"I think the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i think the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!" Bill Hicks. The man has been dead for 20+ years and damned if his words don't get more true every year.
The simple fact is that unless your "vote" is done by a check with a lot of zeroes on it? Well then your "choices' are Coke VS Coke in a holiday can, IE none. I could sit here for an hour explaining why but i think this video explains it better than I could.
Uhh...that's kinda the POINT with Crytek, hence the meme. you buy the game now, play it on low, and then have your mind blown when the tech finally catches up and you can run it maxed out.
The nice thing about this is it makes their games some of the most awesome looking for years and years, fire up Far Cry 1 on ultra everything and it looks so damned good you want to just sit there for an hour watching the fly by. I personally LOVE this about their games as it gives me that sense of awe like I had the first time I saw the Unreal fly by...anybody remember the first time you saw that? I bet you just sat there in awe watching that thing for ages didn't you? That is what makes Crytek games great, as not only are they fun to play but as your hardware gets better the games look better, year after year.
Dude its the level, its coded for shit. I have a hexacore with 8gb of RAM and an HD4850 OCed and it'll still bog when it gets to that ONE level, while everything else runs perfectly. Compare this to something like Just Cause II where i can set charges all over a compound and do my own "cool guys don't look at explosions" with smokestacks falling and fuel tanks blowing and fireballs that block out the sky and it still don't chug.
But go onto any forum and mention the carrier level and watch all the pissed off rants you get, I have yet to see anybody render that thing 100% chug free.
Then your customers shouldn't be wanting to play Crysis 3 now should they? this is like bitching that your new econo car won't keep up with a 911 in the quarter, well no shit, you didn't pay 911 money either!
They can play tons of games on that rig, just not Crysis 3. If they want to play even more games they can add a cheap discrete, but for Crysis 3 they should be looking at an HD5850 minimum, HD6850 better. BTW why are you being such a cheap bastard when it comes to PSUs? The only things I put less than a 500w in are the office boxes.
But the planet shouldn't have to wait for you to stop building cheap shit before the numbers go up, sorry. Either keep up or be happy with the tens of thousands of games you can play on those specs, but quit expecting the world to be made around your bottom of the line shit just so you can sell more low end units.
And I'll tell you just like I tell MY customers which is "If you wanna game then discrete all the way". Seriously you can get an HD4850 for $35, or an HD6850 for $100, so there really isn't a point in trying to play games on an IGP.
No matter how you slice it its the shared memory that makes those worthless. You just can't pump enough through bog standard DDR 3 to make a killer gaming system with an IGP, its just not gonna do it. Great for video, fine for casual, sucks balls for modern shooters and the like.
LOL wut? Informative? You can get a 5650 with 1 Gb of RAM for less than $40, keep an eye out on the sales it can be had for less than $20. Hell if you don't mind refurbs (and I don't, never had a problem with 'em) you can get a 6850 for $100 and a 6870 for $120, and that's for a 256bit card with GDDR 5. Gaming, even with all the purty, has never been cheaper friend.
Back in the day you were lucky if a card that cost less than $200 would last you a year, I'm just now getting ready to swap out my 4850 for a 6870 after getting nearly 3 years out of it, the cost? $70 when I bought it, you can get it at Geeks now for around $35.
Well like I said maybe he or she isn't hitting the exact conditions that caused the bug. Look at the Phenom I TLB bug, everybody had a fit about that but I sold those chips like mad because in my own tests doing average jobs frankly you'd have better odds hitting the powerball than hitting the TLB bug, and this was with a known issue. You work in a PC shop long enough and you see everything at least once, I have seen systems with a bad RAM stick or spotty hard drive run for years because what the user was doing just wasn't tripping over the bad place, then they happen to do that one task that hits the bad part and it falls down like a house of cards. Its weird but it happens which is why i was curious if you found out what caused it to choke.
But unless you are playing casual games only you are still gonna need the keyboard and mouse, right? Sure more games are getting controller friendly but when you look at the huge number of games on Steam one would have to be picky as hell about their purchases not to get any games that work better with KB and mouse.
As long as they don't get rid of the old UI to try to force us into "this new innovation!" ala Win 8 I say go for it, more choices is always good especially if it allows more to enjoy the service. After all more users mean better economies of sale and thus lower prices, it means better support from the ISPs, its a win/win as far as I'm concerned.
Except if only 1 out of 10,000 is using encryption, guess who is getting red flagged? the 1 in 10,000. Its called a chilling effect, look it up. These aren't the keystone cops ya know, they generally know how exactly to word that shit so they can get away with doing pretty much whatever, hell its why they have laws like resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, its because these are "catch all" laws that they can use on anybody at any time. After all, who decides what is disorderly? And of course they can use resisting even when they have no valid reason to arrest you in the first place, so they get to do what they want and you can't say shit.
