Ignore Drinkypoo as obvious troll is obvious. The same poster tried to claim last time there was a post on AMD that they were "trapped" on Vista as there was no drivers for their laptop chip and when i pointed out several sources for the chip in question for both XP AND Windows 7 i got "Those don't work...and go fuck yourself!" which is not only pathetic and sad but also complete lies as i had sold a machine with the EXACT SAME CHIP running XP, it ran just wonderfully. Drinkypoo is a Linux + Nvidia fangirl and will spew FUD any time either Windows or AMD is mentioned.
As for ION what Drinkypoo fails to mention is Nvidia has abandoned it along with the rest of their chipset business after intel refused to give them access to the newer bus designs. there will NEVER be an ION 3, ION will never get NCQ support, the Nvidia chips you see now are it and won't be getting a single update as Nvidia is not in the chipset business anymore and the IGP developers were let go nearly two years ago. So anybody using ION for anything would have to be nuts as its obsolete and won't be getting replaced by anything but shitty Intel IGP.
As for SB? Frankly Intel has it waaay overpriced compared to socket AM3. Intel has been nuts lately with sockets anyway with LGA775, 1155, 1156, 1366 and 2011 all being produced. I recently priced the i3 and frankly i could have gotten a black edition quad and a nice motherboard and still come out about 35% less than going with an i3 dual and bottom of the line board. On an HTPC frankly the extra cost really isn't worth it as the unit simply won't be doing that much heavy lifting with the GPU doing the decode. I've built a couple of E-350 HTPCs as well as a couple of Phenom II based and with both we are talking full 1080p over HDMI with very little CPU usage so IMHO its just not worth the price difference. I recently built a customer an AMD Athlon quad HTPC and even after making a profit they ended up with a unit that not only does 1080p but games thanks to an HD4830 and transcodes and rips movies for just a hair under $600 with Win 7 HP X64, you just can't beat that price for that kind of performance.
But don't waste your breath on drinkypoo unless your post is "AMD kills kittehs and Windows burns babies!" all you'll get is shit flung at you, with each lie getting worse and more unbelievable than the last. AMD has not only opened their specs to the Linux driver devs but actually paid out of their own pocket to hire devs to help them so i don't see how a company could be more committed to Linux support than that. if you go to Phoronix you'll see they've made HUGE strides in an insanely short amount of time and IIRC most of the E-series features are supported now. Of course its even better in Windows but considering the help AMD is giving I wouldn't be surprised if the two platforms are equal as far as features go in another year with most AMD CPUs and APUs already perfectly usable in linux with free drivers.
Don't forget that back then EVERYTHING was hackable and the companies would give you details on the entire system like you wouldn't believe! I remember writing to Commodore about my VIC and ended up with a manual that had every single opcode for the CPU, had all the pins listed for every single I/O on the board, the amount of detail they gave you was just unreal. I have a customer that had one of the old Commodore 128s back in the day and thanks to all the details they gave him on the graphics subsystem he was able to do a pretty sharp for the time animation routine for one of his customers which was one of the very first retailers of those big old home sat dishes.
Thanks to him knowing exactly how the C128 drew successive lines he was able to cook up this cool animation of how the dish tracked the sat, how the data streamed down from the sat to the dish and finally to the home, but according to him it was a little TOO slick because computer graphics were so rare at the time they ended up having to set his display to the side of the booth because people were piling up in front of the screen watching his animation to the point they couldn't conduct business!
So I'm really grateful for the time i spent at the VIC and thanks to it and the C64 there was such a wealth of software for it that it really exploded the computer and helped give birth to what we see today. Between Commodore starting the first price war and MSFT selling MS-DOS to anybody with a buck so that Compaq could take the faster 386 and clone the IBM 5150 (which is where we get the word PC from,as the buzzword back then was "IBM PC compatible") we went from computers being the toys of the rich to a truly mass market commodity that now gives us honestly insane levels of power for incredibly cheap. So happy anniversary Commodore!
How about my own little anecdote instead? i don't know about the other guy but I've watched relatives turn into zombies thanks to those damned reality shows, we are talking smart people just turned into lumps that breathe watching endless reality crap. i have to wonder if one dissected the signal you'd find some hidden message like on "They Live" with words like "Don't think" and "obey" popping on the screen. I know that the girls at the cableco always point me out when i come in because i don't have a TV, not because they find that fact shocking, its because they simply can't understand how someone can't be watching reality TV. You can ask them about Survivor or Idol, that Jersey thing or the cooking one and they know ALL about every contestant and just tons of completely pointless bullshit about these "personalities" if you want to call them that.
