I'm sorry, I didn't think I needed to clarify the statement that "Bulldozer is AMD's netburst" but since it is obvious that I do need to clarify allow me to do so.
What I meant is that in both cases the company threw out good design practices chasing a single metric, higher clocks in the case of Intel, higher core count per TDP in the case of AMD, and both paid/are paying for it. In both cases you get chips that run hotter, suck more power, and give less IPC.
And having good Linux support really doesn't help when more than 90% of your market is NOT running Linux, you might as well say "Well if the world switched to netBSD all the problems would disappear!" because the world isn't gonna switch to Linux or NetBSD thanks to all the mission critical programs that are Windows only and will never be ported.
And while I agree that theoretically the problems could be partially fixed by the scheduler, in reality MSFT has made it clear they WILL NOT FIX in ANY version of their OS except...Windows 8. Considering Windows 8 is getting press such as Windows 8...Yes its THAT bad and is the source of parody and ridicule you again have the NetBSD problem, as the majority of your potential customers won't run the "fixed" OS so will be gimped if they take your product. If I refuse to run Win 8, would I be better off with Intel or AMD? The choice is obvious as AMD will be crippled on my OS while Intel won't.
In the end I truly believe the only hope left we have for AMD, and this is from someone who hasn't built a single Intel PC since finding out about the bribery and compiler rigging, is that the new chief chip architect they hired away from Apple will right the ship. Because XP is supported until 2014, Vista until 2017, and Win 7 until 2020 and the new chips will run like ass on all of the above. Can AMD afford to literally sit on ass for THAT long, until all the other OSes are no longer used? I don't think so and since they were stupid enough not to give MSFT the heads up as to what was going on and by killing Thuban and the successor to Brazos they've locked themselves into a path where the most hated Windows OS since MS Bob is the ONLY hope they have...bad move AMD, seriously bad move.
Its not. I simply don't like to support abusive business practices. It is on record that Intel bribed the OEMs to take netburst and limit AMD offerings, so badly did they bribe there were several quarters where the ONLY profits Dell saw during the price wars was Intel kickbacks, and to this very day Intel rigs their compiler so that if it isn't an Intel chip any code compiled with ICC is gimped. Take a Via chip (the only one you can change the CPUID on) and replace "Centaur Hauls" with "Genuine Intel" and gasp! The chip runs 30% faster, with just a CPUID change! Isn't that amazing?
So it doesn't have a damned thing due to being a "fanboi" of one or the other, it has to do with putting my money where my mouth is and refusing to support abusive practices. I also won't buy Apple as I refuse to be placed in a walled garden, I refuse to buy games that have always online DRM or online passes, does that make me a "fanboi" because I won't support being screwed without lube? I'll be happy to buy from Intel when they stop rigging their compiler as they have already paid a 1.25 billion dollar settlement over the OEM bribery. So far as of 2012 the ICC still rigs, so I still boycott. Its called having principles friend, and the world would be a better place if more people had them.
Sure they don't...until you update the thing and Linus takes a steaming dump all over your drivers! But don't take MY word for it, how about one of the Red Hat Developers who says the desktop is "suckage" and the entire system is broken? Are you claiming HE has a "bias" too? How about a list of things horribly broken in Linux and please note the date of the list is 2012 AND it has links to every. single. example. so you can check them for yourself.
I repeat if you are willing to put up with a broken driver model (and don't give us the "If they'll only open their specs!" excuse because the other two work just fine without specs which makes it YOUR problem not ours) and updates breaking shit like its Win9X all over again, or have a reason such as server management or programming to run Linux? Enjoy, wish you nothing but luck. But expecting the average user to deal with that shit is like telling them "Hey want a free TV?" and when they say yes you hand them a pile of transistors andsome breadboards and say "Good luck LOL!". Because while there are plenty of "friendly" distros frankly they don't STAY friendly, that is unless you are willing to disable ALL updates and risk the machine ending up a broken mess or a zombie because it isn't patched. And oh yes Linux DOES have malware, I'll be happy to wallpaper the page with links to it if you'd like.
If you look at those "kits" the Intel one? NO HDD and NO DVD, they do that to try to make the price look cheaper. When you figure in buying those parts, which are included in the AMD, you are adding close to $100 to the price of the system.
And if we all subscribe to your theory? We should all buy the absolute cheapest shittiest stuff since it'll be out of date next month anyway. But as we have seen that simply isn't the case, the devs try to make the games play on the widest possible machines to maximize sales. Too few gamers actually have Core i7s and HD7950s to make targeting that market viable so I seriously doubt they are gonna be putting out anything in the near future that won't run on a 3GHz quad. Hell until last year my boys were gaming on a pair of Pentium Ds OCed to 3.4Ghz with Geforce 7600GTs and they were able to play a good 70% of the games out there when I retired them, it was DirectX 10 and 11 that hampered more than any actual specs, but since I was gonna have to wipe and start over with Win 7 anyway i figured it was a good time to move them to more modern multicores.
But if you wanna see what the devs are gonna target look at the Steam specs and see what the most popular chips are. You are looking at dual cores holding 48% with the quads right behind at 39%. Oh and just FYI I didn't go hexa just for gaming, I like being able to game AND have other things running in the background which is nice. Look at the GPU list and you'll see the vast majority are on $100 or less GPUs as well.
Are there plenty of machines that can curbstomp those AMDs at quadruple the price? Sure there are, just as a Ferrari wouldn't even work up a sweat stomping a Camaro in a race. But there are a hell of a lot more Camaros than Ferrari out there and any dev wanting to make back the tens of millions they spent on development will target the largest market.
One final thing...you really can't look back when it comes to PCs and predict the future, why? Because we have only been out of the MHz war for barely 5 years now. Before that each CPU manufacturer was leapfrogging the other by leaps and bounds, hell throughout the 90s if your PC was even a year old it would probably struggle to run the latest programs because the MHz was jumping so fast. That really isn't the case anymore because the thermal envelope was making it so you needed an AC unit just to cool the chips. This is why you see both Intel and AMD worried more about heat and battery life, because frankly for the vast majority of tasks that C2Q or Phenom II X4 is already major overkill. Sure you'll still have the occasional Crysis "must win teh benches!" style game but that is getting fewer and farther between. Frankly this is why MSFT is having a coronary and why AMD and Intel are both reporting lower sales for the rest of the year, there really isn't anything that folks want to do that doesn't run perfectly fine on even 4 year old chips.
But they aren't making Trinity without the GPU correct? Trinity is fine for office boxes but who wants to be stuck with an IGP constantly pulling power and needing graphics drivers? If they manage to get hybrid CF working I can see it but so far the guys on the forums that have messed with it say its hit and miss, more often its a miss, with bugs, hangs, crashes, graphics corruption, its just not ready for prime time. And I have some customers that prefer Nvidia GPUs, who wants to have to run AMD AND Nvidia graphics drivers?