I would urge everyone to watch The end of America by Naomi Wolf where she lays out step by step, using historical cases, how a free society becomes non free. BTW she is now on the NSA watchlists for daring to talk about constitutional rights, can't have that now. She argues there are ways to stop it but I would counter short of violent revolution it is inevitable, with the propaganda power of the mass media and the ability to get these laws through by either slipping them in on an unaware populace or targeting them at "the other" that no one will dare defend, terrorists, pedos, they can get pretty much any police powers they desire and then the laws will simply be widened until they can use it on anybody.
As some law professors pointed out a couple of years back you ARE a criminal, and so am I, and them, and your family, because they have managed to get so many vaguely worded laws on the books that simply going through your daily lives you break probably a dozen laws a day, laws that could get you anywhere from 6 months to a couple of years per charge. the ONLY reason these laws haven't been used against you is they simply haven't had a reason to, but if they can spy on 10,000 and can't spy on only 1 out of that 10,000? Well then time to dust those laws off huh?
While I think Ayn Rand was total batshit even the crazy can have a moment of truth, and her idea that to the government ALL are criminals, its only a question of the charges, is pretty damned spot on. You can protest, write your congress critter, in the end they'll just tack this to the end of some bill at 3 AM and run it through.
Yes but to ignore that its a down economy while at the same time trying to gouge across your entire line to please Wall Street? just shows what a pathetic and incompetent CEO Ballmer really is. He pissed everybody off by removing the ability to just have a normal desktop in Win 8 THEN charged more than a fricking iPad for Surface THEN gouged the OEMs on licenses (thus making sure WinRT isn't supported by the OEMs) and THEN to top all that fail off he is gonna gouge the enterprise, which is already spooked about a down economy?
Everyone makes comments about Elop being a plant but frankly Ballmer could have been a plant and it wouldn't have caused any more damage, the man is taking everything Bill built and taking a massive dump on it, all for the futile desire to please The Street and become an ersatz Apple.
So what kinds of problems were people having with Steam before? I have built several HTPCs and didn't hear a complaint one about Steam, it looked just fine, went to a customer's place the other day to do a few tweaks to his system and while there I watched him play TF 2 on his 55 inch TV and I have to say it looked fricking great, so I don't know what they would change.
What gets me about that bullshit argument is this...even if you played 24/7/365 there are just sooooo many games released each quarter there is no way they could have played all the games in the under $10 bin on Steam, and that isn't even counting the daily deals or the big sales. heck during the summer sale I got the complete Deus Ex series WITH all the DLC for $15, Got Saints Row 3 with all the DLC I cared for for $12 (the boys got it with ALL the DLC for $20), 4 Crysis games for $15, seriously I'm ass deep in killer games and I spend on average less than a Happy Meal per game. I get ALL the DLC, all the patches, the MP,etc.
Having a couple of teen boys and a GF I'm not rich by ANY stretch of the imagination yet for less than the cost of a take out pizza a month i have just a ton of killer AAA titles, and if something comes out that I don't have the cash for? Well there are literally THOUSANDS of games to choose from in the under $5 bin from Steam right this minute, just glancing at the daily deals they have L4D II at $5, Portal II for $5, and Counter Strike: GO for $7.50...how much cheaper can you get?
So their excuses are just that, for just $15-$20 a month they would quickly have a HUGE library of titles, I don't care what genre they like, and they would be all triple A games with all the extras and DLC. So if they want to be a pirate because they won't pay for what they want? Just admit it and be honest, because with Steam they could have all the games they could possibly want to play, including hundreds that are FTP, so pirating games when you have so many games to choose from for practically pocket change is just bullshit.
You are welcome and any time you run into another weird head scratcher feel free to just drop me an email, the address is in my UID. Working in the shop i run into those "little niggling problems" all the time so I usually have some free little tool for this or that problem.
Did you run a test on the hardware? Because i have seen an install puke (Not a Vista to 7 upgrade, both other OS installs) when it hits a bad sector on the drive or has a bad bit of RAM and you'd be surprised how often a problem like that can allow the machine to run for ages until you hit just the right conditions to trigger the problem. Had to change out the CPU in my former landlady's PC once because when she would launch her email it would BSOD but ONLY on email. Ran a CPU test and sure enough it was throwing errors but for some reason it just never threw enough errors to crash the system EXCEPT when she launched her email. Its weird but you work on PCs long enough you'll see anything at least once.
