Depends on the school district honestly, we ended up pulling my two boys for home schooling because the local public school is WASP central and if you aren't WASP you might as well be a nigger at a Klan rally for how well you'll be treated. with one Catholic and the other gay? Yeah that place was a shithole for them. The last straw was when an English teacher dedicated her whole damned class for giving a lecture on "Idolaters and Sodomites", yes we SHOULD have sued that place out of existence but my sister was fighting a losing battle with cancer and honestly we just couldn't take any more fucking stress so we told them to go to hell and pulled them out.
So with all the articles on bullying and how even the teachers have been busted encouraging the shit you'd think folks wouldn't paint the GED with such a broad brush, there are a hell of a lot of people who quit public school NOT because they don't want to learn but because the school is a hellhole and the parents can't afford to move. I know I wouldn't wish our school district on a non WASP if they were my worst enemy, its bad enough the black folks all self segregate so their kids don't have to go to "McWhitey" as they call it because all non WASPs are treated like dirt there.
And the sad part is MSFT had this shit ready to go and actually gaining share more than half a decade ago until Ballmer killed it for a lame iTunes ripoff because God fucking forbid MSFT do anything other than copy Apple under his watch.
Fricking playsforsure was BRILLIANT, you could use ANY player, from that $20 thumbstick to that $400 PMP, and you could get your tunes from any one of a dozen sites thus keeping prices low and competition high. Most sites gave you so many MP3s free and clear per month, usually enough that at the buck a song iTunes set as the price you were getting the service for basically free, and instead of having to have Internet 24/7 to use it you only needed to hook up once a month to get another load of tunes, which you could choose your own or pick one of a ton of pre-compiled playlists of everything from top 40 - metal, whatever.
if this turns out to be a hit I really hope somebody on the board at MSFT just walks up and bitchslaps Ballmer's fat ass, i really do, because frankly they could have had this but BETTER in practically every way, they already had massive support and the whole infrastructure already up and running, but yet again Ballmer snatched defeat from the jaws of victory because it wouldn't make MSFT into an ersatz Apple. Fucking idiot.
And having dealt with crazy paranoid stoners more than once can you guess what is gonna be the outcome? A shitload of dead birds as the paranoid drug runner takes out every bird in the sky "just in case"..
Why don't you tell me I'm secretly an AMD Ninja like the Linux Loonie that swears I must be at a call center in Redmond while you are at it? And the fact that you have to heat your place 8 months a year...and? you HONESTLY are gonna sit here and argue that using a power piggie is CHEAPER than running an efficient heater to stay warm? Really? Sure you can't be that fricking obtuse to the numbers that a P4 uses, that would be like saying you can move to Alaska and save money on your heating bill by dumpster diving a bunch of P4s, that is beyond retarded.
I recommend the E350 because in this case, which was talking about an office filled with P4s, you get 1.-A faster CPU, 2.- A faster GPU, and 3.- You can run 4 of them for the cost of a single Prescott or Cedar Mill P4. Nobody was comparing this to Phenom triples or C2Qs or anything else BUT the Pentium 4. But hey if you want to toss money at a slow as shit long piped P4? Don't let me stop you, fool and their money and all that.
Hell all you had to do was put your hand behind a P4 tower to see what a power pig it was, the things would be just blasting VERY hot air out the back, even when idling!
You could even take the supposedly "low end" like the Celeron and the AMD Duron/Sempron and the Celery would just belch out heat constantly whereas a Duron would be cool to the touch. I have a Sempron from the netburst era I'm gonna have to finally change out because of XP going EOL and even jammed into a corner it never overheats because the Sempron just doesn't use squat compared to a netburst chip.
Sadly I would argue AMD has done the same mistake with their newest "bulldozer based" chips in that they focused on number of cores and clock speed above all and now have 125+ watt chips that blow through power and belch heat while needing a GHz more speed to top the previous gen, just like how Intel had to rig the compiler against the P3 to make the P4 look good. This is why I've been sticking with the Stars based chips like Athlon and Phenom II, they don't just blast through power and belch heat like the new BD based chips.
Actually I'm a socialist that leads communist, I just fucking hate reverse robin hood scams which is ALL the crap&trade shit is! All you are doing is the classic "We have to do something!" fallacy which always ends up not doing a God damned thing but letting a few guys at the top make out like fucking bandits without actually fixing shit, its another bridge to nowhere, another regulation that will have 40 fucking loopholes written in before it gets to the floor, its fucking bullshit.
If you are gonna do that shit, why not just send your money to a televangelist that says Jesus is gonna fix it? You'll be doing the same thing, neither will fix jack shit, both will allow a few at the top to make out like bandits, and at least most of the preachers do try to keep the fucking smug levels down, whereas Gore and friends are douches to the 1 billionth power.
If he was real and honest and walked the walk like Ed Begley Jr, who lives in a modest house and drives electric cars because he doesn't want to ruin the environment? I would be 100% behind him but he doesn't, he is just another fat fuck sitting in a limo stuffing his fat face telling YOU that YOU need to use less while he blasts the AC and throws his wrappers out the window. Fuck him and fuck anybody that supports the whole "do as I say, not as I do" bullshit because YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, nothing real will get done as long as these snake oil scammers are selling their bullshit.
I can't remember which one I had, may have been Sega CD, but the soundtrack caused me to wreck more than the enemies! It had Kid Rock before he became famous and a bunch of other killer tracks (The Kid Rock track was "Somebody's gotta feel this" which kicks ass at 110MPH).
But what made it great was like I said, nothing to make you lose concentration on the road, you could switch music tracks, you could swing your weapon, hit the booster...that was pretty much it. This let you just lock onto the road and zone out and enjoy the shit out of the game. if they add all the targeting crap like GTA drive by missions I know I won't buy it because that ain't Road Rash, that is GTA which is lame. I want killer tunes, fast speed, simple controls, THAT is Road Rash!
No I'm not, board $70, 4GB of RAM $12, PCI to IDE Adapter $10...final total $92 shipped. And I noticed you pulled numbers out of your ass, I provided links showing where you can find the E350 at the price cited. I seriously doubt you are setting up Intel shit except maybe an Atom for $100.
IF you know what you are doing and IF you tune the system to the chip? Hell yeah they can be nice, I have an E350 netbook with Win 7 and thanks to tweaking the shit out of it (if you haven't tried "Brazos Tweaker" look it up) both hardware and software wise? yeah I can play games like Torchlight II on mine as well.