I just hope the new chip designer they hired away from Apple knows his foo and can solve the problems as I haven't built a single Intel unit since finding out about the OEM bribery, but with each rev its getting harder and harder to ignore the facts. The facts are that AMD runs hotter, gets less IPC, sucks battery life, and unless you want Metro...shudder, you'll get shitty scheduling from Windows because it treats the half core design as hardware HT which kills performance and MSFT has already said they won't fix the scheduler in older versions of Windows, all you get is a lame patch that tells it to spread the HT across cores...yuck.
Wow look at how I got modded down by the AMD fanbois LOL! Which is funny as hell since I haven't sold a single Intel unit since I heard about the bribing of the OEMs. But truth is truth and the last three CEOs of AMD has run the company right off a cliff.
I wish I could find the link, it was on one of the ATI gaming forums of all things when I tripped over it, but one of the guys that actually engineered the Athlon64 came on the forum and laid out EXACTLY what went wrong with AMD. The Cyrix guys? GONE. The guys that made the Athlon64? GONE. In fact according to him ALL of the guys that made the chips that made AMD famous? GONE. They were ALL fired and replaced by "computer layouts" which have a 30%+ penalty on both heat and die size and according to him are a hell of a lot more likely to cause you to have bugs like the TLB and Core 2 fails to scale bugs AMD has suffered as of late.
If you got it cheap enough like you did? yeah I can see it, but you shouldn't discount the other Thubans just because they aren't the 1100T. I've been building a ton of 1035T and 1045T and I can tell you the last runs of those chips just had insane amounts of headroom and with some decent DDR 3 you can get crazy OCs on those chips. It was a 1035T that I got the 3.3GHz-3.7GHz Turbo and that was with a cheap Asrock gamer board, if I'd have put a little money into a decent OCing board and a better cooling unit I probably could have gotten close to 4GHz off of that baby. As it was I was barely getting 140F under load with a cheap $30 cooler and some Arctic Silver.
And I've been there friend, you just hate to have to replace a good board like that. A good resource for the next time you get in that boat is Starmicro as they sell chips going back to Slot A and are pretty damned affordable. I've been buying from them for years and it really depends on what they have this week but you can get some insane deals from them.
But I know how you feel friend, I haven't built an Intel system since my Cedar Mill P4 (hey it was cheap and I was able to get 4GHz on air) and have NO desire to see Intel become a monopoly but seriously...what choice do we have? What am I gonna replace my netbook with when I wear it out? I love the hell out of the Brazos chip its got but they killed the successor to Brazos and Bulldozer sucks balls in mobile for power draw and I gotta have at LEAST 5 hours.
And on the desktop what am I gonna build when I run out of socket AM3s? My customers have made it clear than Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT and with BD you have to kill half the cores just to keep it from sucking, and last I checked you could get a low end Intel quad for the same price as a BD "8-core" which I'd have to kill 4 cores on and the Intel curbstomps it in both heat AND IPC, so what can we do?
I can tell you what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna keep selling AM3+ systems for as long as I can, luckily most of my customers don't need "top o' the line" performance and I'm getting the triples, quads, and hexas cheap enough that I can still save them a good $200 off an Intel machine by going AMD. But those stocks are gonna run dry, the boards are gonna go up, then what? All I can do is hope the new chip designer they hired away from Apple will take one look at their roadmap and say "Oh HELL no!" and come up with a competitive chip. Because as it is with each new tick/tock its getting harder and harder to stick with AM3, especially since no new chips are coming out.
The way they seem to be going above and beyond to make sure Win 8 is a flop I'm surprised they haven't started putting "little extras" in the fricking box.
Seriously though does anyone need any more proof that Ballmer and the marketing droids have pretty much shoved the engineers into a corner and are running riot? You've got the complete ignoring of the massive hate for Metro on desktops, all of the old guard quietly getting the fuck out of Dodge like Allchin and Ozzie, dropping a giant log on the table of the OEMs by throwing out the surface, and now built in Big Brother bullshit. If the words "train wreck" ever applied to a company I would say it applies to MSFT right now.
I have already switched my customers and family over to Win 7, the one that Ballmer was too busy squirting with the Zune to notice, and that is where we're staying. I urge every one of my fellow geeks to do the same so that when Win 8 makes Vista look like Win95 the board will finally get slapped upside the head with the halibut of truth and fire that damned sweaty monkey. Hopefully if they get on their knees and beg real nicely they can get Allchin or Ozzie back to right the ship because as it is? Its a fucking disaster.
That is why you simply avoid Faildozer which is AMD's Netburst. And I don't know where you are getting the $150-$160 from, unless you are talking the black edition OCing chips, because I've been buying quads for around $100 and the hexacores for around $120. As i linked to you can get the whole bleeding kit, case, board, 4Gb of RAM,DVD burner, 500Gb HDD and an AMD hexacore for $340 before MIR, just $310 total. Throw in an $80 copy of Win 7 OEM and an HD4850 or HD6770 and you are looking at less than $450 for a fully outfitted PC whereas with Intel you've spent nearly half of that amount on the CPU alone.
But looking at what the specs of the PS4 is supposed to be frankly I don't see any hexacore or quad AMD having to worry about the next gen games, and the money you save can go towards an SSD or bigger GPU which again when you are talking about the AMD getting 60 FPS stock its not like an AMD with an SSD or better GPU is gonna get curbstomped by an Intel with HDD or weak GPU. Sure if you've got a grand burning a hole in your pocket? Go for it, but many of us have to balance out our purchases. In my case i also have two teen boys that game so I have to try to keep our systems close to even, with Intel I was looking at over $2000 when you figured in 3 chips and the higher cost of Intel boards VS a little over $1400 before MIR to get all 3 of us new multicores with HD4850s last year. I figure we've got another year to year and a half before i'll swap out the GPUs and with 2 hexacores and a quad I doubt we'll be needing new systems for a good 5 years or more.
So you paid more than 60% higher than the cost of a Phenom quad or even hexa....just to turn half the cores off thus turning it into a quad? Ooookay there. Frankly the headroom in the last runs of the Thubans is so crazy I've been using them for my power builds, with a decent aftermarket cooler (I like the N520 myself, only $30 and works quite well with Arctic Silver) you can get crazy speeds if that is your thing. I managed to get mine to a little over 3.3GHz with a turbocore of 3.7GHz and I really wasn't even trying and there are several guys online that with a good OCing board and decent cooling have managed to get 4Ghz.
But even you have to admit its a bad design dude. I mean in bench after bench it gets 30%-50% less IPC than the Thuban, it uses more power than Thuban, and as you yourself found out unless you want to run Windows 8 you have to kill half the cores to keep the performance from dying.