So I don't have any doubt it puked on you, but if it were me it would drive me up a wall until I found out WHY it puked, hardware? Bad media? I would just have to know what caused the freak out before i could let it go. Heck I had one customer whose desktop would crash every 3 to 5 hours on the dot, drove me nuts as it wouldn't do it for me so I had him write down everything he did from the time it was turned on...the culprit? It turned out he watched a lot of videos and his GPU would get dodgy when the hardware acceleration heated it up, since I wasn't watching videos on a customer's PC I never heated it enough to cause the problem.
Thank you for that bit of common sense. nobody is gonna buy Linux laptops and desktops retail and no retailer is gonna sell 'em so expecting someone to go slapping Linux on a pile of machines JUST to give this guy some info on the drives? Yeah...not gonna happen. I'm glad Linux works for you but its just not a consumer friendly OS, sorry.
But if he would have suggested something cross platform, especially something that can run from a stick? I would have been happy to just give it a quick spin on the systems around the shop and posted the numbers, not like i don't have an assload of burners around here.
And I second the multiple drives idea, drives are cheap, why not have more than one? I keep a couple in all my systems as its so much easier to just feed discs two at a time when you have a big job and of course if you need to whip off a copy on the fly its quicker than writing to the drive first. Go to Geeks or Newegg and they have really cheap burners and DVD ROMs, if this guy is really gonna rip something like 1200 discs most cases have slots for 3 or 4 drives so there is really nothing stopping him from making a nice ripping machine.
I have to think its on purpose, to drive sales of their $1000 Macs, because surely to God the richest company on the planet could hire better coders than THAT. I swear every time i have to deal with a customer's iTunes it sends me back to the days of Win9X and REALPlayer, it is THAT flaky and crashy.
So I truly think they make it just "good enough" that they can activate and have it "kinda sorta" work so everybody can tell them "You know on my Mac iTunes runs great!" because surely they could have hired better Windows coders by now, I mean its 2012 and its still THAT buggy? Its gotta be on purpose, either that or the PHBs really just don't give a fuck.
Actually it was built for Win 7 unixsc,, which is why you have to pretty much use automatic in win 8 since metro don't have a taskbar. Give it a try, i bet your users will love the hell out of you for it. Like I said its pretty much set and forget, auto mode detects keystrokes and turns off the touchpad as long as they are typing so they really don't have to do anything once you've installed it, it'll turn the touchpad on when not typing and off when typing, couldn't be easier.
hell I liked it so much i installed it on my win 7 netbook, works like a charm and keeps me from blowing a blood vessel because as you know on those 12 inch netbooks there isn't a lot of room between the keyboard and the touchpad and I was bumping the damned thing constantly. with touchfreeze i never even have to think about it, I start typing in word or a website anjd i can brush against the touchpad all day long and nothing happens. HTH.
Uhhh...you're right, I sell computers, and I actually had many customers just as you described....they bought the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade and that was that. hell if you haven't tried a Vista to 7 upgrade its the most painless thing in the world, you didn't even need a guy like me as long as you were replacing like with like, like 32 bit for 32bit, because it would transfer your docs and setting on the upgrade so it was pretty damned painless.
And believe me I know about the long tail in laptops,l i still have customers running Turion singles and first gen core from over 6 years ago. Hell even my netbook is pushing 3 years old but I have to give Asus credit, the AMD EEE still types nice, has a responsive keyboard, I still get a little over 4 hours on the battery. Barring anything happening to it I could see myself using this 5 years from now because the kind of work I have when out on a call just doesn't need a powerhouse mobile unit.
But that still don't explain to me why in all this time they wouldn't have taken the Vista system to a local shop to ask for advice, hell most of us are happy to hand out advice for free and I would have told them to grab a Win 7 OEM and either DIY or have me do it, hell its such an easy job to do I don't even charge full OS install price for a Vista to 7 upgrade since I don't have to do a bunch of data backup first. Maybe they like it? You know the rule EVERYTHING will find somebody that loves it, they have Zune fan clubs ya know. I had one customer that hung onto fricking WinME until 2009, he had one of the very few systems released that had ONLY WDM drivers and for him it was rock solid stable and for the basic jobs he had it worked just fine. I have met exactly ONE, just one mind you, that actually prefers Vista, and that is a little old lady with a laptop. Since all she does with it is surf she never sees a UAC prompt, and she is using so little of the C2D that is in the laptop that Vista can be as piggish as it wants and she'll never know it, all she ever does is have a single Google Chrome tab open on the thing anyway.
So who knows, maybe that 5% is just like her and their usage patterns mean none of Vista's weaknesses affect them, considering how many PC users are out there I'd be the first to say this is very possible. Heck it took me ages to get my GF off her late model P4, because with her only checking her email and going to FB a 3Ghz P4 with WinXP worked just fine for her. That low end Athlon triple I built for her will no doubt be her main system in 2020 when Win 7 is EOLed and if we are still together then i have no doubt I'll simply slap Win X on it as its several times more powerful than she really needed but frankly it was cheaper to build than something weaker.