Finally the REALLY scary part to me is how many families are using the idiot box for a babysitter for their kids. My kids would come in from visiting one of their friends and would have these shocked looks and say something like "Can you believe they have TVs everywhere but no books?" which frankly I find horrifying. Can you imagine growing up with nothing but reality TV crap to "stimulate" your mind?
Well if given the choice I know I'd rather be on stage, playing the bassbeast and making that lumber roar! Recording is fine and dandy but i always looked at it as an illusion, almost nobody is gonna sound like they do in the studio IRL, its just too polished and rehearsed. But live in front of a crowd is where i come alive, i take my 50 foot amp cord and head out there in the audience and dance with some cuties while I play, or kick on one of the funky effects i have programmed in my Zoom and just go nuts, now THAT is fun!
Why so big? If its a work laptop I'd be looking at one of the 60Gb models, especially if you are doing the heavy lifting on a server. I have to admit I've been tempted to pick up one for my little EEE (the 1215B model great little unit if you know anybody that needs an ultra portable cheap) just to see how much performance I can squeeze out of her but frankly i'm already getting 6 hours plus on a battery when watching HD video and I can tack over an hour onto that if i'm using ExpressGate instead of Win 7 HP so it would probably be overkill. I'm really impressed with the little EEE though, it actually has enough kick I'm using it for music editing in Audacity and a drummer in a box (hell of a lot better than dealing with a metronome IMHO) using hydrogen and she never lags so i'm just amazed.
But if you need it for work and they won't cough up a decent system i'd look into getting one of the quad AMD laptops for myself and then just taking it off as a work expense. I mean if my oldest can PVP in the new Star wars MMO with his and not lag i'm sure it'll do something as trivial as you know, work;-)
Best bet IMHO is the new AMD E-350 mini boards. you are talking about a unit that uses 18w for the chip and around 35w all told full load, has a Radeon chip built into the APU that has support for just about every format, many of them even have a PCIe so if you decide you need even more GPU you can add it easily but since they do 1080p over HDMI I really don't see the point but its nice to have the option, and you can pick up one for $70 after rebate if you don't mind using a DVI to HDMI adapter or $100 if you want an HDMI built in. Oh and they hold 8Gb of RAM which is nice as Win 7 superfetch will load all your apps into RAM to make it VERY snappy. Great little unit and easy peasy to make a whisper quiet HTPC with one, I've built a couple for customers and they are happy as can be with it. And Netflix works just fine in WMC friend, it shows up under Internet TV along with about 2 dozen free channels.
As for TFA the point of this is.....what exactly? any TV new and fancy enough to have that port will already have streaming built in and the ones old enough they could use this won't have the port. Sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me. For those customers that didn't have the money to go HTPC I recommend the WD TV Live which is small and looks nice in an entertainment center and whether they choose HTPC or WDTV for the kiddies i recommend the Nbox Media Player as its simple enough for young ones to use and with a 200Gb drive you can load all their favorite shows and movies on them no problem and no have to worry about little Suzy crying because her sister scratched their favorite Dora disc. Oh and for those that have clueless family/friends that want to be able to rip DVDs? Tipard DVD ripper, best $30 they'll ever spend as its literally "push button to rip movie" and its default setting is to a bog standard DivX 5 which will play on anything and it has built in Streams and CUDA to help speed ripping.
That is one really nice thing about today, when i started with HTPCs they cost an arm and a leg to build and now you can build a really nice unit with frankly insane amounts of power for cheap, hell you shop around you can build one nice enough to even game on for less than $600. And when I started out pretty much the only software you had was this buggy shit that came with whatever cap card you got, now their is WMC and XBMC and MediaPortal and MythTV, man its never been easier to have a nice HTPC!
Riiiight, because schools are gonna have enough bandwidth to run the entire school on VMs on a server just so they can use Chromebooks...fanboi much? this reminds me of a conversation where someone said "Name ONE thing Linux can't do!" and I said "How about the tight integration of GPO plus AD plus Exchange plus Sharepoint?" and what i got as a response was a page and a half of kludge, including 4 different projects that had been abandoned for over a year, just so they could say "Linux does everything windows does!".