BTW just FYI but if you can stand the "LOL I Iz A Cellphone LOL" Win 8 UI supposedly they fixed the scheduler so that it will recognize the FX chips and schedule them correctly, instead of treating all the cores equally which as you know they are not. supposedly if you slap Win 8 on it'll bring the scores up closer to Thuban, but since I ain't buying the turkey you'll have to check it yourself, I'm sticking with AM3 as long as possible and if the new chip designer they hired away from Apple doesn't right the ship I'll have to go Intel.
Even for those of us who like competition and try to support AMD its a bad time, they killed Thuban, killed the next version of Bobcat, other than Liano they really don't have anything for those that don't want to spend their time OCing to make up for the lack of IPC in Faildozer, and no Windows other than 8 has a scheduler that will even feed the BD chips correctly because AMD didn't even bother to tell MSFT what they were doing! I swear if I didn't know any better I'd think the CEO was a plant, because he sure couldn't fuck up the company any worse if he was working for Intel.
Or maybe, just maybe, its a taste thing? I was born in the late 60s and while I thought 1-6 was only so-so I really enjoyed 7 and 8. During the 1-6 period I preferred the Phantasy Stars over the Final Fantasy series but 7 and 8 had more of that epic feel like I enjoyed in the Phantasy Star games.
That said $50k for a game cart? Damn, just shows people pay crazy prices for collectables if you get the right one.
The X4 850 is NOT a Phenom, that is just marketing BS. The difference between the Athlon and the Phenom has always been the Athlon lacks L3 which the 850 lacks as well. So all the 850 is is an Athlon II with a different name on it, compare it to an X4 945 or even 925 and it becomes painfully clear that the L3 does make a difference.
Which makes me wonder a little about their tests, specifically if they turned off Turbocore in the BIOS. I may have missed it but I didn't see anything about TC in the article and the whole point of TC is to crank up the speed when you aren't using all the cores and thus have more thermal envelope to play with.
I know that stock my 1035T will jump from 2.6GHz to nearly 3.1GHz when I'm using 3 cores or less and if I wanted to play with the OC Tuner a little I can easily get that even higher, I've compared it with a Phenom II X2 at 3.1GHz and an Athlon II X3 at 3.2GHz I have at the shop and I can't really tell any difference with TC on as even today so few programs are using more than 2 cores that I'm often in TC mode running programs and games.
That said anybody who thinks they can put a shitty Celeron single core with a badass GPU and have a decent system is retarded, its ALWAYS been a balancing act. You look at your budget, decide what is important, and get the best deals that you can and hope for a nice mix. I have to agree with your assessment of Faildozer though, what a bad chip. I've been sticking with the Phenom IIs in my builds precisely because Dozer is a dog, its costs on average 40% more and runs on average 40% slower while using more power and cranking more heat. There really isn't a single metric that would sell dozer over Liano or Phenom, I just hope AMD straightens out because the last thing we need is Intel having a monopoly on X86.
While I agree with most of what you are saying I don't agree that AMD Phenom II based chips are "terrible" at gaming, if you look at the chart they are getting over 60 FPS and the huge difference in price between an AMD Phenom II quad or hexa compared to an Intel quad or hexa means you will have more money for a faster GPU or an SSD, which when you are already getting 60 FPS is gonna be probably the smart way to go. I know I built two hexacores for less than $850 with Win 7 HP X64 and HD4850s last year and they still blast through any game I care to throw at them with great graphics and no lag.
So I would say if ALL you are gonna do is game? Then the Intel dual cores would be the way to go. But if you are gonna be doing other things as well then it all comes down to whether you can afford to go for the higher end Intel quad and still have money left over for the rest of the parts you want. I know that my AMD hexa just chews through video transcodes while still giving me decent framerate and considering you can get a full hexa kit for just $340 compared to the cheapest Intel quad kit being $500 without HDD or DVD? That's a pretty damned big difference for an extra 20 FPS.
This also shows what many of us have been saying which is Bulldozer is AMD's Netburst. I've stuck with the Phenoms because you get great bang for the buck and because it was obvious the "half core' design of BD was crap, now we have it in B&W, the much older Phenom spanking the latest AMD chips which cost on average 35-45% more. Lets just hope that recent hire of the former Apple chip designer to AMD can right the ship, because otherwise when I can't score X4s and X6s anymore i'll have no choice but to go Intel.
Oh bullshit. Did everyone forget the Quake 3 malware that sat in the repos for a year and a fricking half? For something that is INSANELY popular like Firefox then MAYBE, just maybe, you've had a couple of dozen guys that aren't the actual devs look at the thing. For the rest, the bazillion little packages that make up your average distro that nobody ever seems to even think about until it breaks? Not a chance. Tell me have YOU gone through the FF source code? How about the Libre Office source? If the answer is no then WTF makes you think anybody else has?
Just because something CAN be done does not mean it HAS been done, there is a difference. Finally have you looked at some of the source for the obfuscated C contest entries? With that you know ahead of time there is malware in it yet many devs here would be hard pressed to find it, so what makes you think that on code where nobody knows if it has or hasn't and aren't expecting to find anything nasty that you or anyone else would spot the bug if it were obfuscated and hidden among a half a million lines of code?
I just wish people would be happy with what they like instead of the constant "X is better than Y" flamewars. If OSX is to your liking and you think Apple hardware is worth the extra scratch? Then please enjoy, wish you nothing but luck. If you think Linux is worth the hassle, are a programmer and need the ability to script, or one of the lucky few that manages to find hardware that is never broken by an update? Great, I wish you nothing but luck and happiness. If you are one of those people for whom the large software library of Windows is required and are able to avoid the crappy releases like Vista and 8, or want to play AAA gaming? Please enjoy, nothing but luck to you.
But please just stop with the ridiculous notion that what works for you will work for everyone else because ya know what? It don't. If the programs I need run on Windows then Linux really isn't gonna help. If my workflow is built around OSX then Windows is gonna drive me batshit and if I need to be able to futz with the low level internals than Windows and OSX is gonna be worthless.
I do have to wonder though, who in their right mind is gonna pay the extra cost associated with Apple hardware to run...Ubuntu? That don't make no damned sense at all, if you want to run Ubuntu you can buy any OEM, many of which has better hardware specs than Apple for cheaper, or even better buy a machine actually BUILT for Ubuntu from someone like System76 and support a market for FOSS systems. Paying all that extra money just to run on a free OS on Apple gear just seems...well kinda retarded to me.
The problem is, which we've seen time and time again, that instead of things getting better they merely MOVE to another country, thus fucking the west.