But obviously you have NEVER had to deal with a "Worst Buy Special" because words like "tuned" and "optimized" simply aren't in their vocabulary. First you NEVER get a disc, only a "restore partition" that is as loaded down with crapware as the initial install, they'll have so much shit running in the background an A-series quad would struggle, you get the slowest hard drive and memory they can find, and when it comes to APUs they don't set up a damned thing, nothing is using the APU.
So don't get me wrong, I like the AMD Bobcats, I really do, hell if often replace old P4 boards with Bobcats as it'll boost the system performance while saving a shitload of power, but giving Worst Buy these chips just ruins the experience, its like handing them Celery laptops in that by the time they are done piling shit on them its gonna run like shit.
Dude I'm with ya, I use a Coolermaster N520, in fact I switched my whole family over to N520s because those copper bases and copper heatpipes make a BIG fricking difference when it comes to temps. I don't OC simply because Turbocore in my 1035T really is enough and I live in the south so you have to watch how hot you get things if you don't want to live in an oven but I can see using it to extend the life.
But that really wasn't what we were talking about, the guy was talking about wanting/needing 10GHz CPUs and I was pointing out that the hundreds of millions who buy PCs each year? Can't use all the cycles of even a 7 year old Phenom I quad, they really aren't gonna pay a thousand a chip to get 10Ghz chips made, there really isn't enough people just slamming the shit out of CPUs to make that reality. Hell I have built gaming rigs using $45 Athlon quads and ya know what? they just blow through games like they were nothing.
I had a friend who had gone through a rough divorce tell me "Build me something that will game as cheap as you can" which I found intriguing as hell, I had never actually tried to build a super duper cheap GAMING system before so here is what he ended up with: Athlon X3 at 3.3GHz (figured we could try a core unlock later, so far hasn't needed one) with 4GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD, and an HD4850 we picked up for like $37 off of Geeks and Win 7 HP. How well does it game? Pretty damned well actually, Batman:AA, Just Cause II, Saints Row III, it plays them all on a 37 inch 1080P TV and it never seems to drop below 30FPS. And this was a machine that cost like $350 all told, so are you REALLY surprised that people aren't buying the latest and greatest?
Oh bullshit, solar panels aren't even 50% efficient right now and if you sit down and do the figures without mommy government tilting the scales with tax breaks and other bullshit? It will NEVER break even, it won't. get rid of every tax break on oil and coal? they WILL make money, do the same for solar? DEAD, its dead as a doornail. Don't get me wrong, that does NOT mean we shouldn't be spending on R&D, just the opposite, i think we need to spend like crazy on R&D so that we'll be the ones to find the breakthroughs on renewables but right now? Solar don't cut it.
And your "tax" idea sadly is just bullshit because it ALWAYS leads to the same place, lobbyist buys congress, gets breaks passed for THEIR country, you are right back in the same boat only you just made things worse and gave scammers more money, congrats. Don't believe me? Then WTF is China doing with most favored nation status? They do every nasty thing in the book to their people yet they are put on the same footing as Canada? WTF? Of course we ALL know the real reason why that is, too many rich making money off of disposable Chinese workers, too many lobbyists making out checks. fuck man the worst polluting coal plants in this country have exemptions from every God damned reg because they bribed the shit out of the politicians! I wish I still had the link as somebody actually got the owner of those plants cornered and the fucker bragged that the reason he can do WTF ever he wants is because "I can pick up the phone at 3AM and call the POTUS and he says "sir" to me"
so I'm sorry but until you get the scammers like Gore out of the system you might as well just send your paycheck to a televangelist, its the same thing, one says he is gonna save the afterlife, one says he's gonna save the world, both are completely full of shit. Just read this to see why that don't work because those guys are already ahead of you, they will have 400 loopholes already set up before the thing even gets to a fucking vote. either you be a bastard and say "this bullshit stops now" or you just accept all you are doing is giving your wallet to a televangelist who is telling you what you want to hear, sadly that is pretty much your choices friend.
Are you THIS fucking stupid, or are you such a flag waver you don't give a fuck if you get assraped as long as they wear the right t-shirt? Read the God damned link the ONLY things that will get passed if you support AGW right now is FUCKING SCAMS, you will do NOTHING, not a God damned thing, to lower carbon by a single fucking pint, ALL YOU WILL DO is make fat fucks like Al Gore rich!
If your idea of "doing something" is giving money to scammers, fuck don't let me stop you, just send all your money to the nearest televangelist and call it a fucking day. Hell you might as well, its the same bullshit, just a different wrapper.
That is what I thought when I saw gun targeting...NO, FUCK NO, you are missing the whole point, what made that FUN was that it was simple, you could grab a chain or a bat and whack the other guy or kick him into traffic, but because they kept it simple you could still just race and win.
Nooo...it was because many of us that was for actually FIXING the problem saw the AGW platform hijacked by scammers who don't give a flying fuck about the climate or the planet, they just want to fleece you for themselves and their friends.
You watch me catch hell for pissing on their "dear leader" but Al Gore is the fucking worst of the lot, he actually has the giant brass balls to say farting around in a one man Lear jet or having a fleet of SUVs is CARBON NEUTRAL because he pays HIMSELF from his own little carbon bullshit company, and to top it off it lowers his fucking taxes to boot! That would be like moving money from my left to right pocket and not only demanding you tell me how wonderful i am for doing that but getting to take the money off my taxes for "moving fees". What a fucking scammer!
So many of us have gotten sick of the "don't do as I do, do as I say" and fucking scamming that has become the AGW platform. Its one thing if you have someone like Ed Begley JR who walks the walk and does without himself to make the world a better place, quite another when you have a fat fuck in a limo saying "You fucking peasants better tighten your belts" while he stuffs his fat fucking face. Fuck them, may they all fucking drown in the rising seas.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, its pulled out their posterior and when we are talking about basically killing the already half dead economies of most of the western world (Because China and India have already said we can take cap & trade and shove it up our asses and the "ZOMFG invisible hand free trade!" drones will NEVER let you just block trade with them) on numbers supposedly showing you what will happen decades in advance? Yeah I call shenanigans.
Look we ALL want less pollution but to actually achieve that some VERY nasty choices are gonna HAVE to happen. You will HAVE to cut off trade with the third world until they pass environmental laws equal or better than your own, you will HAVE to add trillions to the debt to build the infrastructure to support hybrids, not to mention billions on a "people's car/truck" that would be something like a hybrid diesel/electric so you can wean the country off of fossil fuels onto something like carbon capture diesel, and you will HAVE to get the NIMBYs to STFU and build new nuclear plants because none of our renewable choices will even cover what we use now, much less power even 25% of the cars on the road.