Give it up friend, Chromebook is for surfers silly rabbit NOT for kids! Its a throwaway design that they are charging laptop money for, its a dead end, and the last numbers I saw had the major Chromebook OEMs not even selling 3% of their stock, which considering we are talking $500 for an underpowered Atom netbook? yeah and people say MSFT gouges on price!
Okay I'll play, how are those Chromebook gonna run the educational software they've already bought? How is it gonna run the software that those kids will use IRL like MS Office, which BTW schools can get REAL cheap thanks to MSFT edu pricing? Answer they can't, Chromebooks would be good for surfing but we aren't buying machines to teach little Johnny how to surf. You are also ignoring that both MSFT and Apple have big discounts for education and that with disc imaging you can have a boned install back up in a few minutes.
Here is a prediction: In three years Chromebooks will be abandoned by Google just like Wave and everything else they threw at the wall and it didn't stick. so far every Chromebook released has been overpriced and underpowered and frankly they just don't sell. Since Google has a well known history of keeping only the hits and tossing the misses, even if they aren't complete failures but just fair to middling that will be the end of Chromebook. I mean when you can buy TWO atom netbooks for the price of a single Chromebook? Its too damned high. For a school of any decent size the downsides will far outweigh the upsides of Chromebook, sorry. Now YOU scream Negative nancy and wave your Googleflag and chant "all can go to hell except cave 76!" because obvious fanboi is obvious. They could go Apple OR MSFT OR Linux even and end up better off in the long run than going Chromebook, sorry.
While I agree with all of your points the flipside is frankly kids simply aren't learning the skills at home they require and learning computer skills is a BIG requirement for getting anywhere anymore. you just don't realize how computer illiterate someone can be until you try teaching an adult that has never used them how to operate a computer and use the web safely. i have a neighbor downstairs that is 57 years old and had NEVER touched a keyboard! I've taken him under my wing and thanks to his boss being a really decent guy he gave me a couple of office lease P4s from their shop (one for me to keep in return for setting the other up for him and teaching him the basics) I'm slowly but surely making progress but when you are dealing with someone who simply hasn't ever used one its almost like learning a completely new language. i'm literally having to start with "This is the on switch, this is a file" because he simply has zero frame of reference.
Now compare that to my oldest who is now a sophomore at the local college. On the first day of class they give the kids a PC skills test to see how many were gonna need remedial classes to learn how to research, take their online courses, etc and it took him maybe 3 minutes before the teacher told him to stop and said "Who taught you? Because its obvious you won't be needing any kind of help in this area." and he later told me he said "My uncle had a mouse in my hand practically from the time i could walk" so now he is earning some extra credits helping out as a TA on their remedial computer skills class.
The computer really is an essential tool to get anywhere in life anymore but you'd be surprised how many young people are getting little to no hands on training at what is such an important skill. you'd think with tech being so cheap every kid would be at home learning this stuff but when my boys were in HS they were practically the only kids with PCs at home, the rest had game consoles. But unless you want a job that has "you want fries with that?" as part of your daily routine you NEED these skills and sadly too many kids come home to a console baby sitter and parents that don't care as long as little Suzy ain't bugging them. Personally i think one quarter of the classes kids take in the 4 years of HS ought to be "life skills" where they teach them everything from computer skills to budgeting to how to watch over your 401k because the world isn't getting any simpler folks and the kids just aren't getting these things at home.
Cool page and its nice to see somebody gets it. its not so much about the making extra cash (although that always helps) but about building buzz and a fanbase, anything to help you connect better to the audience. Here is another cool trick we used to do, i called it "The wheel of cheese". Now since i'm good at making up grooves in just about any key what the singer did was cook up this roulette wheel (I think it cost like $25 worth of scrap material) and it would have all the major keys as well as two "mystery prize" slots. We'd pick some sweet young thing or random dude and have them spin the wheel and whatever it landed on we'd have to come up with a song on the spot in that key. it was a fun little game and the audience loved it.
Another cool trick which i love to do is I have a 50 foot amp cord and on smaller stages i'll go out into the audience with my bass and get some girl to dance with me while I play. it really gives a party atmosphere to the show and there is nothing that will inspire a bass player like a 22 year old babe bouncing to the beat;-) of course the audience not only got a kick out of that but on the nights my little hot blooded Cherokee GF was at the show she'd put up with it for a couple of minutes before grabbing me by the back of the neck and pointing me back towards the stage. They all get a charge out of it and laugh when the singer would make a crack like "Better get back up here Beast or that hot tempered Indian GF of yours is libel to scalp your ass!" and I'd just shrug and make my bass roar.