I would second them, and I've had no trouble with Samsung drives and they are built like tanks. the tool he wants us to test with is only for Linux and BeOS so...yeah, recommend something that is cross platform and I'll be happy to give it a quick run on the systems I have lying around the shop ATM and give you the list of the ones with high scores, but if you are wanting a large subset of/. to test drives for you you probably shouldn't pick a tool that only works on OSes that have extremely minor usage numbers, 1.25% if the article yesterday about Win 8 is correct.
But with the bottom falling out on the LCDs its just a matter of time before its not worth doing which is why everybody else bailed and Mitsubishi is bailing now. Each year the cheapies go up a size, last year it was 32 inch, this year 37-42 inch, next year i wouldn't be surprised to see 50 inch at under $400.
That said back in the days of the CRTs you were hot shit if you had a projection, everybody used to pile in our house for big games just so they could watch our 50 inch Toshiba, sure they weren't HD back then but it was a hell of a lot nicer to watch.
Actually if it does MSFT will be VERY unhappy, as Ballmer wants fragmentation up the ass, why? Because it took 7 years of sales to get XP that high and Ballmer don't want ANY product in the channel longer than 3 years. Also by getting lots of churn he can have the OS push whatever he wants to sell, this time its appstores, next time may be games or streaming media.
Personally with all the backlash i'm seeing against Win 8 here at the shop I'd frankly be amazed if Win 8 ever breaks double digits, too many people just hate the hell out of Metro for it to end up at 40%+ like Win 7. Although I am pretty shocked that Vista seems to be locked at 5%, it looks like there are some die hard Vista fans that just aren't gonna let go of it.
Another telling metric is the fact that despite the hatred of Metro it looks like Linux is doomed to stay under 2%. Personally I blame the devs and distro packagers for this, because every time it looks like Ballmer is gonna crap out another turkey they have to shoot themselves in the foot by throwing away working designs for alpha quality crap, see the mess that is Pulse, or KDE 4 and Gnome 3 shoved onto the public when they weren't even at alpha quality yet. It just seems the devs can't leave well enough alone and if the distro isn't so bleeding edge the CDs have stigmata and the software so alpha it crashes if you look at it funny then the devs just aren't happy.
Somebody is modding me down (How DARE you not drink the Win 8 koolaid!) so I don't know if you'll see this or not, but if you do here is how i fixed that very problem here at the shop..touchfreeze. With touchfreeze they can toggle it on and off via the taskbar, it also has an automatic mode that will disable the touchpad when it detects typing so most of the time they won't even have to think about it, its all good. HTH.
And all of those things we have been able to get BETTER on the net and with them actually honest opinions, sometimes too honest as we saw by that reviewer getting fired for refusing to say Kane & Lynch was anything but a stinker, instead of the "buy it! Buy it now, don't you know you should buy it now?" infomercial crap that Power practically made their hallmark.
So I just don't get the nostalgia, it was a few tidbits worth having wrapped in an infomercial. It was one of dozens, was as unbiased about its products as an infomercial host, and everything it did we can get a hundred times better and for free on the net and have been for the better part of a decade and a half..
Does that work with the new iPods and iPhones? Because frankly I'm tired of dealing with customers that have a buggy iTunes, I swear iTunes on Windows is probably the most buggy thing I've had to deal with in awhile, so if there is something I could give them and say "If it gets buggy again use this instead" that would be quite helpful.
Uhhh...you go to Amazon, type in name of game, done. And with Steam having even fricking genesis games i honestly don't see why a game can't have a crazy long tail, its not like there aren't hundreds of millions of Windows PCs out, and after a game has been out a year or two frankly even the IGPs (well if you are using AMD, Intel takes longer) will be able to run your game.
Hell look at Team Fortress Classic...that was originally a Quake TWO mod wasn't it? and it was released...what? 1998 or so? Yet Valve is STILL making money on that game, Half Life I, Counter Strike, I should know as my oldest picked me up the Half Life Classic set during the summer sale since he knew I had all of HL 2 but not HL 1. Know what I found on TF classic? TONS of players, it felt just as full as TF2 as a matter of fact, and everybody was having a fricking BALL, just a blast playing it even though the graphics could be run on a $200 netbook.
So I see absolutely NO reason why a game, especially a niche genre that is moddable, can't make money for several years. again look at freelancer, load up one of the big MP mods like Crossfire and just see how many people you'll have playing a nearly decade old game. If its a good game its a good game PERIOD and as long as you make it easy to buy, Amazon and Steam would be the big two to make sure its on if it were me, then there is no reason that you can't keep right on making money with the game.
