Because its a fricking DESKTOP, not a server! For the love of God are nerds fricking clueless! Let me spell it out..on a desktop CLI should be optional but NEVER mandatory, but in Linux its the opposite. In fact I dare you to remove CLI access and go for one year, just one, on a Linux desktop without it and you'll find it just can't be done because the devs are lazy ass ubernerds whose answer to EVERY problem is "open up bash and type". in fact I bet if you want to...ohh lets say Ubuntu forums, you know, the "Linux for humans" distro? Yeah go there and remove EVERY post that has "open up bash and type" in it guess what you'd have? A forum whose posts could be counted on one hand!
There is a REASON why OSX and Windows don't start at a CLI prompt you know, its because most users consider CLI a DO NOT WANT yet rather than take in the fact that its been GUIs since nineteen fricking eighty eight the devs in their arrogance, just like you are doing RIGHT NOW, say "The CLI is faster, its leet!" which of course is BULLSHIT, its completely non discoverable and ONLY good for two tasks...scripting and repeatative actions. Well how many HOME users are writing scripts? Running batch files? You could put every single one that would fall under that description in your average HS gym and have seats left over, its THAT small a niche among home users.
But don't worry, the devs don't give a crap if Linux stays at 1% so it'll be Windows boxes as far as the eye can see simply because it would mean lazy devs would actually have to learn to write decent UIs instead of leaning on CLI like a crutch. This is also why no matter how hard MSFT screws the OEMs they'll take it, even though your product is "free" because they know the cost of support will shoot through the roof and quickly make Windows the CHEAPER OS by far. This is why every major B&M has dabbled in Linux only to come running back to MSFT, you tell home users to "open up bash and type" and they are gonna be bringing that unit back and demanding windows Home where they don't have to do that shit instead.
Now just to be fair AC not ALL older machines are bad....just the P4 because netburst was a power hog. The socket 754 and 939 Athlon/Duron/Semprons were good on power, just avoid the socket A as the first runs didn't have a thermal monitor and were easy to cook, early core chips such as the Core Solo and the Core based Celerons were also good on power, and of course while the IGPs suuuucked the first gen Atoms were really great when it came to power as well.
But there is a reason i'm staring at a Pentium D MCE box that I'm gonna be selling while keeping the 754 Sempron, and that is because with its long pipes the netburst chips just belched out the heat while going through power like a drunk goes through a free minibar. Even though that Pentium D has easily 3 times the performance it probably puts out 6 times the heat and easily sucks more than triple the power of the Sempron, that Sempron at max load uses less than a Smithfield Pentium D at idle, they were THAT bad when it came to power.
I don't think I'd recommend hanging onto a late model P3 though, the caps will be getting pretty brittle by now and when they go they often take the box and sometimes the monitor with them. if I wanted something low power and couldn't find a Sempron or Athlon lying around I'd go for an E350 or an Atom mini-board, with both of those you be using less than 20w under load and idling in the single digits. if you are gonna run a system 24/7/365 and don't need the crazy performance from it they would be your best bet.
If it has the single "download" button in YouTube I'd sure appreciate it Crosshair, i have a lot of older customers that like to download little funny videos and send them to their relatives (yes I know they could just send the links, but they don't want to, they want to send the videos, and as the tech its my job to make sure they can do what they want to do with their machine, even if its dumb) and frankly I haven't found anything that is THAT simple, i install it and they just have a big "download" button under the video, hell my mom could figure out how to use that.
The few I've found were not only a PITA to install but frankly required a bunch of steps to get the video, that isn't gonna cut it with home users, simpler the better is the way to go. So if you know a way i'm all ears, just shoot it in an email to the address in my UID if you don't mind as I'm getting a lot of posts responded to so this one is probably gonna be buried soon. Thanks.
Did you REALLY just compare a netburst P4 to a Sempron? Really? Don't know much about arches do you? hell that Sempron at max load uses less than a Prescott AT IDLE. And as I said one of the nice things about socket 754 is that you can use MOBILE Athlons in them...you know...laptop chips? As in even lower heat and deeper sleep states?
So I'm sorry but some older chips are GOOD, some older chips are BAD when it comes to power. pretty much all of the netburst P4s are giant power hogs, Intel was able to get the clocks so high by just throwing ever more voltage at it, while the 754 and 939 AMDs were actually pretty damned good when it came to power. as you can see here I can put a Mobile Athlon with a max of just 35w which puts the idle around 14w and the cost? $9. so there really is no comparison, Netburst from the same period was already over 86w and rising so it makes sense to chunk those. The Sempron I have in there now maxes at 42w and I'll be able to drop it even lower thank to the mobile having PowerNow to drop the clock when it isn't needed, so its easily worth the $9 upgrade over spending $120 ($100 for the board plus $20 for the RAM) for the E350. The guy I was talking to was running a middle period P4 (probably Prescott which was one of the worst by the age he gave for the system) so in his case the amount of power and heat that thing went through made it worth switching out.
Lets see...cowards cowards AAAANNNNDDD cowards. Have some fucking balls and be man enough to post from your account, don't be a bunch of pussies and hide behind AC. using AC only shows you truly ARE a coward, or you are too fucking lazy to spend the whole 3 minutes making an account...hmmm...a chicken or a lazy slob...now WHY should anybody listen to you again?
What I love is there is no jumping through hoops or messing with cracks. i want a game on my netbook which doesn't have a DVD drive? no problem, just drag the.exe over and run it.
But I'm about to get serious hate for pointing this out but fuck it, it needs to be said...they really really REALLY need to more testing on their games! Case in point i76, that game uses the CPU clock as a timer for several in game events so this game does NOT like modern multicores, yet there is zero warning that this game is gonna require hacks and tinkering to get to run. I went through every trick on the forums before giving up and while its only $10 its still not looking good on GOG when they are selling a game with serious issues. you go to their forum page for i76 and you'll see the thing is full of people having similar issues with not being able to progress in the game. And this is far from the only one, there are several games on their forums where people are having to use my hacks because I'd run into a game and just have to keep trying different things until I found a way around the problem which i would promptly post.
So while i love and will keep buying from GOG I really wish they'd do a little more testing or at least give you a heads up if there are serious issues. But this is something I've been pointing out for awhile now folks, its not the DOS games that are gonna end up lost, DOSBox has that down pat, its the Win9X era games because so many of them used hacks to squeeze more performance out, what we need is a "Win9X Box" that will simulate say a 733MHz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that will fake all the quirks that devs would use back then.