Isn't it funny that you have NEVER seen Al Gore come out for trade restrictions with China, even though they are belching so many pollutants you can literally detect their smog on the US west coast? Why do you think that is? Its because Al and his friends make crazy MONIES off of China and they ain't about to stop that gravy train or change THEIR habits, just as Al has the brass balls to say farting around in a Lear jjet by himself is "carbon neutral" because he pays himself with credits...from his own company! That would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket, calling it "wealth redistribution" and getting a fucking tax break for it!
Lets face it folks, carbon credits and many of the "solutions" to global warming are nothing but SCAMS. They even have one of the creators of the credit default swap scam coming up with the "rules" for carbon credits!
Whether you believe in AGW or not friends doesn't really matter anymore, because the ONLY agenda being pushed isn't designed to do jack shit about AGW, its designed to let the 1% at the top steal more of your money. if it had a damned thing to do with AGW they'd be asking for tariffs so that companies couldn't just avoid the new environmental laws by packing up and moving to China or South America but that ain't happening, is it? Instead they say its good for YOU to pay for these carbon credits while THEY shut down the factories and move them overseas so THEY don't have to pay them. Sorry but that is total bullshit designed to stuff the pockets of the rich by taking it from the poor and middle class. A middle class that is as endangered as any animal out there precisely because of bullshit like AGW "solutions".
Ya know as much as I fricking hate AT&T I think they are getting a bum rap on this one, as at least AT&T says you have the choice of arbitration or going to small claims.
Moral of the story....don't use eBay. Lets face it ever since eBay bought PayPal its been scammers heaven, chargebacks and stolen cards and fake sellers and eBay frankly doesn't give a shit as long as they make money in the end, even if they just have to take your bank account to do so.
I'm sure there are smaller startups out there doing the same thing and if not there is always Craigslist, but if you deal with eBay eventually you WILL get burned. I know enough guys doing the whole eBay thing to know they have to move a serious amount of merch to make up for the fraud and bullshit. So unless you are gonna be moving thousands through the thing I'd say avoid like the clap.
Then Discovery and Crossfire are for you friend, huge universe where you can be just a little guy going it alone, join a guild, be a miner or a pirate, you can pretty much do whatever you want.
I can't recall offhand which it is, maybe Discovery, where you can buy these "ID Chips" that basically tell others through their HUD what you are, be it bounty hunter or miner or whatever or you can just choose to be a Freelancer and do a bit of everything but you'll want to stay out of the heavy faction areas (or have a fast ship in case you need to bug out) but if you are wanting these huge Elite style "do anything you want" then download Freelancer Mod Manager and give it a spin.
The great thing about the Freelancer mods is with FMM you can have dozens installed and just switch between them with the flip of a switch in FMM so if the first one you try isn't your cup of tea just switch to one of the others. there are about a half a dozen that are usually pretty well populated at any time and since the space is so vast you can just go on your merry way without being constantly hassled by griefers, just take your starting ship, do some mining or trading, and work you way up. You can even buy the huge capital ships if you want to go for the whole BattleStar kind of feel, but I'd rather go for the fast and heavily armed midrange ships, that gives you a decent amount of cargo space and the firepower to deal with any NPCs that might try to screw with you...have fun!
Do you think NT 3 and XP are the same OS? Because there is THAT big a difference between Vista and 7. Vista had serious kernel problems, especially with regards to I/O, in fact I had Vista thrash one drive to death, Win 7? No problem and in fact unless I launch a program that I haven't in awhile there is no HDD access needed. Vista had a truly shitastic memory subsystem that would gobble memory like it was going out of style yet still thrash your drive if you launched anything, Win 7? Takes unused memory and caches your most used programs so they all load instantly. I could probably make this post the size of an article just listing everything that was broken in Vista that was either replaced completely or rebuilt for 7 friend.
Oh and RAM? Didn't help with Vista RTM. The machine I was running at the time was a lot more powerful than the average, we are talking Cedar Mill 3.6GHz with HT, 2Gb of RAM, Geforce 7600GT with 512Mb of VRAM, and dual 7200 RPM drives and it STILL ran like a slug. I used every tip and trick on the net, disabled search, killed UAC, nothing would keep Vista from just constantly swapping and thrashing along. I could just sit there on the desktop, nothing running, just the desktop, and the HDD indicator would just stay lit up. And God help you if you tried to multitask while using the network as Vista would slow to a fricking crawl if you did ANYTHING while using the network, there was just no way around it, until SP2 it was just a bad OS.
Actually there is too much traffic outside the shop for a thief to want to spend the time hunting for the DVR, in fact every theft in that area has been things like tires off the vehicles or the trailers they use to carry large loads. Thieves really don't wanna spend one second more than they have to and if they can pop the lock off one of those toolboxes on the back of a truck that's $200-$500+ in tools and takes less than 3 minutes from start to driving away, hence why I put in the DVR.
Which is why I said it didn't get the support that it deserved. The ONLY reason we are able to go x64 now is that MSFT insisted that if you wanted to get WHQL certified you HAD to have an x64 as well as an x32 driver starting with Vista. If they would have done that for XP drivers once XP x64 came out? Frankly you wouldn't have had that problem.
Its a damned shame too, as I ran XP x64 as my main OS from RTM to Win 7 RTM and it was built like a tank, never crashed or hung, extremely low resource using so all that memory was available for your programs, it was a damned good OS and it was only features like even better memory management in Win 7 that finally got me to switch.
The problem is you look at any major class action and the ONLY ones getting shit is the lawyers, the actual victims if they are lucky get a fucking coupon.
You know what works better for the person that actually got screwed? Small claims court. Most states its between $5k and $10K, costs around $35 to file, don't need a lawyer, and from talking to relatives that have done it the judges there? Don't take any shit from corps. They are also quick to award punitive damages because they figure the corp should have just settled the damned thing instead of wasting the courts time.
Personally I think that is a HELL of a better deal since the person who actually got screwed gets the money instead of some ambulance chaser. Haven't you noticed how big a business class actions have become? Hell they advertise all day long on TV now, right beside the slip and fall ambulance chasers. If the fact that they are advertising right beside the ambulance chasers doesn't give you a clue the whole thing has become a get rich quick scheme for lawyers I don't know what does, because they sure as hell ain't taking those ads out to help the victims, that's for damned sure.
Actually you are wrong, and here is why....memory. That is what allowed me to get my last customers off of XP, because even my baseline systems now come with 4Gb and the XP 3.2Gb limit means those businesses didn't have the RAM they paid for.
Now if XP X64 would have been given the support it deserved? Then i could have seen many businesses just going with it, but too few drivers were put out for it since MSFT really didn't advertise or support it so for those with even 4 or 5 year old systems its better to just go Win 7 X64 and have a decent amount of RAM in the unit.