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"I think the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i think the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!" Bill Hicks. The man has been dead for 20+ years and damned if his words don't get more true every year.
The simple fact is that unless your "vote" is done by a check with a lot of zeroes on it? Well then your "choices' are Coke VS Coke in a holiday can, IE none. I could sit here for an hour explaining why but i think this video explains it better than I could.
Uhh...that's kinda the POINT with Crytek, hence the meme. you buy the game now, play it on low, and then have your mind blown when the tech finally catches up and you can run it maxed out.
The nice thing about this is it makes their games some of the most awesome looking for years and years, fire up Far Cry 1 on ultra everything and it looks so damned good you want to just sit there for an hour watching the fly by. I personally LOVE this about their games as it gives me that sense of awe like I had the first time I saw the Unreal fly by...anybody remember the first time you saw that? I bet you just sat there in awe watching that thing for ages didn't you? That is what makes Crytek games great, as not only are they fun to play but as your hardware gets better the games look better, year after year.
Dude its the level, its coded for shit. I have a hexacore with 8gb of RAM and an HD4850 OCed and it'll still bog when it gets to that ONE level, while everything else runs perfectly. Compare this to something like Just Cause II where i can set charges all over a compound and do my own "cool guys don't look at explosions" with smokestacks falling and fuel tanks blowing and fireballs that block out the sky and it still don't chug.
But go onto any forum and mention the carrier level and watch all the pissed off rants you get, I have yet to see anybody render that thing 100% chug free.
Then your customers shouldn't be wanting to play Crysis 3 now should they? this is like bitching that your new econo car won't keep up with a 911 in the quarter, well no shit, you didn't pay 911 money either!
They can play tons of games on that rig, just not Crysis 3. If they want to play even more games they can add a cheap discrete, but for Crysis 3 they should be looking at an HD5850 minimum, HD6850 better. BTW why are you being such a cheap bastard when it comes to PSUs? The only things I put less than a 500w in are the office boxes.
But the planet shouldn't have to wait for you to stop building cheap shit before the numbers go up, sorry. Either keep up or be happy with the tens of thousands of games you can play on those specs, but quit expecting the world to be made around your bottom of the line shit just so you can sell more low end units.
And I'll tell you just like I tell MY customers which is "If you wanna game then discrete all the way". Seriously you can get an HD4850 for $35, or an HD6850 for $100, so there really isn't a point in trying to play games on an IGP.
No matter how you slice it its the shared memory that makes those worthless. You just can't pump enough through bog standard DDR 3 to make a killer gaming system with an IGP, its just not gonna do it. Great for video, fine for casual, sucks balls for modern shooters and the like.
LOL wut? Informative? You can get a 5650 with 1 Gb of RAM for less than $40, keep an eye out on the sales it can be had for less than $20. Hell if you don't mind refurbs (and I don't, never had a problem with 'em) you can get a 6850 for $100 and a 6870 for $120, and that's for a 256bit card with GDDR 5. Gaming, even with all the purty, has never been cheaper friend.
Back in the day you were lucky if a card that cost less than $200 would last you a year, I'm just now getting ready to swap out my 4850 for a 6870 after getting nearly 3 years out of it, the cost? $70 when I bought it, you can get it at Geeks now for around $35.
Well like I said maybe he or she isn't hitting the exact conditions that caused the bug. Look at the Phenom I TLB bug, everybody had a fit about that but I sold those chips like mad because in my own tests doing average jobs frankly you'd have better odds hitting the powerball than hitting the TLB bug, and this was with a known issue. You work in a PC shop long enough and you see everything at least once, I have seen systems with a bad RAM stick or spotty hard drive run for years because what the user was doing just wasn't tripping over the bad place, then they happen to do that one task that hits the bad part and it falls down like a house of cards. Its weird but it happens which is why i was curious if you found out what caused it to choke.
But unless you are playing casual games only you are still gonna need the keyboard and mouse, right? Sure more games are getting controller friendly but when you look at the huge number of games on Steam one would have to be picky as hell about their purchases not to get any games that work better with KB and mouse.
As long as they don't get rid of the old UI to try to force us into "this new innovation!" ala Win 8 I say go for it, more choices is always good especially if it allows more to enjoy the service. After all more users mean better economies of sale and thus lower prices, it means better support from the ISPs, its a win/win as far as I'm concerned.
Except if only 1 out of 10,000 is using encryption, guess who is getting red flagged? the 1 in 10,000. Its called a chilling effect, look it up. These aren't the keystone cops ya know, they generally know how exactly to word that shit so they can get away with doing pretty much whatever, hell its why they have laws like resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, its because these are "catch all" laws that they can use on anybody at any time. After all, who decides what is disorderly? And of course they can use resisting even when they have no valid reason to arrest you in the first place, so they get to do what they want and you can't say shit.