So these are all very hard choices that will have to be made, scams like cap & trade are just reverse robin hood by another name and won't lower greenhouses gases by a single pint, hell if anything they'll RAISE them because it will encourage more factories to be built within countries with lax pollution laws since there is zero penalty for just throwing it on a boat and shipping it to the west. Anyway you slice it people to make a REAL difference...its gonna fucking hurt. If done right it should hurt the rich just as much if not more than the poor (because if you take 100 million from a billionaire he isn't going hungry, take the same percentage from someone on minimum wage and they may end up homeless), it should hurt young and old, its gonna hurt all the way around.
But until you can get rid of the scammers, Al Gore on the left and the oil lobby on the right, and get someone willing to make those hard choices? Well its all fricking moot anyway isn't it?
Well considering its an OS with less than 1% installed base and has been flatline for years? Yeah i'm betting most wouldn't get that. Why not just throw in a BeOS joke while you are at it? Be about as relevant when its an article on gaming.
Sorry but the fact that Intel is STILL rigging their compiler and hasn't gotten busted for antitrust pisses me off enough I've been AMD exclusive for the past 5 years. Besides both the first gen Phenoms and the Thubans (turned off in the Phenom II because Vista was retarded and would fuck up if left on) can drop unused cores into low power idle mode so honestly they really aren't bad at all on power, just don't put Vista on them as the core drops freak Vista out and it'll start dropping loads onto the unused cores which kills the point.
Besides they cripple the Celerons too damned much, they kill the advanced powersaving features and kill too much cache, an Intel chip without cache is gimped all to hell. You compare the performance of that Celery Dual with a Phenom quad or hell even an Athlon Quad (which just FYI but Tiger has the OEM Athlon quads for $45 now) and you get a lot better performance for a negligible power increase. of course if you really are all about power saving the E350 uses less than 20w under load and can be had for $70 shipped. Sorry but bang for the buck is still firmly in the AMD camp.
Thanks, and for those that say "Oh and E-Series doesn't stack up against a COre2Duo"? Here is the Passmark scores which the E350 scores 776, the Intel C2D T2400 at 1.83GHz scores a 789, so pretty damned close to the first gens. If you can score an E450 they score neck and neck with the 2GHz T2450 so again its neck and neck only the price is a HELL of a lot different.
And to the AC that says "I like AMD"? I like bang for the buck and hate corporate douchebaggery, intel STILL rigs their compiler (while AMD uses a fork of GCC and hands out the code) and if you'll show me where I can get a C2D WITH the heatsink AND the motherboard for $70 shipped? be happy to consider it. With the E350 you can take an old Pentium 4 box and turn it into a power sipper with better performance for less than $110, and that is with you buying a PCI to IDE adapter if the system still has IDE drives, if it has SATA you can do it for less than $95. I'm sorry but you can't beat that, you save money, save cooling, and save power, while getting better performance...what's not to like?
I hate to break the news to ya dude, but your niche? Maybe 3% of the market MAYBE. There just isn't enough of you to make the billions required to make a 10GHz CPU a reality. Hell how many even OC or use liquid cooling? if it was more than 5% I'd be surprised.
You simply can't generate enough business to sustain the market, I'm sure you probably buy the latest and greatest the second it comes out but most folks? Its just not worth it. Hell I multitask like mad and I can't slam this $100 6 core.
Dude do NOT save that P4, the amount of juice you waste feeding that beast makes it not worth the trouble. Since you like Tiger kits (which I do to, they are fricking fantastic) you should look at the $130 E350 Mini which just uses 16w under load while giving you a dual core APU that is great for everyday tasks. Since you already have the box you can get just the board at Amazon for like $70, slap in a $12 RAM stick and the system will pay for itself just on the amount of power you save and waste heat you don't have to deal with.
I've been turning old P4 office boxes into E350 boxes and its quite popular with the SMBs, better performance than the P4 at not even a fifth the power. I like 'em so much if I ever get a few days "me time" so I can take my time and set my software up the way I like I'll be ripping the guts out my old Sempron nettop at the shop and replacing it for an E350, I'll get a nice performance boost while using even less power than the Sempron, its cheap, great for basic tasks, and low power, its really a sweet little unit.
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Well then I'm sorry but your company is retarded. The Pentium 4 was a power blowing space heating piece of shit, its the one system where I tell folks "That has GOT to go" and honestly today you'd have to be an idiot to keep one. You can get a mini based on the AMD E350 ready to go and that gives you the performance of a first gen Core2Duo at 1.7GHz while using less power than the fans in one of those P4s, in fact you could probably replace 5 of the P4s with E350s and you'd be using less juice than 1 of the P4s did under load while having better performance.
Now as far as the laptops and the abortion known as Windows 8 AKA "LOL appstores tablets touch"? On those 2 points I agree completely, I have several customers using 3 and 4 year old laptops and they are just fine, they do the job quite well. Hell I have a 3 year old E350 netbook and for the kinds of jobs I have when I'm on a service call, as well as my personal websurfing and video watching? Works wonderfully, hell it even still gets 4 hours on the original battery.
So while I agree on the laptops and avoiding the Win 8 STD keeping P4s is just fucking retarded, if they were first gen core or even older Athlons? yeah I could see it, but there really is a reason why nothing Intel makes uses netburst and that is because it was simply a shitty power pig and the sooner those things are recycled the better.
My condolences. That is one thing I should probably give credit to my ex for, we had a nice little arrangement where I didn't go out buying clothes without her input and she didn't buy tech stuff without mine. Made my life a HELL of a lot easier when i could just say "Yeah, not gonna happen, that's a buggy POS" and that was the end of that. To bad the rest of her family turned into the soap opera from hell because we personally got along great, it was the constant drama being dumped on us that made it not worth the effort.
Good luck on Win 8, I hope you have a HIGH tolerance for frustration...you think I'm joking but I'm really REALLY not, that damned thing has "dumbed down" and "designed by committee" written all over it. Remember how before you just pushed F8 to get to safe mode? Now its Alt+F8 and it will only catch every other time and you have to go through three PAGES worth of bullshit you don't want JUST to get to safe mode. I shit you not, I swear to God its the truth. Everything that could be done with one or two clicks of the mouse now take going through multiple sub-menus because the OS is a patronizing little shit that thinks you are too fucking stupid to do anything, nothing follows logic and convention, oh and did I mention the ADS? That's right a shitload of the "apps" (God I HATE that word) put on there by MSFT have fricking ads built in. Because its not enough you paid for the OS or the damned thing tries to guide you to their shitty appstore, nope gotta milk your dumb consumer ass for every penny they can...greedy shits.