Oh and one final nit to pick....why is the GOG guys getting screwed on prices? When you see a game like Grimloack that both GOG and Steam has Steam nearly always has it cheaper, and of course on the sales its not even close, the last sale where i saw they both had it GOG was selling the game for $7, steam for $3. WTH devs, you punishing GOG for not having DRM? Because i find it hard to believe Valve is gonna be taking a loss on a game, sale or not. So if valve is getting the same cut all I can figure is either the GOG guys are taking a bigger slice (thus making the devs charge more to come out with the same profit on their end) or you are giving Valve better prices than you are giving GOG.
Uhhh...last I checked there is a 64 bit Flash for Windows and it runs just fine...I have it installed in Pale Moon X64 on my hexacore at home.
But that don't change the fact that since chrome came out and started drinking their milkshake FF has gone downhill with regards to low power devices, as I said i have to support all kinds of systems, from the latest multicores to Atoms and older office machines and FF since V6 has just been terrible on these. SD video is a slideshow, opening new tabs, hell even scrolling bookmarks can cause FF to peg the CPU at 100% and even make the UI unresponsive, that is simply unacceptable.
So while i hope that they fix it, as I have yet to find a replacement for the FF "download as MP4 or FLV" YouTube plugin which some of my home users love, so far I've tried every new release, as well as several variants like Waterfox and IceDragon and Pale Moon and so far no dice, they ALL peg the CPU, which leads me to believe its a problem with Gecko.
Because, despite the joker below you who obviously don't know shit, you will only run single tasks on a 10-12 inch screen because frankly you won't be able to see to run multiple programs, whereas with the 15.6 inch screen you'll have your browser, and your chat, and maybe your email, its a hell of a lot easier to run more programs on a big screen than it is a small...and the fact i actually have to fricking explain that just shows how far this site has fallen, I swear each year it gets more like Reddit than/.
You got Win 7 to run on an ARM tablet? Yeah, I think maybe you got one of those "chinamart specials" running an android with a Windows skin, because according to the website of the company that makes it its running a TI OMAP quad, I don't think Win 7 ever supported ARM.
Waste your mod points guys, it won't change reality and reality is this...In Linux you just changed the registry for...dum dum dum...INI files shat all over the place! Yes that is SO much better, lets just shit INI files all over the place, THAT'S the ticket!
Riddle me this..is there an EASY way to restore one of those INI files if it gets fucked? like maybe a simple keypress that would...oh i don't know...restore the last known good config perhaps? There isn't? How about a way to just send someone an INI file that will fix a particular problem they are having just by going "clicky clicky" and not having to put in an assload of CLI, like say how I can reset the windows sound server with a 14Kb reg file? There isn't?
Sorry but going back to the days of Win 3.x is NOT progress, its regress. Of course as long as Torvalds is running the show frankly nothing will change hell the man even says "let the devs do it" when it comes to drivers which THE MATH DON'T WORK because you have x number of devs and X+YYYYYYY number of drivers, but suuure, you call that progress all you want. that's why all the B&Ms carry...oh wait a tick, nobody sells Linux systems but online..I wonder why that is? perhaps because they don't have to support the creaky mess once it goes out the door?
But at the end of the day nobody cares about "freedom! (TM)" when it comes to OSes, they really really don't. if they did Apple wouldn't have lines around the block for their latest iDevice and MSFT wouldn't be able to sell millions of a turkey like Win 8. at the end of the day you either make a good product or STFU, Linux has tons of show stoppers but rather than ADMIT those problems and fix them instead you expect the world to do things YOUR way, to embrace CLI (Protip: It ain't 1979 anymore, let go of the fucking command line you damned nerd, its a desktop NOT a server) and deal with everything being like the shifting sand. Instead now that the antitrust is over MSFT can just lock that shit down and since you never made a compelling product nobody will care that you are locked out.
But what to me is fucking sad is you have had OVER HALF A DECADE to pull your collective heads out your asses and compete, Ballmer is a pathetic CEO and if you would have made even a halfway decent product the OEMs would have been happy to get away from iSteve 2.0, instead it was the same nerdish circle jerking and elitist bullshit and surprise! The OEMs will put up with iBallmer rather than deal with you. If the fact that Ballmer keeps raising the prices and fucking over the OEMs trying to ape Apple and they'd STILL rather deal with that instead of you don't smack you with a cluebat nothing will. this is why I've blocked Linux articles, go tired of the bullshit and the batshit crazy...you can keep your "freedom", I'd rather have a product that works, thanks anyway.
"And 97% say ACs with quotes pulled out of their asses are worthless". It takes less than 2 minutes to register, if you want anyone to take anything you say seriously don't be a lazy bastard, okay?
Congrats, you chose...wisely. The ONE place where Win 8 is actually better than Win 7 IMHO is on HTPCs, the metro UI gives you nice big targets to hit and makes the perfect 10 foot UI. That is why i say "its all about choosing the right tool for the job" because even Win 8 has a place its good and that is HTPC.
If you hadn't already gone with Win 8 I would have actually recommended a version of Linux, specifically OpenELEC as they have pre-built versions for the various chips including Atom, is really light on resources, and has XBMC for its 10 foot UI. So if you get tired of Win 8 or just want to try something new give it a shot, it even works well with more wireless remotes.
As for running a VM? Frankly nothing beats the pirate versions of Windows called "Tiny windows" as they have stripped ALL the bullshit to make Windows as light as possible while still running a good 95%+ of the software. it was originally cooked up by gamers who wanted an ultra stripped down windows so they'd have more resources for their games but it also kicks ass in VMs. Their version of XP only uses 67Mb of RAM fully patched, their version of 2K3 86Mb, Win 7 around 130Mb, and they even managed to get Vista down to 385Mb of RAM. Hey they are tweakers not miracle workers. But all you have to do is swap their cracked key with your own and voila! A legal copy of Windows that has already been pre-tweaked for VM usage. Frankly MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes 'em, I put TinyXP against embedded XP and winFLP and it curbstomped both when it came to resource usage, which is why the Tiny versions make great VMs.
Heck that"s nothing, here at the shop I'm typing this on a circa 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz I use as a nettop, it has a dual boot XP/7 and both run just fine, it has 2Gb of RAM which maxes out the board but other than that its pretty much stock. I'm thinking about trying to slap a mobile Athlon in here next week (just to see if I can, supposedly a lot of these socket 754s could take the mobile chips) but it does everything you'd expect a nettop to do, surfs, downloads, hell it'll even play SD flash videos smooth.