I would urge everyone to watch The end of America by Naomi Wolf where she lays out step by step, using historical cases, how a free society becomes non free. BTW she is now on the NSA watchlists for daring to talk about constitutional rights, can't have that now. She argues there are ways to stop it but I would counter short of violent revolution it is inevitable, with the propaganda power of the mass media and the ability to get these laws through by either slipping them in on an unaware populace or targeting them at "the other" that no one will dare defend, terrorists, pedos, they can get pretty much any police powers they desire and then the laws will simply be widened until they can use it on anybody.
As some law professors pointed out a couple of years back you ARE a criminal, and so am I, and them, and your family, because they have managed to get so many vaguely worded laws on the books that simply going through your daily lives you break probably a dozen laws a day, laws that could get you anywhere from 6 months to a couple of years per charge. the ONLY reason these laws haven't been used against you is they simply haven't had a reason to, but if they can spy on 10,000 and can't spy on only 1 out of that 10,000? Well then time to dust those laws off huh?
While I think Ayn Rand was total batshit even the crazy can have a moment of truth, and her idea that to the government ALL are criminals, its only a question of the charges, is pretty damned spot on. You can protest, write your congress critter, in the end they'll just tack this to the end of some bill at 3 AM and run it through.
Yes but to ignore that its a down economy while at the same time trying to gouge across your entire line to please Wall Street? just shows what a pathetic and incompetent CEO Ballmer really is. He pissed everybody off by removing the ability to just have a normal desktop in Win 8 THEN charged more than a fricking iPad for Surface THEN gouged the OEMs on licenses (thus making sure WinRT isn't supported by the OEMs) and THEN to top all that fail off he is gonna gouge the enterprise, which is already spooked about a down economy?
Everyone makes comments about Elop being a plant but frankly Ballmer could have been a plant and it wouldn't have caused any more damage, the man is taking everything Bill built and taking a massive dump on it, all for the futile desire to please The Street and become an ersatz Apple.
So what kinds of problems were people having with Steam before? I have built several HTPCs and didn't hear a complaint one about Steam, it looked just fine, went to a customer's place the other day to do a few tweaks to his system and while there I watched him play TF 2 on his 55 inch TV and I have to say it looked fricking great, so I don't know what they would change.
What gets me about that bullshit argument is this...even if you played 24/7/365 there are just sooooo many games released each quarter there is no way they could have played all the games in the under $10 bin on Steam, and that isn't even counting the daily deals or the big sales. heck during the summer sale I got the complete Deus Ex series WITH all the DLC for $15, Got Saints Row 3 with all the DLC I cared for for $12 (the boys got it with ALL the DLC for $20), 4 Crysis games for $15, seriously I'm ass deep in killer games and I spend on average less than a Happy Meal per game. I get ALL the DLC, all the patches, the MP,etc.
Having a couple of teen boys and a GF I'm not rich by ANY stretch of the imagination yet for less than the cost of a take out pizza a month i have just a ton of killer AAA titles, and if something comes out that I don't have the cash for? Well there are literally THOUSANDS of games to choose from in the under $5 bin from Steam right this minute, just glancing at the daily deals they have L4D II at $5, Portal II for $5, and Counter Strike: GO for $7.50...how much cheaper can you get?
So their excuses are just that, for just $15-$20 a month they would quickly have a HUGE library of titles, I don't care what genre they like, and they would be all triple A games with all the extras and DLC. So if they want to be a pirate because they won't pay for what they want? Just admit it and be honest, because with Steam they could have all the games they could possibly want to play, including hundreds that are FTP, so pirating games when you have so many games to choose from for practically pocket change is just bullshit.
You are welcome and any time you run into another weird head scratcher feel free to just drop me an email, the address is in my UID. Working in the shop i run into those "little niggling problems" all the time so I usually have some free little tool for this or that problem.
Did you run a test on the hardware? Because i have seen an install puke (Not a Vista to 7 upgrade, both other OS installs) when it hits a bad sector on the drive or has a bad bit of RAM and you'd be surprised how often a problem like that can allow the machine to run for ages until you hit just the right conditions to trigger the problem. Had to change out the CPU in my former landlady's PC once because when she would launch her email it would BSOD but ONLY on email. Ran a CPU test and sure enough it was throwing errors but for some reason it just never threw enough errors to crash the system EXCEPT when she launched her email. Its weird but you work on PCs long enough you'll see anything at least once.
