shitty driver model he has had since the mid 90s, everybody else grew up, Torvalds didn't.
That would be true of Win 7, hell even Vista, but XP had a serious flaw you just can't easily fix, and that is the entire OS and ecosystem expecting you to be running as Admin 24/7/365 which is just BAD design friend.
With XP there are just too many programs, hell too many drivers, that expect admin and will choke and pitch a fit if not outright crash if you try to run as a limited user and even if you manage to get it working the number of permission pop ups will drive you nuts, it'll make Vista look quiet in comparison.
Look I get wanting to keep some of the old stuff, i really do, but XP is just waaaaay past its prime. its had patches on top of patches, 3 service packs, you can run a clean install for a week and then run something like CCleaner or Comodo system cleaner and find the registry already starting to pile up the orphan links and crap,its just not that good to begin with and now that hardware has passed it by (hell the $100 specials at a lot of places have more RAM than XP can handle without hacks) it really is time to let it go.
I mean for the love of Pete we are talking 14 fricking years by the time MSFT pulls the plug, in OS terms it might as well have come on 8-track.
Hell you should have come to me bro, old Hairy would have set you straight.
You see the trick with AMD/ATI is knowing what the card is made for and sticking with that. Take my GF for example, she watches movies, does a little video chat, plays FB games, so any of the low end chips, the 24xx,34xx,43xx, those all work great, solid as a rock.
Now for your mor games that aren't gonna be filling the sky with splosions? The x5xx and x6xx cards really do well there, again you just can't crank the AA and AF and expect it to run smooth, its more for your WoW type players. finally if you want to play anything with plenty of bling? then x7xx and x8xx are the cards for you, hell I'm still gaming on an HD4850 and it just rocks, I had the bling cranked to 11 in Just Cause II and I NEVER dropped below 37FPS in the demo runs, not once. in the actual game it runs even better, I have filled the screen with so many fireballs and pieces of debris i couldn't even see where the road i was driving on was.
But while I can't comment on all of your games I have NOLF 1 and 2 and the youngest has Psyconauts and on these HD4850s? great, smooth as butter, and like I said look around, you can find those cards in the $35 range so its not like you have a real investment here. Good rule of thumb? stay a version or two behind, you'll save money while getting the most stable drivers. Like I said you can get the HD7750 for less than $80 at amazon, it beats the HD6850 cards in a lot of benches while pulling so little power that it can just run off the PCI-E bus, no external power required. I bet if you were to try one you'd see that all those games would just smoke, I've been selling them to customers for a couple of months now and nothing but happy results.
But if you got the HD4250 there is your problem, that was one of those "turbo-cache" cards that both ATI and Nvidia experimented with where they would put a shitty little amount of RAM on the card and supplement it with system RAM. There is a GOOD reason why neither makes those anymore, they found trying to keep two different RAMs running at different speeds synched equaled a crashy mess, which is what it sounds like you went through. if you are gonna be doing more than FB games I wouldn't recommend anything lower than an HD4650, but as i said with the HD4850 at $35 and the HD7750 at $75 there really is no point in getting any smaller than that.
Thank you and I do NOT sound like a damned 13 year old, watch any of those god damned reality shows featuring teens to see how they talk like fricking aliens.
And the P3 was EASILY the most popular CPU when XP was released by a long shot, at the time i stayed pretty damned close to the cutting edge and i had a P3 running at a blistering 1100MHz. The office boxes i was working on at the time were new enough they had WinME stickers on them (needless to say I got a LOT of work wiping ME for XP) and the average was between 650MHz to 900MHz depending on the OEM line and RAM was 128Mb pretty much across the board.
I know people were shocked as hell to see mine had a full 512Mb because that was practically unheard of at the time but I got lucky and knew a guy that could get me RAM at cost and it was still a pretty penny for 2 256Mb chips my friend.