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I'm sorry, I didn't think I needed to clarify the statement that "Bulldozer is AMD's netburst" but since it is obvious that I do need to clarify allow me to do so.
What I meant is that in both cases the company threw out good design practices chasing a single metric, higher clocks in the case of Intel, higher core count per TDP in the case of AMD, and both paid/are paying for it. In both cases you get chips that run hotter, suck more power, and give less IPC.
And having good Linux support really doesn't help when more than 90% of your market is NOT running Linux, you might as well say "Well if the world switched to netBSD all the problems would disappear!" because the world isn't gonna switch to Linux or NetBSD thanks to all the mission critical programs that are Windows only and will never be ported.
And while I agree that theoretically the problems could be partially fixed by the scheduler, in reality MSFT has made it clear they WILL NOT FIX in ANY version of their OS except...Windows 8. Considering Windows 8 is getting press such as Windows 8...Yes its THAT bad and is the source of parody and ridicule you again have the NetBSD problem, as the majority of your potential customers won't run the "fixed" OS so will be gimped if they take your product. If I refuse to run Win 8, would I be better off with Intel or AMD? The choice is obvious as AMD will be crippled on my OS while Intel won't.
In the end I truly believe the only hope left we have for AMD, and this is from someone who hasn't built a single Intel PC since finding out about the bribery and compiler rigging, is that the new chief chip architect they hired away from Apple will right the ship. Because XP is supported until 2014, Vista until 2017, and Win 7 until 2020 and the new chips will run like ass on all of the above. Can AMD afford to literally sit on ass for THAT long, until all the other OSes are no longer used? I don't think so and since they were stupid enough not to give MSFT the heads up as to what was going on and by killing Thuban and the successor to Brazos they've locked themselves into a path where the most hated Windows OS since MS Bob is the ONLY hope they have...bad move AMD, seriously bad move.
Its not. I simply don't like to support abusive business practices. It is on record that Intel bribed the OEMs to take netburst and limit AMD offerings, so badly did they bribe there were several quarters where the ONLY profits Dell saw during the price wars was Intel kickbacks, and to this very day Intel rigs their compiler so that if it isn't an Intel chip any code compiled with ICC is gimped. Take a Via chip (the only one you can change the CPUID on) and replace "Centaur Hauls" with "Genuine Intel" and gasp! The chip runs 30% faster, with just a CPUID change! Isn't that amazing?
So it doesn't have a damned thing due to being a "fanboi" of one or the other, it has to do with putting my money where my mouth is and refusing to support abusive practices. I also won't buy Apple as I refuse to be placed in a walled garden, I refuse to buy games that have always online DRM or online passes, does that make me a "fanboi" because I won't support being screwed without lube? I'll be happy to buy from Intel when they stop rigging their compiler as they have already paid a 1.25 billion dollar settlement over the OEM bribery. So far as of 2012 the ICC still rigs, so I still boycott. Its called having principles friend, and the world would be a better place if more people had them.
Sure they don't...until you update the thing and Linus takes a steaming dump all over your drivers! But don't take MY word for it, how about one of the Red Hat Developers who says the desktop is "suckage" and the entire system is broken? Are you claiming HE has a "bias" too? How about a list of things horribly broken in Linux and please note the date of the list is 2012 AND it has links to every. single. example. so you can check them for yourself.
I repeat if you are willing to put up with a broken driver model (and don't give us the "If they'll only open their specs!" excuse because the other two work just fine without specs which makes it YOUR problem not ours) and updates breaking shit like its Win9X all over again, or have a reason such as server management or programming to run Linux? Enjoy, wish you nothing but luck. But expecting the average user to deal with that shit is like telling them "Hey want a free TV?" and when they say yes you hand them a pile of transistors andsome breadboards and say "Good luck LOL!". Because while there are plenty of "friendly" distros frankly they don't STAY friendly, that is unless you are willing to disable ALL updates and risk the machine ending up a broken mess or a zombie because it isn't patched. And oh yes Linux DOES have malware, I'll be happy to wallpaper the page with links to it if you'd like.
If you look at those "kits" the Intel one? NO HDD and NO DVD, they do that to try to make the price look cheaper. When you figure in buying those parts, which are included in the AMD, you are adding close to $100 to the price of the system.
And if we all subscribe to your theory? We should all buy the absolute cheapest shittiest stuff since it'll be out of date next month anyway. But as we have seen that simply isn't the case, the devs try to make the games play on the widest possible machines to maximize sales. Too few gamers actually have Core i7s and HD7950s to make targeting that market viable so I seriously doubt they are gonna be putting out anything in the near future that won't run on a 3GHz quad. Hell until last year my boys were gaming on a pair of Pentium Ds OCed to 3.4Ghz with Geforce 7600GTs and they were able to play a good 70% of the games out there when I retired them, it was DirectX 10 and 11 that hampered more than any actual specs, but since I was gonna have to wipe and start over with Win 7 anyway i figured it was a good time to move them to more modern multicores.
But if you wanna see what the devs are gonna target look at the Steam specs and see what the most popular chips are. You are looking at dual cores holding 48% with the quads right behind at 39%. Oh and just FYI I didn't go hexa just for gaming, I like being able to game AND have other things running in the background which is nice. Look at the GPU list and you'll see the vast majority are on $100 or less GPUs as well.
Are there plenty of machines that can curbstomp those AMDs at quadruple the price? Sure there are, just as a Ferrari wouldn't even work up a sweat stomping a Camaro in a race. But there are a hell of a lot more Camaros than Ferrari out there and any dev wanting to make back the tens of millions they spent on development will target the largest market.
One final thing...you really can't look back when it comes to PCs and predict the future, why? Because we have only been out of the MHz war for barely 5 years now. Before that each CPU manufacturer was leapfrogging the other by leaps and bounds, hell throughout the 90s if your PC was even a year old it would probably struggle to run the latest programs because the MHz was jumping so fast. That really isn't the case anymore because the thermal envelope was making it so you needed an AC unit just to cool the chips. This is why you see both Intel and AMD worried more about heat and battery life, because frankly for the vast majority of tasks that C2Q or Phenom II X4 is already major overkill. Sure you'll still have the occasional Crysis "must win teh benches!" style game but that is getting fewer and farther between. Frankly this is why MSFT is having a coronary and why AMD and Intel are both reporting lower sales for the rest of the year, there really isn't anything that folks want to do that doesn't run perfectly fine on even 4 year old chips.
But they aren't making Trinity without the GPU correct? Trinity is fine for office boxes but who wants to be stuck with an IGP constantly pulling power and needing graphics drivers? If they manage to get hybrid CF working I can see it but so far the guys on the forums that have messed with it say its hit and miss, more often its a miss, with bugs, hangs, crashes, graphics corruption, its just not ready for prime time. And I have some customers that prefer Nvidia GPUs, who wants to have to run AMD AND Nvidia graphics drivers?