So I don't have any doubt it puked on you, but if it were me it would drive me up a wall until I found out WHY it puked, hardware? Bad media? I would just have to know what caused the freak out before i could let it go. Heck I had one customer whose desktop would crash every 3 to 5 hours on the dot, drove me nuts as it wouldn't do it for me so I had him write down everything he did from the time it was turned on...the culprit? It turned out he watched a lot of videos and his GPU would get dodgy when the hardware acceleration heated it up, since I wasn't watching videos on a customer's PC I never heated it enough to cause the problem.
Thank you for that bit of common sense. nobody is gonna buy Linux laptops and desktops retail and no retailer is gonna sell 'em so expecting someone to go slapping Linux on a pile of machines JUST to give this guy some info on the drives? Yeah...not gonna happen. I'm glad Linux works for you but its just not a consumer friendly OS, sorry.
But if he would have suggested something cross platform, especially something that can run from a stick? I would have been happy to just give it a quick spin on the systems around the shop and posted the numbers, not like i don't have an assload of burners around here.
And I second the multiple drives idea, drives are cheap, why not have more than one? I keep a couple in all my systems as its so much easier to just feed discs two at a time when you have a big job and of course if you need to whip off a copy on the fly its quicker than writing to the drive first. Go to Geeks or Newegg and they have really cheap burners and DVD ROMs, if this guy is really gonna rip something like 1200 discs most cases have slots for 3 or 4 drives so there is really nothing stopping him from making a nice ripping machine.
I have to think its on purpose, to drive sales of their $1000 Macs, because surely to God the richest company on the planet could hire better coders than THAT. I swear every time i have to deal with a customer's iTunes it sends me back to the days of Win9X and REALPlayer, it is THAT flaky and crashy.
So I truly think they make it just "good enough" that they can activate and have it "kinda sorta" work so everybody can tell them "You know on my Mac iTunes runs great!" because surely they could have hired better Windows coders by now, I mean its 2012 and its still THAT buggy? Its gotta be on purpose, either that or the PHBs really just don't give a fuck.
Actually it was built for Win 7 unixsc,, which is why you have to pretty much use automatic in win 8 since metro don't have a taskbar. Give it a try, i bet your users will love the hell out of you for it. Like I said its pretty much set and forget, auto mode detects keystrokes and turns off the touchpad as long as they are typing so they really don't have to do anything once you've installed it, it'll turn the touchpad on when not typing and off when typing, couldn't be easier.
hell I liked it so much i installed it on my win 7 netbook, works like a charm and keeps me from blowing a blood vessel because as you know on those 12 inch netbooks there isn't a lot of room between the keyboard and the touchpad and I was bumping the damned thing constantly. with touchfreeze i never even have to think about it, I start typing in word or a website anjd i can brush against the touchpad all day long and nothing happens. HTH.
Uhhh...you're right, I sell computers, and I actually had many customers just as you described....they bought the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade and that was that. hell if you haven't tried a Vista to 7 upgrade its the most painless thing in the world, you didn't even need a guy like me as long as you were replacing like with like, like 32 bit for 32bit, because it would transfer your docs and setting on the upgrade so it was pretty damned painless.
And believe me I know about the long tail in laptops,l i still have customers running Turion singles and first gen core from over 6 years ago. Hell even my netbook is pushing 3 years old but I have to give Asus credit, the AMD EEE still types nice, has a responsive keyboard, I still get a little over 4 hours on the battery. Barring anything happening to it I could see myself using this 5 years from now because the kind of work I have when out on a call just doesn't need a powerhouse mobile unit.
But that still don't explain to me why in all this time they wouldn't have taken the Vista system to a local shop to ask for advice, hell most of us are happy to hand out advice for free and I would have told them to grab a Win 7 OEM and either DIY or have me do it, hell its such an easy job to do I don't even charge full OS install price for a Vista to 7 upgrade since I don't have to do a bunch of data backup first. Maybe they like it? You know the rule EVERYTHING will find somebody that loves it, they have Zune fan clubs ya know. I had one customer that hung onto fricking WinME until 2009, he had one of the very few systems released that had ONLY WDM drivers and for him it was rock solid stable and for the basic jobs he had it worked just fine. I have met exactly ONE, just one mind you, that actually prefers Vista, and that is a little old lady with a laptop. Since all she does with it is surf she never sees a UAC prompt, and she is using so little of the C2D that is in the laptop that Vista can be as piggish as it wants and she'll never know it, all she ever does is have a single Google Chrome tab open on the thing anyway.
So who knows, maybe that 5% is just like her and their usage patterns mean none of Vista's weaknesses affect them, considering how many PC users are out there I'd be the first to say this is very possible. Heck it took me ages to get my GF off her late model P4, because with her only checking her email and going to FB a 3Ghz P4 with WinXP worked just fine for her. That low end Athlon triple I built for her will no doubt be her main system in 2020 when Win 7 is EOLed and if we are still together then i have no doubt I'll simply slap Win X on it as its several times more powerful than she really needed but frankly it was cheaper to build than something weaker.