So while i agree one can do just fine on an older machine i just have to ask...a P4? Really? You DO know those were power hogs, right? Maybe you should look into swapping that board for one of those cheap AMD E350 boards, it idles at around 6w, maxes out less than 20w and with a dual core APU you'd get better performance and not be wasting power and cooling on the piggie P4. I'm all for saving old gear from the scrapheap but there is a reason why i sell all the P4 and Pentium D systems that comes through my door while keeping the AMD, the difference in power and heat really isn't funny.
You are using the wrong AV then, just use what I use at the shop and give to my customers which is Comodo Internet Security Free. Its lightweight, only uses 60Mb-90Mb depending on what features you use, has by default sandboxing, and while the defaults are logical and sane you can tweak to your heart's content so you only have what you want. For example i don't IM or use download mail so those features are turned off. Its really nice and its the only one that i know of that is free for personal AND business use,they make their money on the server products and web services.
Of course anybody that got one of the BF laptops will have to clean off a Horton or mcCrappy infection, I call it an infection because frankly I've seen malware that uses less resources than those two, but once that crap is gone and a decent AV like Comodo or Avast Free (my former "go to" and still nice, just too chatty for my taste now) is put on? Well then even a netbook will purr like a kitten. Oh and i'm sure some will say "What about MSE? its super low resource!" yes it is but frankly it is really only good for geeks, as I've found that while it catches bugs in downloaded files just fine it sucks ass at drive bys. With something like Comodo or Avast you have MUCH better drive by protection as both do scan before load on web pages which MSE don't and this when combined with a low rights browser like any of the Chromium variants makes it pretty damned hard to infect Vista/7/8. In fact the last time I saw one of those pwned the user uninstalled his AV so he could install a "porn codec" which of course was just a trojan that filled the system with malware.
Trust me, I have customers that can get more viruses than a Bangkok whore on coupon day and if Comodo can survive them without letting the machine get pwned? Then it'll work for anybody.
Oh lord, did you REALLY just do the Braveheart "They can't take away our FREEDUM!" bit? Seriously?
And frankly Win 7 runs great even on low power devices, I have an E350 netbook and it is pretty damned snappy with win 7, I can even plug it into an HDTV and watch full 1080P. And while I fricking HATE the Metro UI even I'll admit they have made the underlying OS faster, it boots faster, uses less memory (thanks to killing Aero, which is the first thing i do on a Win 7 build) its just a damned shame that they had to wrap it up in a "LOL I Iz A Cellphone LOL" UI.
But to say that MSFT can't write a good OS is just the height of arrogance, its elitist horseshit to make little nerds feel good about themselves by ignoring the fact that there are literally hundreds of millions of Windows installs out there and you know what? people are happy with them, it does what they want it to do.
Except they are NOT selling "cheap but good" like the EEE (I have one myself, a 1215B that is a couple of years old now, runs great) but instead "cheap and shit" like jamming desktop chips into laptops, garbage fans, just total crap.
In fact if you kept up with the BF sales there wasn't a SINGLE netbook in the bunch, they were all crap 15 inchers. The one I had to laugh the hardest at was the one where they stuffed an AMD C series (a VERY weak chip that is designed for 10-12 inchers) into a fricking 15.6 inch laptop, complete with DVD burner! Yeah like you are gonna be making DVD movies on a Bobcat with a top speed of 1.3Ghz.
So I would agree completely if they had been selling netbooks, when you have a 10-12 inch screen at 1366x768 frankly you can have a weak chip and still do decently, heck my EEE even does 1080P over HDMI as long as that is ALL its doing, but the chips they were stuffing into these full sized laptops just were just not made to do what they have them doing..
No shit, you know how many of those damned things i have thrown in the garbage over the years at the shop? its ALWAYS the same, either they put a desktop chip in a laptop (no shit, I've seen DESKTOP Athlons and Celerons stuffed into a crap laptop) or they put a shit fan, but either way the POS cooks so i end up having to convert the drive into an external and pick them up something that is actually usable.
So please warn those around you to stay FAR away from these piles of shit. If they truly have NO money and want something cheap? get an off lease or a refurb, hell you can get a netbook for less than $150 at Cowboom and at least they won't roast and fall apart in a month.
Its horrible performance on FB is one of the reasons my customers are using a Chromium variant right now. Does anybody know how it does as far as CPU loading? I have to support a lot of low power systems and since around FF V6 its been completely unusable, especially for watching SD video, but even opening new tabs can cause FF to slam the CPU to 100%.
Anyway i don't mess with beta software anymore (enough bugs in the releases, thanks ever so) but if anybody has a low power AMD bobcat or Intel Atom I would like to know how this compares to Chrome.
Oh please! You make it sound like its some big hard problem! Just use PC Decrappifier takes five minutes IF that, and call it a day. It'll not only clean out the trialware but any extra crap the OEM puts to sell their own stuff (such as all the HP services crap) and it takes just a couple of clicks and all done.
And I would remind everyone that Sony offered a few years back to sell any PC you wanted crap free for just $50 extra, they had so few takers they quit bothering. Personally I'll keep the $50 and take 5 minutes to clean the crap on a laptop, desktops i build my own.
This is why my little shop has been AMD exclusive for the past 5 years, you just can't beat the bang for the buck from AMD.
As far as boards I prefer Asrock but since it looks like Asus is gonna buy Asrock its gonna be AsusRock whether i like it or not, i just hope Asus keeps the Asrock brand and the cool features, Asrock has always added great features to their boards like X-FastUSB (bypasses the Windows USB stack and gives you a hell of a speedboost on USB 2 and just insane speeds on USB 3) and X-FastLAN (great tool which lets you tailor your bandwidth on a per application basis, great if you are playing online) and just a ton of great OCing features and little extras in the BIOS.
I've been thinking of getting another, simply because this board only supports DDR 2, but since it already has 8Gb of RAM and since i haven't found any programs that can use up the RAM I got, plus the fact that I went Win 7 Home on this build (what can I say, I got it for $40 for preordering) so it can only hold 16gb anyway? meh, I think I'll just stick with this board and add a caching SSD and a new GPU instead.