I just hope the new chip designer they hired away from Apple knows his foo and can solve the problems as I haven't built a single Intel unit since finding out about the OEM bribery, but with each rev its getting harder and harder to ignore the facts. The facts are that AMD runs hotter, gets less IPC, sucks battery life, and unless you want Metro...shudder, you'll get shitty scheduling from Windows because it treats the half core design as hardware HT which kills performance and MSFT has already said they won't fix the scheduler in older versions of Windows, all you get is a lame patch that tells it to spread the HT across cores...yuck.
Wow look at how I got modded down by the AMD fanbois LOL! Which is funny as hell since I haven't sold a single Intel unit since I heard about the bribing of the OEMs. But truth is truth and the last three CEOs of AMD has run the company right off a cliff.
I wish I could find the link, it was on one of the ATI gaming forums of all things when I tripped over it, but one of the guys that actually engineered the Athlon64 came on the forum and laid out EXACTLY what went wrong with AMD. The Cyrix guys? GONE. The guys that made the Athlon64? GONE. In fact according to him ALL of the guys that made the chips that made AMD famous? GONE. They were ALL fired and replaced by "computer layouts" which have a 30%+ penalty on both heat and die size and according to him are a hell of a lot more likely to cause you to have bugs like the TLB and Core 2 fails to scale bugs AMD has suffered as of late.
If you got it cheap enough like you did? yeah I can see it, but you shouldn't discount the other Thubans just because they aren't the 1100T. I've been building a ton of 1035T and 1045T and I can tell you the last runs of those chips just had insane amounts of headroom and with some decent DDR 3 you can get crazy OCs on those chips. It was a 1035T that I got the 3.3GHz-3.7GHz Turbo and that was with a cheap Asrock gamer board, if I'd have put a little money into a decent OCing board and a better cooling unit I probably could have gotten close to 4GHz off of that baby. As it was I was barely getting 140F under load with a cheap $30 cooler and some Arctic Silver.
And I've been there friend, you just hate to have to replace a good board like that. A good resource for the next time you get in that boat is Starmicro as they sell chips going back to Slot A and are pretty damned affordable. I've been buying from them for years and it really depends on what they have this week but you can get some insane deals from them.
But I know how you feel friend, I haven't built an Intel system since my Cedar Mill P4 (hey it was cheap and I was able to get 4GHz on air) and have NO desire to see Intel become a monopoly but seriously...what choice do we have? What am I gonna replace my netbook with when I wear it out? I love the hell out of the Brazos chip its got but they killed the successor to Brazos and Bulldozer sucks balls in mobile for power draw and I gotta have at LEAST 5 hours.
And on the desktop what am I gonna build when I run out of socket AM3s? My customers have made it clear than Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT and with BD you have to kill half the cores just to keep it from sucking, and last I checked you could get a low end Intel quad for the same price as a BD "8-core" which I'd have to kill 4 cores on and the Intel curbstomps it in both heat AND IPC, so what can we do?
I can tell you what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna keep selling AM3+ systems for as long as I can, luckily most of my customers don't need "top o' the line" performance and I'm getting the triples, quads, and hexas cheap enough that I can still save them a good $200 off an Intel machine by going AMD. But those stocks are gonna run dry, the boards are gonna go up, then what? All I can do is hope the new chip designer they hired away from Apple will take one look at their roadmap and say "Oh HELL no!" and come up with a competitive chip. Because as it is with each new tick/tock its getting harder and harder to stick with AM3, especially since no new chips are coming out.
The way they seem to be going above and beyond to make sure Win 8 is a flop I'm surprised they haven't started putting "little extras" in the fricking box.
Seriously though does anyone need any more proof that Ballmer and the marketing droids have pretty much shoved the engineers into a corner and are running riot? You've got the complete ignoring of the massive hate for Metro on desktops, all of the old guard quietly getting the fuck out of Dodge like Allchin and Ozzie, dropping a giant log on the table of the OEMs by throwing out the surface, and now built in Big Brother bullshit. If the words "train wreck" ever applied to a company I would say it applies to MSFT right now.
I have already switched my customers and family over to Win 7, the one that Ballmer was too busy squirting with the Zune to notice, and that is where we're staying. I urge every one of my fellow geeks to do the same so that when Win 8 makes Vista look like Win95 the board will finally get slapped upside the head with the halibut of truth and fire that damned sweaty monkey. Hopefully if they get on their knees and beg real nicely they can get Allchin or Ozzie back to right the ship because as it is? Its a fucking disaster.
That is why you simply avoid Faildozer which is AMD's Netburst. And I don't know where you are getting the $150-$160 from, unless you are talking the black edition OCing chips, because I've been buying quads for around $100 and the hexacores for around $120. As i linked to you can get the whole bleeding kit, case, board, 4Gb of RAM,DVD burner, 500Gb HDD and an AMD hexacore for $340 before MIR, just $310 total. Throw in an $80 copy of Win 7 OEM and an HD4850 or HD6770 and you are looking at less than $450 for a fully outfitted PC whereas with Intel you've spent nearly half of that amount on the CPU alone.
But looking at what the specs of the PS4 is supposed to be frankly I don't see any hexacore or quad AMD having to worry about the next gen games, and the money you save can go towards an SSD or bigger GPU which again when you are talking about the AMD getting 60 FPS stock its not like an AMD with an SSD or better GPU is gonna get curbstomped by an Intel with HDD or weak GPU. Sure if you've got a grand burning a hole in your pocket? Go for it, but many of us have to balance out our purchases. In my case i also have two teen boys that game so I have to try to keep our systems close to even, with Intel I was looking at over $2000 when you figured in 3 chips and the higher cost of Intel boards VS a little over $1400 before MIR to get all 3 of us new multicores with HD4850s last year. I figure we've got another year to year and a half before i'll swap out the GPUs and with 2 hexacores and a quad I doubt we'll be needing new systems for a good 5 years or more.
So you paid more than 60% higher than the cost of a Phenom quad or even hexa....just to turn half the cores off thus turning it into a quad? Ooookay there. Frankly the headroom in the last runs of the Thubans is so crazy I've been using them for my power builds, with a decent aftermarket cooler (I like the N520 myself, only $30 and works quite well with Arctic Silver) you can get crazy speeds if that is your thing. I managed to get mine to a little over 3.3GHz with a turbocore of 3.7GHz and I really wasn't even trying and there are several guys online that with a good OCing board and decent cooling have managed to get 4Ghz.
But even you have to admit its a bad design dude. I mean in bench after bench it gets 30%-50% less IPC than the Thuban, it uses more power than Thuban, and as you yourself found out unless you want to run Windows 8 you have to kill half the cores to keep the performance from dying.