Trust me I could go on all day just naming shit that is stupid or patronizing in that damned thing, let me end by saying I'd rather be stuck for a year on a dual boot with WinME and WinVista than have to take that POS for a single month. At least with WinME if you did enough stripping you could get it mostly stable and with winVista you could kill UAC and add a few tweaks and it would be usable, Windows 8 is like watching a naked Ballmer do pelvic thrusts with a WinPhone for a g-string, its just offensive and pathetic no matter how you try to cover it.
This is why I never understood how anybody could bitch about MSFT patches. I mean do you have ANY idea how many times I updated my laptop or desktop when I was running Linux and had an update break something? More than I could possibly count, wireless and sound the worse though, I don't think I ever had sound AND wireless come through completely unscathed once, one or the other would ALWAYS get broken. And this was bog standard hardware too, nothing exotic.
Considering the amount of hardware that Windows runs on and software that runs on it? Love 'em or hate 'em everybody should give them credit for this because its fricking amazing how little breakage occurs with their updates. And when there IS breakage like in TFA it is nearly always some weird corner case, like in this case a funky kernel hooking driver (which how many times has MSFT asked companies not to use weird kernel hooks for precisely this reason?) which went nuts most likely because it expects the kernel to be X size or behave in X manner which it doesn't now. which if they would have just used the APIs frankly they wouldn't have had to care, but hey what can ya do.
Actually, and you are gonna laugh your ass off as it'll probably sound like a sales pitch but YOU sir need to replace those boards with AMD E350s.
You see 10 years old means Pentium 4 which was the POWER PIGGIE FROM HELL because Intel just quit giving a shit about anything but clock speed. the amount of power those suckers just blast through is just nuts, it truly is. You can get AMD E350 boards for $70, pair that with a $12 4GB RAM stick and a little $7 PCI to IDE board (since I bet most of your stuff is IDE) and frankly you will use LESS power when the system is at full load than the fans in the box use when the P4 is at idle. I am not shitting you, before some jackass stole my kill-a-watt out of the shop I measured and just the fans plugged into the PSU was something like 24 watts and the board maxed out was only between 18 and 19. Of course when I added the P4 holy crap, that thing was blowing through enough juice ( Prescott P4 with HT, 2.8GHz IIRC) that you could run FOUR of the E350s for the cost of ONE of the P4s.
So you see you are in one of the few situations where I recommend an upgrade, you can keep your OS as the E350 supports XP-Win 8 no problem, as far as performance the E350 APU scores about the same as a 1.7GHz first gen Core2Duo which is of course a hell of a lot better than the long piped P4, and finally the electric bill will just drop like a stone. I have done this conversion for several businesses and they just love the hell out of it as you don't even need any fans, just the fan in the PSU is enough to keep it cool so they are just whisper quiet and like I said the next month's electric bill you WILL notice the difference.
But I wouldn't say either is "resting" because even their previous gen chips are just so insanely bad ass that if you have a chip made after...ohhh lets say late 06/early 07? The differences will be minor unless you are just slamming the dogshit out of the chip. I mean take dad's quad, its 2.2GHz so plenty of speed, it can drop the speed on unused cores so the power usage is actually quite good, the systems has 4GB of RAM and can hold 8GB of DDR 2 if he needs it (which he don't, hell I game and have 8GB and most of mine is used for caching) and it has a TB of HDD space which is extreme overkill for my dad. hell even the IGP is something like a HD4300 which I actually played the original Bioshock just fine on an HD4300 while waiting for my GPU to come in so for movie watching or checking the video cameras I set up at his shop its just overkill.
As I have said here before five years ago my low end machine I was selling was a Phenom I X3 or X4 with 4GB and a 500GB HDD and an HD3xxx or HD4xxx IGP...seriously how many users are gonna even stress that out? Hell I picked up my aging aunt an offlease PC the other day, she got a Core2Duo with 3GB of RAM,250GB HDD and Win 7 for IIRC it was $187 shipped, think she will slam that system anytime soon? She scans family photos with her little scanner and plays her little flash games so I seriously doubt that system will be hitting more than 40% anytime soon, its just total overkill.
Actually? And as much as I HATE THAT STUPID DUMBED DOWN WIN 8 %$&%$^$...I gotta be honest and...TFA is pretty much right on the money. hell my AMD netbook is 3 years old, runs great, I was the guy that HAD to build a PC every year for gaming, but I'm up to a 6 core with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space, what more do I need here? Games are just now starting to really use duals and triples, most games won't even stress a triple so half my cores are sitting idle or doing other stuff, so why do i need more?
This really hit me over the head about 2 years ago which is why I'm doing more HTPCs and security cams now, and that was when the Phenom II quads first got REALLY cheap. You see my dad is the perfect "test case" if you will for your "bog standard PC user" because he is as MOR as you can get, he surfs, watches movies, uses chat and webmail, runs his little office software, its about as bog standard of a use case as one can get. So I start seeing the new quads below $100 and I think "Hmmm, its been awhile since i built dad that Phenom I quad, maybe its time to build a new system" so I set up performance logging and came back 2 weeks later to see, what did I find?
45%. No shit, we are talking a 2.2GHz first gen Phenom I quad and he ONLY was able to get to 45% usage and looking closer at what was going on it looks like a browser hang caused that spike, if I remove that? he's barely hitting 30% and that is when he is going full bore. I thought "Well yeah, its a quad, surely that older dual core i built for the shop has to be ready for the pasture"...nope, biggest spikes around 70% but only when he is loading something up and after that its nothing, 20s and 30s during background tasks.
So it all comes down to one simple fact...The MHz war was a bubble. I would argue what we are seeing now is NOT "The death of the PC" anymore than the housing bubble popping meant the death of houses, its just a return to a more normal state. before laptops were getting replaced every other year and desktops around every 3 and now we are seeing laptops going 5-6 years and desktops that can easily go 8 or 9, I mean that Phenom I quad my dad has is circa 07 so its already at 6 years and its not being stressed.
It all comes down to both AMD and Intel building chips that are just so insanely powerful that folks can't come up with enough useful work for them to do, certainly not enough to max 'em out. Of course Windows 8 being Satan spawn certainly isn't helping matters any but there are still plenty of places selling win 7 systems right now but if your system is already a multicore seriously what more do you need?