But you are right about XP, I just wanted to warn those that were used to the fact you could switch boards with XP and not have the OS refuse to boot. If you try to replace NBs on win 7 it will NOT run, you'll have to do a full re-install, even a repair install won't cut the mustard. So if you have say an AMD 7xx board any other 7xx will work, an 8xx will probably work, but an Nvidia or Intel board will NOT work without a clean install. I don't know about you but I've had this install since Oct 09 and it purrs like a kitten so i have ZERO desire in starting over from scratch, hell my software alone would probably take a week.
So I'll keep right on using AMD here at the shop, I mean you can get quads for $60, what's not to like? And if you have older systems I would STRONGLY suggest you check out Starmicro, if you think an upgrade gives you a kick in the pants on a new system just see how big a difference a new chip can make in an old system. I've bought a ton from them and they don't sell junk, just goot chips at cheap prices.
You've never actually been poor, have you? those are the laws for the rich folks, I've known plenty of poor folks that have spent anywhere from 3-5 days in jail before just being let go, and good fucking luck finding a lawyer that will take up your case.
You should really come down to the meth highway and get a nice taste of REAL America, its a place where a couple of guys can get run over on a train track with the engineer saying they were covered in a police tarp at the time only to have the ME rule they had "passed out on the tracks due to marijuana intoxication" (yeah no shit, they actually used THAT as an excuse) or the guy that was shot, stabbed, beaten, and thrown off the bridge...cause of death? Suicide...snicker snicker. And nobody is gonna say jack shit about any of it because its common knowledge the last snitch was handed by the cops to a local brutal drug trafficker who "pulled a Fargo" on him without killing him first.
yeah...really don't matter what your little rule books say if nobody cares about that shit. watch the video i linked to, cops acting no different than the gangbangers and then realize less than 2% of those in the video even got fired for that shit.
They are faking the living shit out of it, just like the "N64 fog" by keeping the perspective low, using lots of small spaces, other classic tricks, and even then they are still running into the wall.
At the end of the day you just can't change the fact that the ARM arch just won't scale up to the levels of even a first gen Core Solo, it just won't. it was designed to be a low heat, low power chip and there is really nothing you can do to change the fact it has piss poor IPC short of throwing out the entire design and starting over. I mean you are JUST NOW having ARM reach the IPC of an early prescott P4, and they have to use a JavaScript test tailored to ARM's strengths to have it "win" in that situation, otherwise that damned near decade old P4 still stomps it. and this is AFTER millions have been sunk by multiple companies trying to get the IPC up. Remember Nvidia is pretty much betting the farm on ARM after Intel cut them out of the IGP business and Apple kicked them for AMD GPUs so this is pretty much it, do or die, and they still can't get the IPC up.
At the end of the day you are pouring jet fuel into a moped motor and trying to get it to match the performance of the jet, its just not gonna happen. As AMD found out you can only throw more cores at it so long before you end up having to cripple the cores to squeeze more of them in and get under the TDP, and I just don't see ARM going up above hexacore, again it just doesn't scale well.
If you don't have any account numbers how in the hell do you tell the paying customers from freeloaders? Just take their word on it?
I'm sorry but if you don't even have account numbers or some other easy way to tell the freeloaders from paying customers then your getting a bad rep is the least of your problems.
A word of advice Billy about Windows and motherboards...know what fucks people more than anything? Northbridge as Windows does NOT like you switching Northbridges and you'll often have to do a full re-install if you switch from say an Nvidia to AMD Northbridge and vice versa.
This is why when I decided to give my AMD Deneb quad board to my youngest i took my time and found a board with a similar Northbridge because sure enough just to see if MSFT had fixed the problem i tried plugging the drive into a new board with an Nvidia Northbridge and nope! I would have had to go full re-install if I switched. But since I was careful about which Northbridge I went with I was able to swap out pretty much every part on the computer, board, CPU, GPU,RAM, even changed out the 500Gb for a 2Tb and only had a single re-activation that took less than 10 seconds online.
So if you don't mind wiping and reinstalling? You can switch anything for anything, never had an activation take more than a couple of minutes by phone, most passed online in seconds, but Windows does NOT like it when you switch NBs on anything newer than XP, and even on XP it'll tend to make the system buggy. But since i stuck with an AMD NB I was able to go from a board that maxed out at a Phenom II quad (oh its SAYS it'll do a hexacore but MSI are lying sacks of shit, it won't even post on anything bigger than a quad) to a board that will take the latest octocores and still keep my RTM Win 7 install.
Oh and I agree with you about how nice it is to do CPU upgrades a word of warning...most of those CPU compatibility lists? LIES. What I have found is nearly all the AM2+ and AM3 boards will max out at Deneb, they will NOT take a Zosma or Thuban or newer, because the boards can't supply the voltages for turbocore. Most of the board manufacturers simply looked at the TDP to decide what would work without actually testing and any chip with turbocore that says 95w is actually required to have closer to 107w when turbocore kicks in and so won't even POST in a board that was built before TC came out, compatibility lists be damned. that means the most your board will support is a Deneb based quad but NOT any higher, just FYI so you don't waste money down the line on a chip that won't fit.
BTW if you want a cheap triple of quad for the box just go to Starmicroas I've been buying from them for years and you can get great deals on just about any socket by Intel and AMD. If you are not gaming the Phenom X3 for $53 is quite nice, built several office boxes with those and they are good chips. They also have the low power AMD Phenom quad for $68, those are great for HTPCs and for really quiet office boxes. Just FYI.
There is only one place locally that does that where I will do business, a little pizza shop but only because they put their money where their mouth is. They give discounts if you bring in a toy for the Xmas toy drive for example, they also support and match donations given to a local shelter for unwanted and abandoned kids.
So yeah, living in the south I can say there are a LOT of places that just use it as a marketing gimmick, but there are still a few that actually put their money where their mouth is and try to support good causes. Frankly it don't take much digging to find out which are horseshit and which are on the line, and even though I don't believe I have no problem supporting a business that is truly trying to help out the poor, especially kids. After all with the economy this bad frankly any of us could end up down and out so its nice to see a few places that still try to keep the idea of helping out the helpless during this season alive. If it gives their business a boost? I'm happy for them, just as I'll now be taking all my print jobs to the place down the street as they went out and bought a dozen turkeys and hams and had a big cookout in the backyard of my apt building, just so all the folks with no family in the apts around here wouldn't go without a traditional thanksgiving dinner. I thought that was a damned nice gesture and have no problem supporting a business that does things like that to help the folks around them.