BTW just FYI but if you can stand the "LOL I Iz A Cellphone LOL" Win 8 UI supposedly they fixed the scheduler so that it will recognize the FX chips and schedule them correctly, instead of treating all the cores equally which as you know they are not. supposedly if you slap Win 8 on it'll bring the scores up closer to Thuban, but since I ain't buying the turkey you'll have to check it yourself, I'm sticking with AM3 as long as possible and if the new chip designer they hired away from Apple doesn't right the ship I'll have to go Intel.
Even for those of us who like competition and try to support AMD its a bad time, they killed Thuban, killed the next version of Bobcat, other than Liano they really don't have anything for those that don't want to spend their time OCing to make up for the lack of IPC in Faildozer, and no Windows other than 8 has a scheduler that will even feed the BD chips correctly because AMD didn't even bother to tell MSFT what they were doing! I swear if I didn't know any better I'd think the CEO was a plant, because he sure couldn't fuck up the company any worse if he was working for Intel.
Or maybe, just maybe, its a taste thing? I was born in the late 60s and while I thought 1-6 was only so-so I really enjoyed 7 and 8. During the 1-6 period I preferred the Phantasy Stars over the Final Fantasy series but 7 and 8 had more of that epic feel like I enjoyed in the Phantasy Star games.
That said $50k for a game cart? Damn, just shows people pay crazy prices for collectables if you get the right one.
The X4 850 is NOT a Phenom, that is just marketing BS. The difference between the Athlon and the Phenom has always been the Athlon lacks L3 which the 850 lacks as well. So all the 850 is is an Athlon II with a different name on it, compare it to an X4 945 or even 925 and it becomes painfully clear that the L3 does make a difference.
Which makes me wonder a little about their tests, specifically if they turned off Turbocore in the BIOS. I may have missed it but I didn't see anything about TC in the article and the whole point of TC is to crank up the speed when you aren't using all the cores and thus have more thermal envelope to play with.
I know that stock my 1035T will jump from 2.6GHz to nearly 3.1GHz when I'm using 3 cores or less and if I wanted to play with the OC Tuner a little I can easily get that even higher, I've compared it with a Phenom II X2 at 3.1GHz and an Athlon II X3 at 3.2GHz I have at the shop and I can't really tell any difference with TC on as even today so few programs are using more than 2 cores that I'm often in TC mode running programs and games.
That said anybody who thinks they can put a shitty Celeron single core with a badass GPU and have a decent system is retarded, its ALWAYS been a balancing act. You look at your budget, decide what is important, and get the best deals that you can and hope for a nice mix. I have to agree with your assessment of Faildozer though, what a bad chip. I've been sticking with the Phenom IIs in my builds precisely because Dozer is a dog, its costs on average 40% more and runs on average 40% slower while using more power and cranking more heat. There really isn't a single metric that would sell dozer over Liano or Phenom, I just hope AMD straightens out because the last thing we need is Intel having a monopoly on X86.
While I agree with most of what you are saying I don't agree that AMD Phenom II based chips are "terrible" at gaming, if you look at the chart they are getting over 60 FPS and the huge difference in price between an AMD Phenom II quad or hexa compared to an Intel quad or hexa means you will have more money for a faster GPU or an SSD, which when you are already getting 60 FPS is gonna be probably the smart way to go. I know I built two hexacores for less than $850 with Win 7 HP X64 and HD4850s last year and they still blast through any game I care to throw at them with great graphics and no lag.
So I would say if ALL you are gonna do is game? Then the Intel dual cores would be the way to go. But if you are gonna be doing other things as well then it all comes down to whether you can afford to go for the higher end Intel quad and still have money left over for the rest of the parts you want. I know that my AMD hexa just chews through video transcodes while still giving me decent framerate and considering you can get a full hexa kit for just $340 compared to the cheapest Intel quad kit being $500 without HDD or DVD? That's a pretty damned big difference for an extra 20 FPS.
This also shows what many of us have been saying which is Bulldozer is AMD's Netburst. I've stuck with the Phenoms because you get great bang for the buck and because it was obvious the "half core' design of BD was crap, now we have it in B&W, the much older Phenom spanking the latest AMD chips which cost on average 35-45% more. Lets just hope that recent hire of the former Apple chip designer to AMD can right the ship, because otherwise when I can't score X4s and X6s anymore i'll have no choice but to go Intel.
Oh bullshit. Did everyone forget the Quake 3 malware that sat in the repos for a year and a fricking half? For something that is INSANELY popular like Firefox then MAYBE, just maybe, you've had a couple of dozen guys that aren't the actual devs look at the thing. For the rest, the bazillion little packages that make up your average distro that nobody ever seems to even think about until it breaks? Not a chance. Tell me have YOU gone through the FF source code? How about the Libre Office source? If the answer is no then WTF makes you think anybody else has?
Just because something CAN be done does not mean it HAS been done, there is a difference. Finally have you looked at some of the source for the obfuscated C contest entries? With that you know ahead of time there is malware in it yet many devs here would be hard pressed to find it, so what makes you think that on code where nobody knows if it has or hasn't and aren't expecting to find anything nasty that you or anyone else would spot the bug if it were obfuscated and hidden among a half a million lines of code?
I just wish people would be happy with what they like instead of the constant "X is better than Y" flamewars. If OSX is to your liking and you think Apple hardware is worth the extra scratch? Then please enjoy, wish you nothing but luck. If you think Linux is worth the hassle, are a programmer and need the ability to script, or one of the lucky few that manages to find hardware that is never broken by an update? Great, I wish you nothing but luck and happiness. If you are one of those people for whom the large software library of Windows is required and are able to avoid the crappy releases like Vista and 8, or want to play AAA gaming? Please enjoy, nothing but luck to you.
But please just stop with the ridiculous notion that what works for you will work for everyone else because ya know what? It don't. If the programs I need run on Windows then Linux really isn't gonna help. If my workflow is built around OSX then Windows is gonna drive me batshit and if I need to be able to futz with the low level internals than Windows and OSX is gonna be worthless.
I do have to wonder though, who in their right mind is gonna pay the extra cost associated with Apple hardware to run...Ubuntu? That don't make no damned sense at all, if you want to run Ubuntu you can buy any OEM, many of which has better hardware specs than Apple for cheaper, or even better buy a machine actually BUILT for Ubuntu from someone like System76 and support a market for FOSS systems. Paying all that extra money just to run on a free OS on Apple gear just seems...well kinda retarded to me.
The problem is, which we've seen time and time again, that instead of things getting better they merely MOVE to another country, thus fucking the west.