Man the sad part to me is there was all these great OSes that did NOT lose because MSFT was Darth Vader but because the ones owning the OS didn't have a damned brain. VMS? great, BeOS? great, OS/2? great, I ran all three at one time and when they were in their prime they were better than what MSFT had out at the time by a pretty big margin but they were just handled sooooo badly.
That is why I have this theory that so far has proven true time and time again, that all that "EEE" and "shoot 'em in the head" bullshit by MSFT was just bravado covering up what the REAL source of their fortune was, which could be summed up in "And then the other guy did something REALLY dumb". You look into the history of VMS,BeOS,OS/2 and time and again you'll see them do just boneheaded shit that opened the door wide and gave MSFT a free pass.
But I wouldn't be surprised if there is still a LOT of backend that behaves like VMS, guys here can say what they want but NTFS is pretty damned solid and most of the early NT work was all Cutler and the man knew his stuff.
Dude you ain't telling me nothing, my ex was a phone operator that sold vacation packages and I swear I would be sitting there waiting for her to get off work and I'd hear over her headset "Hey yuse guys gotta hear this gal talk, she sounds like them gone with the wind chicks!" or something to that effect, I swear she made more sales up north strictly because they loved to hear her thick southern belle voice.
But I wouldn't live up north on a bet, I have heard just about every accent known to man and yankee accents are just grating on the ear, its waaay too clipped and fast, not musical at all. I can deal with west coast, FLA, but yankee accents to me are like fingernails on a chalkboard so i don't know how you stand it.
Exactly, I might as well have said "And the fleegal goes to the flimjam" for all the good simply saying "its on somebody else's PC" would be.
I mean do ANY of you know how many God damned times i have to give the "CPU,Memory,HDD" speech? I'd say to this very day you probably have a good 80% of computer users that has at least one, if not all three of those WRONG and will do something like ask me to add memory when they meant HDD or think that adding a bigger HDD will make their PC faster.
So I don't think the guys here really realize how little people know about a PC, to them its a magical black box that only exists when its on and disappears when its off. Don't even get me started on the whole "legal,grey area,illegal" thing because you don't know how many people think if they type the name of a movie in the theater and it pops up with a link on Google? why it HAS to be okay, why Google says so!...facepalm.
Riiight, and maybe you can pay a couple hundred bucks so i can sit around for a few hours giving lectures to all these people that can't even tell the difference between a keyboard port and a mouse? thought so.
High minded idealism is all well and good when you make 6 figures and have a college degree, i work with ordinary folks, the guys you probably wouldn't give the time to on a bet, and they don't have the hours to spare nor do i have the hours to give teaching how fricking DNS works when simply warning them about the dot three can kill a LOT of phishing dead.
Dude pick up an ATI HD4850, you can pick those up for like $35 if you look around. I am running one and I can tell you all my games run GREAT in Win 7, I can fire up Just Cause II and do the whole "cool guys don't look at explosions" bit, Batman AA and AC run great, the Borderland series run fine, its no problem.
If you want something faster and have a little bit more green an HD7750 runs close to the 6850s while using half the power and again runs great in windows 7. XP is nearly 14 years old man, hell it can't even take a full 3GB of RAM if you have a decent amount of VRAM on your GPU, if my GF's Pentium D can run Win 7 (slapped in an HD2400XT,cost a grand total of $9) then so can your PC.
A final bit of advice, go to Starmicro and pick up a dual core if that board will support it, hell I've had pretty decent luck getting AM2 boards to take the MOR Athlon 64 X2s even if the board's chiplist don't show one and their chips are cheap enough you can afford to take the chance. I've been buying from those guys for years, great bunch and they'll have a chip for just about any socket. You'd be surprised how little money it takes to turn your system into a pretty kicking Windows 7 machine, and the increased security and extra features are WELL worth the upgrade. When I use XP now I feel like I've gone back to Win95, how I lived without jumplists and breadcrumbs is beyond me. Well worth a few bucks friend.