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Because its a fricking DESKTOP, not a server! For the love of God are nerds fricking clueless! Let me spell it out..on a desktop CLI should be optional but NEVER mandatory, but in Linux its the opposite. In fact I dare you to remove CLI access and go for one year, just one, on a Linux desktop without it and you'll find it just can't be done because the devs are lazy ass ubernerds whose answer to EVERY problem is "open up bash and type". in fact I bet if you want to...ohh lets say Ubuntu forums, you know, the "Linux for humans" distro? Yeah go there and remove EVERY post that has "open up bash and type" in it guess what you'd have? A forum whose posts could be counted on one hand!
There is a REASON why OSX and Windows don't start at a CLI prompt you know, its because most users consider CLI a DO NOT WANT yet rather than take in the fact that its been GUIs since nineteen fricking eighty eight the devs in their arrogance, just like you are doing RIGHT NOW, say "The CLI is faster, its leet!" which of course is BULLSHIT, its completely non discoverable and ONLY good for two tasks...scripting and repeatative actions. Well how many HOME users are writing scripts? Running batch files? You could put every single one that would fall under that description in your average HS gym and have seats left over, its THAT small a niche among home users.
But don't worry, the devs don't give a crap if Linux stays at 1% so it'll be Windows boxes as far as the eye can see simply because it would mean lazy devs would actually have to learn to write decent UIs instead of leaning on CLI like a crutch. This is also why no matter how hard MSFT screws the OEMs they'll take it, even though your product is "free" because they know the cost of support will shoot through the roof and quickly make Windows the CHEAPER OS by far. This is why every major B&M has dabbled in Linux only to come running back to MSFT, you tell home users to "open up bash and type" and they are gonna be bringing that unit back and demanding windows Home where they don't have to do that shit instead.
Now just to be fair AC not ALL older machines are bad....just the P4 because netburst was a power hog. The socket 754 and 939 Athlon/Duron/Semprons were good on power, just avoid the socket A as the first runs didn't have a thermal monitor and were easy to cook, early core chips such as the Core Solo and the Core based Celerons were also good on power, and of course while the IGPs suuuucked the first gen Atoms were really great when it came to power as well.
But there is a reason i'm staring at a Pentium D MCE box that I'm gonna be selling while keeping the 754 Sempron, and that is because with its long pipes the netburst chips just belched out the heat while going through power like a drunk goes through a free minibar. Even though that Pentium D has easily 3 times the performance it probably puts out 6 times the heat and easily sucks more than triple the power of the Sempron, that Sempron at max load uses less than a Smithfield Pentium D at idle, they were THAT bad when it came to power.
I don't think I'd recommend hanging onto a late model P3 though, the caps will be getting pretty brittle by now and when they go they often take the box and sometimes the monitor with them. if I wanted something low power and couldn't find a Sempron or Athlon lying around I'd go for an E350 or an Atom mini-board, with both of those you be using less than 20w under load and idling in the single digits. if you are gonna run a system 24/7/365 and don't need the crazy performance from it they would be your best bet.
If it has the single "download" button in YouTube I'd sure appreciate it Crosshair, i have a lot of older customers that like to download little funny videos and send them to their relatives (yes I know they could just send the links, but they don't want to, they want to send the videos, and as the tech its my job to make sure they can do what they want to do with their machine, even if its dumb) and frankly I haven't found anything that is THAT simple, i install it and they just have a big "download" button under the video, hell my mom could figure out how to use that.
The few I've found were not only a PITA to install but frankly required a bunch of steps to get the video, that isn't gonna cut it with home users, simpler the better is the way to go. So if you know a way i'm all ears, just shoot it in an email to the address in my UID if you don't mind as I'm getting a lot of posts responded to so this one is probably gonna be buried soon. Thanks.
Did you REALLY just compare a netburst P4 to a Sempron? Really? Don't know much about arches do you? hell that Sempron at max load uses less than a Prescott AT IDLE. And as I said one of the nice things about socket 754 is that you can use MOBILE Athlons in them...you know...laptop chips? As in even lower heat and deeper sleep states?
So I'm sorry but some older chips are GOOD, some older chips are BAD when it comes to power. pretty much all of the netburst P4s are giant power hogs, Intel was able to get the clocks so high by just throwing ever more voltage at it, while the 754 and 939 AMDs were actually pretty damned good when it came to power. as you can see here I can put a Mobile Athlon with a max of just 35w which puts the idle around 14w and the cost? $9. so there really is no comparison, Netburst from the same period was already over 86w and rising so it makes sense to chunk those. The Sempron I have in there now maxes at 42w and I'll be able to drop it even lower thank to the mobile having PowerNow to drop the clock when it isn't needed, so its easily worth the $9 upgrade over spending $120 ($100 for the board plus $20 for the RAM) for the E350. The guy I was talking to was running a middle period P4 (probably Prescott which was one of the worst by the age he gave for the system) so in his case the amount of power and heat that thing went through made it worth switching out.
Lets see...cowards cowards AAAANNNNDDD cowards. Have some fucking balls and be man enough to post from your account, don't be a bunch of pussies and hide behind AC. using AC only shows you truly ARE a coward, or you are too fucking lazy to spend the whole 3 minutes making an account...hmmm...a chicken or a lazy slob...now WHY should anybody listen to you again?
What I love is there is no jumping through hoops or messing with cracks. i want a game on my netbook which doesn't have a DVD drive? no problem, just drag the .exe over and run it.
But I'm about to get serious hate for pointing this out but fuck it, it needs to be said...they really really REALLY need to more testing on their games! Case in point i76, that game uses the CPU clock as a timer for several in game events so this game does NOT like modern multicores, yet there is zero warning that this game is gonna require hacks and tinkering to get to run. I went through every trick on the forums before giving up and while its only $10 its still not looking good on GOG when they are selling a game with serious issues. you go to their forum page for i76 and you'll see the thing is full of people having similar issues with not being able to progress in the game. And this is far from the only one, there are several games on their forums where people are having to use my hacks because I'd run into a game and just have to keep trying different things until I found a way around the problem which i would promptly post.
So while i love and will keep buying from GOG I really wish they'd do a little more testing or at least give you a heads up if there are serious issues. But this is something I've been pointing out for awhile now folks, its not the DOS games that are gonna end up lost, DOSBox has that down pat, its the Win9X era games because so many of them used hacks to squeeze more performance out, what we need is a "Win9X Box" that will simulate say a 733MHz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that will fake all the quirks that devs would use back then.