Isn't it funny that you have NEVER seen Al Gore come out for trade restrictions with China, even though they are belching so many pollutants you can literally detect their smog on the US west coast? Why do you think that is? Its because Al and his friends make crazy MONIES off of China and they ain't about to stop that gravy train or change THEIR habits, just as Al has the brass balls to say farting around in a Lear jjet by himself is "carbon neutral" because he pays himself with credits...from his own company! That would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket, calling it "wealth redistribution" and getting a fucking tax break for it!
Lets face it folks, carbon credits and many of the "solutions" to global warming are nothing but SCAMS. They even have one of the creators of the credit default swap scam coming up with the "rules" for carbon credits!
Whether you believe in AGW or not friends doesn't really matter anymore, because the ONLY agenda being pushed isn't designed to do jack shit about AGW, its designed to let the 1% at the top steal more of your money. if it had a damned thing to do with AGW they'd be asking for tariffs so that companies couldn't just avoid the new environmental laws by packing up and moving to China or South America but that ain't happening, is it? Instead they say its good for YOU to pay for these carbon credits while THEY shut down the factories and move them overseas so THEY don't have to pay them. Sorry but that is total bullshit designed to stuff the pockets of the rich by taking it from the poor and middle class. A middle class that is as endangered as any animal out there precisely because of bullshit like AGW "solutions".
Ya know as much as I fricking hate AT&T I think they are getting a bum rap on this one, as at least AT&T says you have the choice of arbitration or going to small claims.
Moral of the story....don't use eBay. Lets face it ever since eBay bought PayPal its been scammers heaven, chargebacks and stolen cards and fake sellers and eBay frankly doesn't give a shit as long as they make money in the end, even if they just have to take your bank account to do so.
I'm sure there are smaller startups out there doing the same thing and if not there is always Craigslist, but if you deal with eBay eventually you WILL get burned. I know enough guys doing the whole eBay thing to know they have to move a serious amount of merch to make up for the fraud and bullshit. So unless you are gonna be moving thousands through the thing I'd say avoid like the clap.
Then Discovery and Crossfire are for you friend, huge universe where you can be just a little guy going it alone, join a guild, be a miner or a pirate, you can pretty much do whatever you want.
I can't recall offhand which it is, maybe Discovery, where you can buy these "ID Chips" that basically tell others through their HUD what you are, be it bounty hunter or miner or whatever or you can just choose to be a Freelancer and do a bit of everything but you'll want to stay out of the heavy faction areas (or have a fast ship in case you need to bug out) but if you are wanting these huge Elite style "do anything you want" then download Freelancer Mod Manager and give it a spin.
The great thing about the Freelancer mods is with FMM you can have dozens installed and just switch between them with the flip of a switch in FMM so if the first one you try isn't your cup of tea just switch to one of the others. there are about a half a dozen that are usually pretty well populated at any time and since the space is so vast you can just go on your merry way without being constantly hassled by griefers, just take your starting ship, do some mining or trading, and work you way up. You can even buy the huge capital ships if you want to go for the whole BattleStar kind of feel, but I'd rather go for the fast and heavily armed midrange ships, that gives you a decent amount of cargo space and the firepower to deal with any NPCs that might try to screw with you...have fun!
Do you think NT 3 and XP are the same OS? Because there is THAT big a difference between Vista and 7. Vista had serious kernel problems, especially with regards to I/O, in fact I had Vista thrash one drive to death, Win 7? No problem and in fact unless I launch a program that I haven't in awhile there is no HDD access needed. Vista had a truly shitastic memory subsystem that would gobble memory like it was going out of style yet still thrash your drive if you launched anything, Win 7? Takes unused memory and caches your most used programs so they all load instantly. I could probably make this post the size of an article just listing everything that was broken in Vista that was either replaced completely or rebuilt for 7 friend.
Oh and RAM? Didn't help with Vista RTM. The machine I was running at the time was a lot more powerful than the average, we are talking Cedar Mill 3.6GHz with HT, 2Gb of RAM, Geforce 7600GT with 512Mb of VRAM, and dual 7200 RPM drives and it STILL ran like a slug. I used every tip and trick on the net, disabled search, killed UAC, nothing would keep Vista from just constantly swapping and thrashing along. I could just sit there on the desktop, nothing running, just the desktop, and the HDD indicator would just stay lit up. And God help you if you tried to multitask while using the network as Vista would slow to a fricking crawl if you did ANYTHING while using the network, there was just no way around it, until SP2 it was just a bad OS.
Actually there is too much traffic outside the shop for a thief to want to spend the time hunting for the DVR, in fact every theft in that area has been things like tires off the vehicles or the trailers they use to carry large loads. Thieves really don't wanna spend one second more than they have to and if they can pop the lock off one of those toolboxes on the back of a truck that's $200-$500+ in tools and takes less than 3 minutes from start to driving away, hence why I put in the DVR.
Which is why I said it didn't get the support that it deserved. The ONLY reason we are able to go x64 now is that MSFT insisted that if you wanted to get WHQL certified you HAD to have an x64 as well as an x32 driver starting with Vista. If they would have done that for XP drivers once XP x64 came out? Frankly you wouldn't have had that problem.
Its a damned shame too, as I ran XP x64 as my main OS from RTM to Win 7 RTM and it was built like a tank, never crashed or hung, extremely low resource using so all that memory was available for your programs, it was a damned good OS and it was only features like even better memory management in Win 7 that finally got me to switch.
The problem is you look at any major class action and the ONLY ones getting shit is the lawyers, the actual victims if they are lucky get a fucking coupon.
You know what works better for the person that actually got screwed? Small claims court. Most states its between $5k and $10K, costs around $35 to file, don't need a lawyer, and from talking to relatives that have done it the judges there? Don't take any shit from corps. They are also quick to award punitive damages because they figure the corp should have just settled the damned thing instead of wasting the courts time.
Personally I think that is a HELL of a better deal since the person who actually got screwed gets the money instead of some ambulance chaser. Haven't you noticed how big a business class actions have become? Hell they advertise all day long on TV now, right beside the slip and fall ambulance chasers. If the fact that they are advertising right beside the ambulance chasers doesn't give you a clue the whole thing has become a get rich quick scheme for lawyers I don't know what does, because they sure as hell ain't taking those ads out to help the victims, that's for damned sure.
Actually you are wrong, and here is why....memory. That is what allowed me to get my last customers off of XP, because even my baseline systems now come with 4Gb and the XP 3.2Gb limit means those businesses didn't have the RAM they paid for.
Now if XP X64 would have been given the support it deserved? Then i could have seen many businesses just going with it, but too few drivers were put out for it since MSFT really didn't advertise or support it so for those with even 4 or 5 year old systems its better to just go Win 7 X64 and have a decent amount of RAM in the unit.