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Depends on the school district honestly, we ended up pulling my two boys for home schooling because the local public school is WASP central and if you aren't WASP you might as well be a nigger at a Klan rally for how well you'll be treated. with one Catholic and the other gay? Yeah that place was a shithole for them. The last straw was when an English teacher dedicated her whole damned class for giving a lecture on "Idolaters and Sodomites", yes we SHOULD have sued that place out of existence but my sister was fighting a losing battle with cancer and honestly we just couldn't take any more fucking stress so we told them to go to hell and pulled them out.
So with all the articles on bullying and how even the teachers have been busted encouraging the shit you'd think folks wouldn't paint the GED with such a broad brush, there are a hell of a lot of people who quit public school NOT because they don't want to learn but because the school is a hellhole and the parents can't afford to move. I know I wouldn't wish our school district on a non WASP if they were my worst enemy, its bad enough the black folks all self segregate so their kids don't have to go to "McWhitey" as they call it because all non WASPs are treated like dirt there.
And the sad part is MSFT had this shit ready to go and actually gaining share more than half a decade ago until Ballmer killed it for a lame iTunes ripoff because God fucking forbid MSFT do anything other than copy Apple under his watch.
Fricking playsforsure was BRILLIANT, you could use ANY player, from that $20 thumbstick to that $400 PMP, and you could get your tunes from any one of a dozen sites thus keeping prices low and competition high. Most sites gave you so many MP3s free and clear per month, usually enough that at the buck a song iTunes set as the price you were getting the service for basically free, and instead of having to have Internet 24/7 to use it you only needed to hook up once a month to get another load of tunes, which you could choose your own or pick one of a ton of pre-compiled playlists of everything from top 40 - metal, whatever.
if this turns out to be a hit I really hope somebody on the board at MSFT just walks up and bitchslaps Ballmer's fat ass, i really do, because frankly they could have had this but BETTER in practically every way, they already had massive support and the whole infrastructure already up and running, but yet again Ballmer snatched defeat from the jaws of victory because it wouldn't make MSFT into an ersatz Apple. Fucking idiot.
And having dealt with crazy paranoid stoners more than once can you guess what is gonna be the outcome? A shitload of dead birds as the paranoid drug runner takes out every bird in the sky "just in case"..
Why don't you tell me I'm secretly an AMD Ninja like the Linux Loonie that swears I must be at a call center in Redmond while you are at it? And the fact that you have to heat your place 8 months a year...and? you HONESTLY are gonna sit here and argue that using a power piggie is CHEAPER than running an efficient heater to stay warm? Really? Sure you can't be that fricking obtuse to the numbers that a P4 uses, that would be like saying you can move to Alaska and save money on your heating bill by dumpster diving a bunch of P4s, that is beyond retarded.
I recommend the E350 because in this case, which was talking about an office filled with P4s, you get 1.-A faster CPU, 2.- A faster GPU, and 3.- You can run 4 of them for the cost of a single Prescott or Cedar Mill P4. Nobody was comparing this to Phenom triples or C2Qs or anything else BUT the Pentium 4. But hey if you want to toss money at a slow as shit long piped P4? Don't let me stop you, fool and their money and all that.
Hell all you had to do was put your hand behind a P4 tower to see what a power pig it was, the things would be just blasting VERY hot air out the back, even when idling!
You could even take the supposedly "low end" like the Celeron and the AMD Duron/Sempron and the Celery would just belch out heat constantly whereas a Duron would be cool to the touch. I have a Sempron from the netburst era I'm gonna have to finally change out because of XP going EOL and even jammed into a corner it never overheats because the Sempron just doesn't use squat compared to a netburst chip.
Sadly I would argue AMD has done the same mistake with their newest "bulldozer based" chips in that they focused on number of cores and clock speed above all and now have 125+ watt chips that blow through power and belch heat while needing a GHz more speed to top the previous gen, just like how Intel had to rig the compiler against the P3 to make the P4 look good. This is why I've been sticking with the Stars based chips like Athlon and Phenom II, they don't just blast through power and belch heat like the new BD based chips.
Actually I'm a socialist that leads communist, I just fucking hate reverse robin hood scams which is ALL the crap&trade shit is! All you are doing is the classic "We have to do something!" fallacy which always ends up not doing a God damned thing but letting a few guys at the top make out like fucking bandits without actually fixing shit, its another bridge to nowhere, another regulation that will have 40 fucking loopholes written in before it gets to the floor, its fucking bullshit.
If you are gonna do that shit, why not just send your money to a televangelist that says Jesus is gonna fix it? You'll be doing the same thing, neither will fix jack shit, both will allow a few at the top to make out like bandits, and at least most of the preachers do try to keep the fucking smug levels down, whereas Gore and friends are douches to the 1 billionth power.
If he was real and honest and walked the walk like Ed Begley Jr, who lives in a modest house and drives electric cars because he doesn't want to ruin the environment? I would be 100% behind him but he doesn't, he is just another fat fuck sitting in a limo stuffing his fat face telling YOU that YOU need to use less while he blasts the AC and throws his wrappers out the window. Fuck him and fuck anybody that supports the whole "do as I say, not as I do" bullshit because YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, nothing real will get done as long as these snake oil scammers are selling their bullshit.
I can't remember which one I had, may have been Sega CD, but the soundtrack caused me to wreck more than the enemies! It had Kid Rock before he became famous and a bunch of other killer tracks (The Kid Rock track was "Somebody's gotta feel this" which kicks ass at 110MPH).
But what made it great was like I said, nothing to make you lose concentration on the road, you could switch music tracks, you could swing your weapon, hit the booster...that was pretty much it. This let you just lock onto the road and zone out and enjoy the shit out of the game. if they add all the targeting crap like GTA drive by missions I know I won't buy it because that ain't Road Rash, that is GTA which is lame. I want killer tunes, fast speed, simple controls, THAT is Road Rash!
No I'm not, board $70, 4GB of RAM $12, PCI to IDE Adapter $10...final total $92 shipped. And I noticed you pulled numbers out of your ass, I provided links showing where you can find the E350 at the price cited. I seriously doubt you are setting up Intel shit except maybe an Atom for $100.
IF you know what you are doing and IF you tune the system to the chip? Hell yeah they can be nice, I have an E350 netbook with Win 7 and thanks to tweaking the shit out of it (if you haven't tried "Brazos Tweaker" look it up) both hardware and software wise? yeah I can play games like Torchlight II on mine as well.