Oh and one final nit to pick....why is the GOG guys getting screwed on prices? When you see a game like Grimloack that both GOG and Steam has Steam nearly always has it cheaper, and of course on the sales its not even close, the last sale where i saw they both had it GOG was selling the game for $7, steam for $3. WTH devs, you punishing GOG for not having DRM? Because i find it hard to believe Valve is gonna be taking a loss on a game, sale or not. So if valve is getting the same cut all I can figure is either the GOG guys are taking a bigger slice (thus making the devs charge more to come out with the same profit on their end) or you are giving Valve better prices than you are giving GOG.
Uhhh...last I checked there is a 64 bit Flash for Windows and it runs just fine...I have it installed in Pale Moon X64 on my hexacore at home.
But that don't change the fact that since chrome came out and started drinking their milkshake FF has gone downhill with regards to low power devices, as I said i have to support all kinds of systems, from the latest multicores to Atoms and older office machines and FF since V6 has just been terrible on these. SD video is a slideshow, opening new tabs, hell even scrolling bookmarks can cause FF to peg the CPU at 100% and even make the UI unresponsive, that is simply unacceptable.
So while i hope that they fix it, as I have yet to find a replacement for the FF "download as MP4 or FLV" YouTube plugin which some of my home users love, so far I've tried every new release, as well as several variants like Waterfox and IceDragon and Pale Moon and so far no dice, they ALL peg the CPU, which leads me to believe its a problem with Gecko.
Because, despite the joker below you who obviously don't know shit, you will only run single tasks on a 10-12 inch screen because frankly you won't be able to see to run multiple programs, whereas with the 15.6 inch screen you'll have your browser, and your chat, and maybe your email, its a hell of a lot easier to run more programs on a big screen than it is a small...and the fact i actually have to fricking explain that just shows how far this site has fallen, I swear each year it gets more like Reddit than /.
You got Win 7 to run on an ARM tablet? Yeah, I think maybe you got one of those "chinamart specials" running an android with a Windows skin, because according to the website of the company that makes it its running a TI OMAP quad, I don't think Win 7 ever supported ARM.
Waste your mod points guys, it won't change reality and reality is this...In Linux you just changed the registry for...dum dum dum...INI files shat all over the place! Yes that is SO much better, lets just shit INI files all over the place, THAT'S the ticket!
Riddle me this..is there an EASY way to restore one of those INI files if it gets fucked? like maybe a simple keypress that would...oh i don't know...restore the last known good config perhaps? There isn't? How about a way to just send someone an INI file that will fix a particular problem they are having just by going "clicky clicky" and not having to put in an assload of CLI, like say how I can reset the windows sound server with a 14Kb reg file? There isn't?
Sorry but going back to the days of Win 3.x is NOT progress, its regress. Of course as long as Torvalds is running the show frankly nothing will change hell the man even says "let the devs do it" when it comes to drivers which THE MATH DON'T WORK because you have x number of devs and X+YYYYYYY number of drivers, but suuure, you call that progress all you want. that's why all the B&Ms carry...oh wait a tick, nobody sells Linux systems but online..I wonder why that is? perhaps because they don't have to support the creaky mess once it goes out the door?
But at the end of the day nobody cares about "freedom! (TM)" when it comes to OSes, they really really don't. if they did Apple wouldn't have lines around the block for their latest iDevice and MSFT wouldn't be able to sell millions of a turkey like Win 8. at the end of the day you either make a good product or STFU, Linux has tons of show stoppers but rather than ADMIT those problems and fix them instead you expect the world to do things YOUR way, to embrace CLI (Protip: It ain't 1979 anymore, let go of the fucking command line you damned nerd, its a desktop NOT a server) and deal with everything being like the shifting sand. Instead now that the antitrust is over MSFT can just lock that shit down and since you never made a compelling product nobody will care that you are locked out.
But what to me is fucking sad is you have had OVER HALF A DECADE to pull your collective heads out your asses and compete, Ballmer is a pathetic CEO and if you would have made even a halfway decent product the OEMs would have been happy to get away from iSteve 2.0, instead it was the same nerdish circle jerking and elitist bullshit and surprise! The OEMs will put up with iBallmer rather than deal with you. If the fact that Ballmer keeps raising the prices and fucking over the OEMs trying to ape Apple and they'd STILL rather deal with that instead of you don't smack you with a cluebat nothing will. this is why I've blocked Linux articles, go tired of the bullshit and the batshit crazy...you can keep your "freedom", I'd rather have a product that works, thanks anyway.
"And 97% say ACs with quotes pulled out of their asses are worthless". It takes less than 2 minutes to register, if you want anyone to take anything you say seriously don't be a lazy bastard, okay?
Congrats, you chose...wisely. The ONE place where Win 8 is actually better than Win 7 IMHO is on HTPCs, the metro UI gives you nice big targets to hit and makes the perfect 10 foot UI. That is why i say "its all about choosing the right tool for the job" because even Win 8 has a place its good and that is HTPC.
If you hadn't already gone with Win 8 I would have actually recommended a version of Linux, specifically OpenELEC as they have pre-built versions for the various chips including Atom, is really light on resources, and has XBMC for its 10 foot UI. So if you get tired of Win 8 or just want to try something new give it a shot, it even works well with more wireless remotes.
As for running a VM? Frankly nothing beats the pirate versions of Windows called "Tiny windows" as they have stripped ALL the bullshit to make Windows as light as possible while still running a good 95%+ of the software. it was originally cooked up by gamers who wanted an ultra stripped down windows so they'd have more resources for their games but it also kicks ass in VMs. Their version of XP only uses 67Mb of RAM fully patched, their version of 2K3 86Mb, Win 7 around 130Mb, and they even managed to get Vista down to 385Mb of RAM. Hey they are tweakers not miracle workers. But all you have to do is swap their cracked key with your own and voila! A legal copy of Windows that has already been pre-tweaked for VM usage. Frankly MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes 'em, I put TinyXP against embedded XP and winFLP and it curbstomped both when it came to resource usage, which is why the Tiny versions make great VMs.
Heck that"s nothing, here at the shop I'm typing this on a circa 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz I use as a nettop, it has a dual boot XP/7 and both run just fine, it has 2Gb of RAM which maxes out the board but other than that its pretty much stock. I'm thinking about trying to slap a mobile Athlon in here next week (just to see if I can, supposedly a lot of these socket 754s could take the mobile chips) but it does everything you'd expect a nettop to do, surfs, downloads, hell it'll even play SD flash videos smooth.