I would second them, and I've had no trouble with Samsung drives and they are built like tanks. the tool he wants us to test with is only for Linux and BeOS so...yeah, recommend something that is cross platform and I'll be happy to give it a quick run on the systems I have lying around the shop ATM and give you the list of the ones with high scores, but if you are wanting a large subset of /. to test drives for you you probably shouldn't pick a tool that only works on OSes that have extremely minor usage numbers, 1.25% if the article yesterday about Win 8 is correct.
But with the bottom falling out on the LCDs its just a matter of time before its not worth doing which is why everybody else bailed and Mitsubishi is bailing now. Each year the cheapies go up a size, last year it was 32 inch, this year 37-42 inch, next year i wouldn't be surprised to see 50 inch at under $400.
That said back in the days of the CRTs you were hot shit if you had a projection, everybody used to pile in our house for big games just so they could watch our 50 inch Toshiba, sure they weren't HD back then but it was a hell of a lot nicer to watch.
Actually if it does MSFT will be VERY unhappy, as Ballmer wants fragmentation up the ass, why? Because it took 7 years of sales to get XP that high and Ballmer don't want ANY product in the channel longer than 3 years. Also by getting lots of churn he can have the OS push whatever he wants to sell, this time its appstores, next time may be games or streaming media.
Personally with all the backlash i'm seeing against Win 8 here at the shop I'd frankly be amazed if Win 8 ever breaks double digits, too many people just hate the hell out of Metro for it to end up at 40%+ like Win 7. Although I am pretty shocked that Vista seems to be locked at 5%, it looks like there are some die hard Vista fans that just aren't gonna let go of it.
Another telling metric is the fact that despite the hatred of Metro it looks like Linux is doomed to stay under 2%. Personally I blame the devs and distro packagers for this, because every time it looks like Ballmer is gonna crap out another turkey they have to shoot themselves in the foot by throwing away working designs for alpha quality crap, see the mess that is Pulse, or KDE 4 and Gnome 3 shoved onto the public when they weren't even at alpha quality yet. It just seems the devs can't leave well enough alone and if the distro isn't so bleeding edge the CDs have stigmata and the software so alpha it crashes if you look at it funny then the devs just aren't happy.
Somebody is modding me down (How DARE you not drink the Win 8 koolaid!) so I don't know if you'll see this or not, but if you do here is how i fixed that very problem here at the shop..touchfreeze. With touchfreeze they can toggle it on and off via the taskbar, it also has an automatic mode that will disable the touchpad when it detects typing so most of the time they won't even have to think about it, its all good. HTH.
And all of those things we have been able to get BETTER on the net and with them actually honest opinions, sometimes too honest as we saw by that reviewer getting fired for refusing to say Kane & Lynch was anything but a stinker, instead of the "buy it! Buy it now, don't you know you should buy it now?" infomercial crap that Power practically made their hallmark.
So I just don't get the nostalgia, it was a few tidbits worth having wrapped in an infomercial. It was one of dozens, was as unbiased about its products as an infomercial host, and everything it did we can get a hundred times better and for free on the net and have been for the better part of a decade and a half..
Does that work with the new iPods and iPhones? Because frankly I'm tired of dealing with customers that have a buggy iTunes, I swear iTunes on Windows is probably the most buggy thing I've had to deal with in awhile, so if there is something I could give them and say "If it gets buggy again use this instead" that would be quite helpful.
Uhhh...you go to Amazon, type in name of game, done. And with Steam having even fricking genesis games i honestly don't see why a game can't have a crazy long tail, its not like there aren't hundreds of millions of Windows PCs out, and after a game has been out a year or two frankly even the IGPs (well if you are using AMD, Intel takes longer) will be able to run your game.
Hell look at Team Fortress Classic...that was originally a Quake TWO mod wasn't it? and it was released...what? 1998 or so? Yet Valve is STILL making money on that game, Half Life I, Counter Strike, I should know as my oldest picked me up the Half Life Classic set during the summer sale since he knew I had all of HL 2 but not HL 1. Know what I found on TF classic? TONS of players, it felt just as full as TF2 as a matter of fact, and everybody was having a fricking BALL, just a blast playing it even though the graphics could be run on a $200 netbook.
So I see absolutely NO reason why a game, especially a niche genre that is moddable, can't make money for several years. again look at freelancer, load up one of the big MP mods like Crossfire and just see how many people you'll have playing a nearly decade old game. If its a good game its a good game PERIOD and as long as you make it easy to buy, Amazon and Steam would be the big two to make sure its on if it were me, then there is no reason that you can't keep right on making money with the game.