But obviously you have NEVER had to deal with a "Worst Buy Special" because words like "tuned" and "optimized" simply aren't in their vocabulary. First you NEVER get a disc, only a "restore partition" that is as loaded down with crapware as the initial install, they'll have so much shit running in the background an A-series quad would struggle, you get the slowest hard drive and memory they can find, and when it comes to APUs they don't set up a damned thing, nothing is using the APU.
So don't get me wrong, I like the AMD Bobcats, I really do, hell if often replace old P4 boards with Bobcats as it'll boost the system performance while saving a shitload of power, but giving Worst Buy these chips just ruins the experience, its like handing them Celery laptops in that by the time they are done piling shit on them its gonna run like shit.
Dude I'm with ya, I use a Coolermaster N520, in fact I switched my whole family over to N520s because those copper bases and copper heatpipes make a BIG fricking difference when it comes to temps. I don't OC simply because Turbocore in my 1035T really is enough and I live in the south so you have to watch how hot you get things if you don't want to live in an oven but I can see using it to extend the life.
But that really wasn't what we were talking about, the guy was talking about wanting/needing 10GHz CPUs and I was pointing out that the hundreds of millions who buy PCs each year? Can't use all the cycles of even a 7 year old Phenom I quad, they really aren't gonna pay a thousand a chip to get 10Ghz chips made, there really isn't enough people just slamming the shit out of CPUs to make that reality. Hell I have built gaming rigs using $45 Athlon quads and ya know what? they just blow through games like they were nothing.
I had a friend who had gone through a rough divorce tell me "Build me something that will game as cheap as you can" which I found intriguing as hell, I had never actually tried to build a super duper cheap GAMING system before so here is what he ended up with: Athlon X3 at 3.3GHz (figured we could try a core unlock later, so far hasn't needed one) with 4GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD, and an HD4850 we picked up for like $37 off of Geeks and Win 7 HP. How well does it game? Pretty damned well actually, Batman:AA, Just Cause II, Saints Row III, it plays them all on a 37 inch 1080P TV and it never seems to drop below 30FPS. And this was a machine that cost like $350 all told, so are you REALLY surprised that people aren't buying the latest and greatest?
Oh bullshit, solar panels aren't even 50% efficient right now and if you sit down and do the figures without mommy government tilting the scales with tax breaks and other bullshit? It will NEVER break even, it won't. get rid of every tax break on oil and coal? they WILL make money, do the same for solar? DEAD, its dead as a doornail. Don't get me wrong, that does NOT mean we shouldn't be spending on R&D, just the opposite, i think we need to spend like crazy on R&D so that we'll be the ones to find the breakthroughs on renewables but right now? Solar don't cut it.
And your "tax" idea sadly is just bullshit because it ALWAYS leads to the same place, lobbyist buys congress, gets breaks passed for THEIR country, you are right back in the same boat only you just made things worse and gave scammers more money, congrats. Don't believe me? Then WTF is China doing with most favored nation status? They do every nasty thing in the book to their people yet they are put on the same footing as Canada? WTF? Of course we ALL know the real reason why that is, too many rich making money off of disposable Chinese workers, too many lobbyists making out checks. fuck man the worst polluting coal plants in this country have exemptions from every God damned reg because they bribed the shit out of the politicians! I wish I still had the link as somebody actually got the owner of those plants cornered and the fucker bragged that the reason he can do WTF ever he wants is because "I can pick up the phone at 3AM and call the POTUS and he says "sir" to me"
so I'm sorry but until you get the scammers like Gore out of the system you might as well just send your paycheck to a televangelist, its the same thing, one says he is gonna save the afterlife, one says he's gonna save the world, both are completely full of shit. Just read this to see why that don't work because those guys are already ahead of you, they will have 400 loopholes already set up before the thing even gets to a fucking vote. either you be a bastard and say "this bullshit stops now" or you just accept all you are doing is giving your wallet to a televangelist who is telling you what you want to hear, sadly that is pretty much your choices friend.
Are you THIS fucking stupid, or are you such a flag waver you don't give a fuck if you get assraped as long as they wear the right t-shirt? Read the God damned link the ONLY things that will get passed if you support AGW right now is FUCKING SCAMS, you will do NOTHING, not a God damned thing, to lower carbon by a single fucking pint, ALL YOU WILL DO is make fat fucks like Al Gore rich!
If your idea of "doing something" is giving money to scammers, fuck don't let me stop you, just send all your money to the nearest televangelist and call it a fucking day. Hell you might as well, its the same bullshit, just a different wrapper.
That is what I thought when I saw gun targeting...NO, FUCK NO, you are missing the whole point, what made that FUN was that it was simple, you could grab a chain or a bat and whack the other guy or kick him into traffic, but because they kept it simple you could still just race and win.
Nooo...it was because many of us that was for actually FIXING the problem saw the AGW platform hijacked by scammers who don't give a flying fuck about the climate or the planet, they just want to fleece you for themselves and their friends.
You watch me catch hell for pissing on their "dear leader" but Al Gore is the fucking worst of the lot, he actually has the giant brass balls to say farting around in a one man Lear jet or having a fleet of SUVs is CARBON NEUTRAL because he pays HIMSELF from his own little carbon bullshit company, and to top it off it lowers his fucking taxes to boot! That would be like moving money from my left to right pocket and not only demanding you tell me how wonderful i am for doing that but getting to take the money off my taxes for "moving fees". What a fucking scammer!
So many of us have gotten sick of the "don't do as I do, do as I say" and fucking scamming that has become the AGW platform. Its one thing if you have someone like Ed Begley JR who walks the walk and does without himself to make the world a better place, quite another when you have a fat fuck in a limo saying "You fucking peasants better tighten your belts" while he stuffs his fat fucking face. Fuck them, may they all fucking drown in the rising seas.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, its pulled out their posterior and when we are talking about basically killing the already half dead economies of most of the western world (Because China and India have already said we can take cap & trade and shove it up our asses and the "ZOMFG invisible hand free trade!" drones will NEVER let you just block trade with them) on numbers supposedly showing you what will happen decades in advance? Yeah I call shenanigans.
Look we ALL want less pollution but to actually achieve that some VERY nasty choices are gonna HAVE to happen. You will HAVE to cut off trade with the third world until they pass environmental laws equal or better than your own, you will HAVE to add trillions to the debt to build the infrastructure to support hybrids, not to mention billions on a "people's car/truck" that would be something like a hybrid diesel/electric so you can wean the country off of fossil fuels onto something like carbon capture diesel, and you will HAVE to get the NIMBYs to STFU and build new nuclear plants because none of our renewable choices will even cover what we use now, much less power even 25% of the cars on the road.