So while i agree one can do just fine on an older machine i just have to ask...a P4? Really? You DO know those were power hogs, right? Maybe you should look into swapping that board for one of those cheap AMD E350 boards, it idles at around 6w, maxes out less than 20w and with a dual core APU you'd get better performance and not be wasting power and cooling on the piggie P4. I'm all for saving old gear from the scrapheap but there is a reason why i sell all the P4 and Pentium D systems that comes through my door while keeping the AMD, the difference in power and heat really isn't funny.
You are using the wrong AV then, just use what I use at the shop and give to my customers which is Comodo Internet Security Free. Its lightweight, only uses 60Mb-90Mb depending on what features you use, has by default sandboxing, and while the defaults are logical and sane you can tweak to your heart's content so you only have what you want. For example i don't IM or use download mail so those features are turned off. Its really nice and its the only one that i know of that is free for personal AND business use,they make their money on the server products and web services.
Of course anybody that got one of the BF laptops will have to clean off a Horton or mcCrappy infection, I call it an infection because frankly I've seen malware that uses less resources than those two, but once that crap is gone and a decent AV like Comodo or Avast Free (my former "go to" and still nice, just too chatty for my taste now) is put on? Well then even a netbook will purr like a kitten. Oh and i'm sure some will say "What about MSE? its super low resource!" yes it is but frankly it is really only good for geeks, as I've found that while it catches bugs in downloaded files just fine it sucks ass at drive bys. With something like Comodo or Avast you have MUCH better drive by protection as both do scan before load on web pages which MSE don't and this when combined with a low rights browser like any of the Chromium variants makes it pretty damned hard to infect Vista/7/8. In fact the last time I saw one of those pwned the user uninstalled his AV so he could install a "porn codec" which of course was just a trojan that filled the system with malware.
Trust me, I have customers that can get more viruses than a Bangkok whore on coupon day and if Comodo can survive them without letting the machine get pwned? Then it'll work for anybody.
Oh lord, did you REALLY just do the Braveheart "They can't take away our FREEDUM!" bit? Seriously?
And frankly Win 7 runs great even on low power devices, I have an E350 netbook and it is pretty damned snappy with win 7, I can even plug it into an HDTV and watch full 1080P. And while I fricking HATE the Metro UI even I'll admit they have made the underlying OS faster, it boots faster, uses less memory (thanks to killing Aero, which is the first thing i do on a Win 7 build) its just a damned shame that they had to wrap it up in a "LOL I Iz A Cellphone LOL" UI.
But to say that MSFT can't write a good OS is just the height of arrogance, its elitist horseshit to make little nerds feel good about themselves by ignoring the fact that there are literally hundreds of millions of Windows installs out there and you know what? people are happy with them, it does what they want it to do.
Except they are NOT selling "cheap but good" like the EEE (I have one myself, a 1215B that is a couple of years old now, runs great) but instead "cheap and shit" like jamming desktop chips into laptops, garbage fans, just total crap.
In fact if you kept up with the BF sales there wasn't a SINGLE netbook in the bunch, they were all crap 15 inchers. The one I had to laugh the hardest at was the one where they stuffed an AMD C series (a VERY weak chip that is designed for 10-12 inchers) into a fricking 15.6 inch laptop, complete with DVD burner! Yeah like you are gonna be making DVD movies on a Bobcat with a top speed of 1.3Ghz.
So I would agree completely if they had been selling netbooks, when you have a 10-12 inch screen at 1366x768 frankly you can have a weak chip and still do decently, heck my EEE even does 1080P over HDMI as long as that is ALL its doing, but the chips they were stuffing into these full sized laptops just were just not made to do what they have them doing..
No shit, you know how many of those damned things i have thrown in the garbage over the years at the shop? its ALWAYS the same, either they put a desktop chip in a laptop (no shit, I've seen DESKTOP Athlons and Celerons stuffed into a crap laptop) or they put a shit fan, but either way the POS cooks so i end up having to convert the drive into an external and pick them up something that is actually usable.
So please warn those around you to stay FAR away from these piles of shit. If they truly have NO money and want something cheap? get an off lease or a refurb, hell you can get a netbook for less than $150 at Cowboom and at least they won't roast and fall apart in a month.
Its horrible performance on FB is one of the reasons my customers are using a Chromium variant right now. Does anybody know how it does as far as CPU loading? I have to support a lot of low power systems and since around FF V6 its been completely unusable, especially for watching SD video, but even opening new tabs can cause FF to slam the CPU to 100%.
Anyway i don't mess with beta software anymore (enough bugs in the releases, thanks ever so) but if anybody has a low power AMD bobcat or Intel Atom I would like to know how this compares to Chrome.
Oh please! You make it sound like its some big hard problem! Just use PC Decrappifier takes five minutes IF that, and call it a day. It'll not only clean out the trialware but any extra crap the OEM puts to sell their own stuff (such as all the HP services crap) and it takes just a couple of clicks and all done.
And I would remind everyone that Sony offered a few years back to sell any PC you wanted crap free for just $50 extra, they had so few takers they quit bothering. Personally I'll keep the $50 and take 5 minutes to clean the crap on a laptop, desktops i build my own.
This is why my little shop has been AMD exclusive for the past 5 years, you just can't beat the bang for the buck from AMD.
As far as boards I prefer Asrock but since it looks like Asus is gonna buy Asrock its gonna be AsusRock whether i like it or not, i just hope Asus keeps the Asrock brand and the cool features, Asrock has always added great features to their boards like X-FastUSB (bypasses the Windows USB stack and gives you a hell of a speedboost on USB 2 and just insane speeds on USB 3) and X-FastLAN (great tool which lets you tailor your bandwidth on a per application basis, great if you are playing online) and just a ton of great OCing features and little extras in the BIOS.
I've been thinking of getting another, simply because this board only supports DDR 2, but since it already has 8Gb of RAM and since i haven't found any programs that can use up the RAM I got, plus the fact that I went Win 7 Home on this build (what can I say, I got it for $40 for preordering) so it can only hold 16gb anyway? meh, I think I'll just stick with this board and add a caching SSD and a new GPU instead.