So these are all very hard choices that will have to be made, scams like cap & trade are just reverse robin hood by another name and won't lower greenhouses gases by a single pint, hell if anything they'll RAISE them because it will encourage more factories to be built within countries with lax pollution laws since there is zero penalty for just throwing it on a boat and shipping it to the west. Anyway you slice it people to make a REAL difference...its gonna fucking hurt. If done right it should hurt the rich just as much if not more than the poor (because if you take 100 million from a billionaire he isn't going hungry, take the same percentage from someone on minimum wage and they may end up homeless), it should hurt young and old, its gonna hurt all the way around.
But until you can get rid of the scammers, Al Gore on the left and the oil lobby on the right, and get someone willing to make those hard choices? Well its all fricking moot anyway isn't it?
Well considering its an OS with less than 1% installed base and has been flatline for years? Yeah i'm betting most wouldn't get that. Why not just throw in a BeOS joke while you are at it? Be about as relevant when its an article on gaming.
Sorry but the fact that Intel is STILL rigging their compiler and hasn't gotten busted for antitrust pisses me off enough I've been AMD exclusive for the past 5 years. Besides both the first gen Phenoms and the Thubans (turned off in the Phenom II because Vista was retarded and would fuck up if left on) can drop unused cores into low power idle mode so honestly they really aren't bad at all on power, just don't put Vista on them as the core drops freak Vista out and it'll start dropping loads onto the unused cores which kills the point.
Besides they cripple the Celerons too damned much, they kill the advanced powersaving features and kill too much cache, an Intel chip without cache is gimped all to hell. You compare the performance of that Celery Dual with a Phenom quad or hell even an Athlon Quad (which just FYI but Tiger has the OEM Athlon quads for $45 now) and you get a lot better performance for a negligible power increase. of course if you really are all about power saving the E350 uses less than 20w under load and can be had for $70 shipped. Sorry but bang for the buck is still firmly in the AMD camp.
Thanks, and for those that say "Oh and E-Series doesn't stack up against a COre2Duo"? Here is the Passmark scores which the E350 scores 776, the Intel C2D T2400 at 1.83GHz scores a 789, so pretty damned close to the first gens. If you can score an E450 they score neck and neck with the 2GHz T2450 so again its neck and neck only the price is a HELL of a lot different.
And to the AC that says "I like AMD"? I like bang for the buck and hate corporate douchebaggery, intel STILL rigs their compiler (while AMD uses a fork of GCC and hands out the code) and if you'll show me where I can get a C2D WITH the heatsink AND the motherboard for $70 shipped? be happy to consider it. With the E350 you can take an old Pentium 4 box and turn it into a power sipper with better performance for less than $110, and that is with you buying a PCI to IDE adapter if the system still has IDE drives, if it has SATA you can do it for less than $95. I'm sorry but you can't beat that, you save money, save cooling, and save power, while getting better performance...what's not to like?
I hate to break the news to ya dude, but your niche? Maybe 3% of the market MAYBE. There just isn't enough of you to make the billions required to make a 10GHz CPU a reality. Hell how many even OC or use liquid cooling? if it was more than 5% I'd be surprised.
You simply can't generate enough business to sustain the market, I'm sure you probably buy the latest and greatest the second it comes out but most folks? Its just not worth it. Hell I multitask like mad and I can't slam this $100 6 core.
Dude do NOT save that P4, the amount of juice you waste feeding that beast makes it not worth the trouble. Since you like Tiger kits (which I do to, they are fricking fantastic) you should look at the $130 E350 Mini which just uses 16w under load while giving you a dual core APU that is great for everyday tasks. Since you already have the box you can get just the board at Amazon for like $70, slap in a $12 RAM stick and the system will pay for itself just on the amount of power you save and waste heat you don't have to deal with.
I've been turning old P4 office boxes into E350 boxes and its quite popular with the SMBs, better performance than the P4 at not even a fifth the power. I like 'em so much if I ever get a few days "me time" so I can take my time and set my software up the way I like I'll be ripping the guts out my old Sempron nettop at the shop and replacing it for an E350, I'll get a nice performance boost while using even less power than the Sempron, its cheap, great for basic tasks, and low power, its really a sweet little unit.
Well then I'm sorry but your company is retarded. The Pentium 4 was a power blowing space heating piece of shit, its the one system where I tell folks "That has GOT to go" and honestly today you'd have to be an idiot to keep one. You can get a mini based on the AMD E350 ready to go and that gives you the performance of a first gen Core2Duo at 1.7GHz while using less power than the fans in one of those P4s, in fact you could probably replace 5 of the P4s with E350s and you'd be using less juice than 1 of the P4s did under load while having better performance.
Now as far as the laptops and the abortion known as Windows 8 AKA "LOL appstores tablets touch"? On those 2 points I agree completely, I have several customers using 3 and 4 year old laptops and they are just fine, they do the job quite well. Hell I have a 3 year old E350 netbook and for the kinds of jobs I have when I'm on a service call, as well as my personal websurfing and video watching? Works wonderfully, hell it even still gets 4 hours on the original battery.
So while I agree on the laptops and avoiding the Win 8 STD keeping P4s is just fucking retarded, if they were first gen core or even older Athlons? yeah I could see it, but there really is a reason why nothing Intel makes uses netburst and that is because it was simply a shitty power pig and the sooner those things are recycled the better.
My condolences. That is one thing I should probably give credit to my ex for, we had a nice little arrangement where I didn't go out buying clothes without her input and she didn't buy tech stuff without mine. Made my life a HELL of a lot easier when i could just say "Yeah, not gonna happen, that's a buggy POS" and that was the end of that. To bad the rest of her family turned into the soap opera from hell because we personally got along great, it was the constant drama being dumped on us that made it not worth the effort.
Good luck on Win 8, I hope you have a HIGH tolerance for frustration...you think I'm joking but I'm really REALLY not, that damned thing has "dumbed down" and "designed by committee" written all over it. Remember how before you just pushed F8 to get to safe mode? Now its Alt+F8 and it will only catch every other time and you have to go through three PAGES worth of bullshit you don't want JUST to get to safe mode. I shit you not, I swear to God its the truth. Everything that could be done with one or two clicks of the mouse now take going through multiple sub-menus because the OS is a patronizing little shit that thinks you are too fucking stupid to do anything, nothing follows logic and convention, oh and did I mention the ADS? That's right a shitload of the "apps" (God I HATE that word) put on there by MSFT have fricking ads built in. Because its not enough you paid for the OS or the damned thing tries to guide you to their shitty appstore, nope gotta milk your dumb consumer ass for every penny they can...greedy shits.
Trust me I could go on all day just naming shit that is stupid or patronizing in that damned thing, let me end by saying I'd rather be stuck for a year on a dual boot with WinME and WinVista than have to take that POS for a single month. At least with WinME if you did enough stripping you could get it mostly stable and with winVista you could kill UAC and add a few tweaks and it would be usable, Windows 8 is like watching a naked Ballmer do pelvic thrusts with a WinPhone for a g-string, its just offensive and pathetic no matter how you try to cover it.
This is why I never understood how anybody could bitch about MSFT patches. I mean do you have ANY idea how many times I updated my laptop or desktop when I was running Linux and had an update break something? More than I could possibly count, wireless and sound the worse though, I don't think I ever had sound AND wireless come through completely unscathed once, one or the other would ALWAYS get broken. And this was bog standard hardware too, nothing exotic.
Considering the amount of hardware that Windows runs on and software that runs on it? Love 'em or hate 'em everybody should give them credit for this because its fricking amazing how little breakage occurs with their updates. And when there IS breakage like in TFA it is nearly always some weird corner case, like in this case a funky kernel hooking driver (which how many times has MSFT asked companies not to use weird kernel hooks for precisely this reason?) which went nuts most likely because it expects the kernel to be X size or behave in X manner which it doesn't now. which if they would have just used the APIs frankly they wouldn't have had to care, but hey what can ya do.
Actually, and you are gonna laugh your ass off as it'll probably sound like a sales pitch but YOU sir need to replace those boards with AMD E350s.
You see 10 years old means Pentium 4 which was the POWER PIGGIE FROM HELL because Intel just quit giving a shit about anything but clock speed. the amount of power those suckers just blast through is just nuts, it truly is. You can get AMD E350 boards for $70, pair that with a $12 4GB RAM stick and a little $7 PCI to IDE board (since I bet most of your stuff is IDE) and frankly you will use LESS power when the system is at full load than the fans in the box use when the P4 is at idle. I am not shitting you, before some jackass stole my kill-a-watt out of the shop I measured and just the fans plugged into the PSU was something like 24 watts and the board maxed out was only between 18 and 19. Of course when I added the P4 holy crap, that thing was blowing through enough juice ( Prescott P4 with HT, 2.8GHz IIRC) that you could run FOUR of the E350s for the cost of ONE of the P4s.
So you see you are in one of the few situations where I recommend an upgrade, you can keep your OS as the E350 supports XP-Win 8 no problem, as far as performance the E350 APU scores about the same as a 1.7GHz first gen Core2Duo which is of course a hell of a lot better than the long piped P4, and finally the electric bill will just drop like a stone. I have done this conversion for several businesses and they just love the hell out of it as you don't even need any fans, just the fan in the PSU is enough to keep it cool so they are just whisper quiet and like I said the next month's electric bill you WILL notice the difference.
But I wouldn't say either is "resting" because even their previous gen chips are just so insanely bad ass that if you have a chip made after...ohhh lets say late 06/early 07? The differences will be minor unless you are just slamming the dogshit out of the chip. I mean take dad's quad, its 2.2GHz so plenty of speed, it can drop the speed on unused cores so the power usage is actually quite good, the systems has 4GB of RAM and can hold 8GB of DDR 2 if he needs it (which he don't, hell I game and have 8GB and most of mine is used for caching) and it has a TB of HDD space which is extreme overkill for my dad. hell even the IGP is something like a HD4300 which I actually played the original Bioshock just fine on an HD4300 while waiting for my GPU to come in so for movie watching or checking the video cameras I set up at his shop its just overkill.
As I have said here before five years ago my low end machine I was selling was a Phenom I X3 or X4 with 4GB and a 500GB HDD and an HD3xxx or HD4xxx IGP...seriously how many users are gonna even stress that out? Hell I picked up my aging aunt an offlease PC the other day, she got a Core2Duo with 3GB of RAM,250GB HDD and Win 7 for IIRC it was $187 shipped, think she will slam that system anytime soon? She scans family photos with her little scanner and plays her little flash games so I seriously doubt that system will be hitting more than 40% anytime soon, its just total overkill.
Actually? And as much as I HATE THAT STUPID DUMBED DOWN WIN 8 %$&%$^$...I gotta be honest and...TFA is pretty much right on the money. hell my AMD netbook is 3 years old, runs great, I was the guy that HAD to build a PC every year for gaming, but I'm up to a 6 core with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space, what more do I need here? Games are just now starting to really use duals and triples, most games won't even stress a triple so half my cores are sitting idle or doing other stuff, so why do i need more?
This really hit me over the head about 2 years ago which is why I'm doing more HTPCs and security cams now, and that was when the Phenom II quads first got REALLY cheap. You see my dad is the perfect "test case" if you will for your "bog standard PC user" because he is as MOR as you can get, he surfs, watches movies, uses chat and webmail, runs his little office software, its about as bog standard of a use case as one can get. So I start seeing the new quads below $100 and I think "Hmmm, its been awhile since i built dad that Phenom I quad, maybe its time to build a new system" so I set up performance logging and came back 2 weeks later to see, what did I find?
45%. No shit, we are talking a 2.2GHz first gen Phenom I quad and he ONLY was able to get to 45% usage and looking closer at what was going on it looks like a browser hang caused that spike, if I remove that? he's barely hitting 30% and that is when he is going full bore. I thought "Well yeah, its a quad, surely that older dual core i built for the shop has to be ready for the pasture"...nope, biggest spikes around 70% but only when he is loading something up and after that its nothing, 20s and 30s during background tasks.
So it all comes down to one simple fact...The MHz war was a bubble. I would argue what we are seeing now is NOT "The death of the PC" anymore than the housing bubble popping meant the death of houses, its just a return to a more normal state. before laptops were getting replaced every other year and desktops around every 3 and now we are seeing laptops going 5-6 years and desktops that can easily go 8 or 9, I mean that Phenom I quad my dad has is circa 07 so its already at 6 years and its not being stressed.
It all comes down to both AMD and Intel building chips that are just so insanely powerful that folks can't come up with enough useful work for them to do, certainly not enough to max 'em out. Of course Windows 8 being Satan spawn certainly isn't helping matters any but there are still plenty of places selling win 7 systems right now but if your system is already a multicore seriously what more do you need?