But you are right about XP, I just wanted to warn those that were used to the fact you could switch boards with XP and not have the OS refuse to boot. If you try to replace NBs on win 7 it will NOT run, you'll have to do a full re-install, even a repair install won't cut the mustard. So if you have say an AMD 7xx board any other 7xx will work, an 8xx will probably work, but an Nvidia or Intel board will NOT work without a clean install. I don't know about you but I've had this install since Oct 09 and it purrs like a kitten so i have ZERO desire in starting over from scratch, hell my software alone would probably take a week.
So I'll keep right on using AMD here at the shop, I mean you can get quads for $60, what's not to like? And if you have older systems I would STRONGLY suggest you check out Starmicro, if you think an upgrade gives you a kick in the pants on a new system just see how big a difference a new chip can make in an old system. I've bought a ton from them and they don't sell junk, just goot chips at cheap prices.
You've never actually been poor, have you? those are the laws for the rich folks, I've known plenty of poor folks that have spent anywhere from 3-5 days in jail before just being let go, and good fucking luck finding a lawyer that will take up your case.
You should really come down to the meth highway and get a nice taste of REAL America, its a place where a couple of guys can get run over on a train track with the engineer saying they were covered in a police tarp at the time only to have the ME rule they had "passed out on the tracks due to marijuana intoxication" (yeah no shit, they actually used THAT as an excuse) or the guy that was shot, stabbed, beaten, and thrown off the bridge...cause of death? Suicide...snicker snicker. And nobody is gonna say jack shit about any of it because its common knowledge the last snitch was handed by the cops to a local brutal drug trafficker who "pulled a Fargo" on him without killing him first.
yeah...really don't matter what your little rule books say if nobody cares about that shit. watch the video i linked to, cops acting no different than the gangbangers and then realize less than 2% of those in the video even got fired for that shit.
They are faking the living shit out of it, just like the "N64 fog" by keeping the perspective low, using lots of small spaces, other classic tricks, and even then they are still running into the wall.
At the end of the day you just can't change the fact that the ARM arch just won't scale up to the levels of even a first gen Core Solo, it just won't. it was designed to be a low heat, low power chip and there is really nothing you can do to change the fact it has piss poor IPC short of throwing out the entire design and starting over. I mean you are JUST NOW having ARM reach the IPC of an early prescott P4, and they have to use a JavaScript test tailored to ARM's strengths to have it "win" in that situation, otherwise that damned near decade old P4 still stomps it. and this is AFTER millions have been sunk by multiple companies trying to get the IPC up. Remember Nvidia is pretty much betting the farm on ARM after Intel cut them out of the IGP business and Apple kicked them for AMD GPUs so this is pretty much it, do or die, and they still can't get the IPC up.
At the end of the day you are pouring jet fuel into a moped motor and trying to get it to match the performance of the jet, its just not gonna happen. As AMD found out you can only throw more cores at it so long before you end up having to cripple the cores to squeeze more of them in and get under the TDP, and I just don't see ARM going up above hexacore, again it just doesn't scale well.
If you don't have any account numbers how in the hell do you tell the paying customers from freeloaders? Just take their word on it?
I'm sorry but if you don't even have account numbers or some other easy way to tell the freeloaders from paying customers then your getting a bad rep is the least of your problems.
A word of advice Billy about Windows and motherboards...know what fucks people more than anything? Northbridge as Windows does NOT like you switching Northbridges and you'll often have to do a full re-install if you switch from say an Nvidia to AMD Northbridge and vice versa.
This is why when I decided to give my AMD Deneb quad board to my youngest i took my time and found a board with a similar Northbridge because sure enough just to see if MSFT had fixed the problem i tried plugging the drive into a new board with an Nvidia Northbridge and nope! I would have had to go full re-install if I switched. But since I was careful about which Northbridge I went with I was able to swap out pretty much every part on the computer, board, CPU, GPU,RAM, even changed out the 500Gb for a 2Tb and only had a single re-activation that took less than 10 seconds online.
So if you don't mind wiping and reinstalling? You can switch anything for anything, never had an activation take more than a couple of minutes by phone, most passed online in seconds, but Windows does NOT like it when you switch NBs on anything newer than XP, and even on XP it'll tend to make the system buggy. But since i stuck with an AMD NB I was able to go from a board that maxed out at a Phenom II quad (oh its SAYS it'll do a hexacore but MSI are lying sacks of shit, it won't even post on anything bigger than a quad) to a board that will take the latest octocores and still keep my RTM Win 7 install.
Oh and I agree with you about how nice it is to do CPU upgrades a word of warning...most of those CPU compatibility lists? LIES. What I have found is nearly all the AM2+ and AM3 boards will max out at Deneb, they will NOT take a Zosma or Thuban or newer, because the boards can't supply the voltages for turbocore. Most of the board manufacturers simply looked at the TDP to decide what would work without actually testing and any chip with turbocore that says 95w is actually required to have closer to 107w when turbocore kicks in and so won't even POST in a board that was built before TC came out, compatibility lists be damned. that means the most your board will support is a Deneb based quad but NOT any higher, just FYI so you don't waste money down the line on a chip that won't fit.
BTW if you want a cheap triple of quad for the box just go to Starmicroas I've been buying from them for years and you can get great deals on just about any socket by Intel and AMD. If you are not gaming the Phenom X3 for $53 is quite nice, built several office boxes with those and they are good chips. They also have the low power AMD Phenom quad for $68, those are great for HTPCs and for really quiet office boxes. Just FYI.
There is only one place locally that does that where I will do business, a little pizza shop but only because they put their money where their mouth is. They give discounts if you bring in a toy for the Xmas toy drive for example, they also support and match donations given to a local shelter for unwanted and abandoned kids.
So yeah, living in the south I can say there are a LOT of places that just use it as a marketing gimmick, but there are still a few that actually put their money where their mouth is and try to support good causes. Frankly it don't take much digging to find out which are horseshit and which are on the line, and even though I don't believe I have no problem supporting a business that is truly trying to help out the poor, especially kids. After all with the economy this bad frankly any of us could end up down and out so its nice to see a few places that still try to keep the idea of helping out the helpless during this season alive. If it gives their business a boost? I'm happy for them, just as I'll now be taking all my print jobs to the place down the street as they went out and bought a dozen turkeys and hams and had a big cookout in the backyard of my apt building, just so all the folks with no family in the apts around here wouldn't go without a traditional thanksgiving dinner. I thought that was a damned nice gesture and have no problem supporting a business that does things like that to help the folks around them.