Its all about putting on a good show in the end, and giving the audience and good fun evening which i'm sure you know. as long as everybody has a damned good time they will keep coming back and keep telling their friends and THAT is how you get a good buzz going about your band. Anything that helps the audience connect with the band is a GOOD thing in my book. that's why I still let 'em call me beast to this day, because a decade ago on a radio show the DJ said "One of these things is not like the others...we have four clean cut college boys and this big hairy beast of a bass player that looks like he should be playing for Judas priest" and ever since then wherever i play somebody will holler out "Hey its the beast! Make it roar beastman!" and i'll kick on the fuzz and give a loud bass roar. Anything that generates positive vibes, ya know?
Well just off the top of my head there is gaming, VMs for old programs, and industrial and embedded work. I have a client that has an $85000 C&C lathe they use for custom columns run by an ISA card that if my first "gamer" PC ever dies along with the spare i sold them (The gamer is a 100Mhz Pentium with 12Mb of RAM, the spare a 200Mhz Pentium II with a whopping 64Mb of RAM, both have DOS 3.2 from their original machine cloned onto them) then I'll be looking at FreeDOS to see if it'll run the software. I can understand why they want to keep that old thing going, not only did it cost an arm and a leg but it really does make beautiful custom columns and the software is easy peasy to use, just a shame the company went out of business in like 89 so good luck getting more modern software or a better than ISA interface for the thing.
But I bet there are a lot of machines just like that C&C that need access to DOS and thanks to FreeDOS that access exists even for modern hardware. Just because something is old doesn't mean it isn't still useful and valuable as that $85000 machines attests to. So my hat is off to the FreeDOS team, keep up the good work!
Actually that was my last band we were doing that trick with, although I intend to continue it with the new one. As for where we are playing? kinda busy right now trying to get the album recorded with just me and the singer/guitarist doing all the work because we had to fire the drummer over booze problems. So at the moment its me playing bass/keyboards and doing the mixing while Brian does vocals/guitar/drums. Once we have the 12 songs picked that we want for sure on the album (kinda hard to pick when you have over 60, but lucky for us we have our own little digital 16 track studio so it isn't costing us anything but time to lay them down) we are gonna have my oldest wallpaper some flyers up at the local college and hopefully get us a college drummer that can stay off the bottle long enough to get some real work done. But if you want to hear some of the rough two tracks shoot me an email and I'll send you a link to the FB page. Kinda hard to describe really, kinda a SRV meets RHCP with a dozen other styles thrown into the mix. Just remember those were recorded live off a digital 2 track with a drummer that has serious booze issues.
As for the ACtard? You'd be surprised what you can find in a pawnshop for $100 nowadays, some damned nice sounding guitars and basses can be had. We gave away Squire Strats, Kramer Focus, a couple of cool Epi Les Pauls,Washburns, Ibanez, if we didn't consider it good enough to play on stage for at least a few tunes we didn't buy it. And I'd remind the ACtard that i actually kept one of those pawnshop specials and to this day I get compliments on the tone and styling. But if the ACtard would feel better only giving away new instruments there is always RondoMusic which has some nice Tele and LP Junior knockoff for less than $100. One of the bands i recently sat in with had me show them how to do the trick and bought the Rondo Tele and I can tell you that for a $100 Tele it actually played and sounded pretty nice. We all signed the back of the Tele and the lead guitarist liked it enough he played it for nearly half the night before we gave it away and said he was gonna order one for himself and use it as a base to put some hot rodded pickups in.
So while you may be a giant douchenozzle Mr ACtard for everyone else this is a cheap and easy way for a band starting out to quickly build a fanbase while giving something cool back to the fans. in my last band we were clearing an extra $800-$1400 a night depending on the size of the club and that was after figuring in the cost of the pawnshop special! And we NEVER had a single audience member not be thrilled to win a signed and customized by the band guitar, I mean seriously who wouldn't be happy to go see a band and come back with a guitar or bass that the band had decorated and which you saw played on stage before it was handed to you? And you get to hang with the guys afterward and can sit in the wives and GF section?
It sounds like you need to be looking at one of the A series quads if you are gonna try to do compiling and other heavy lifting on a mobile device like that. The A series turbo core will speed up when you aren't slamming all four cores and they will hold 8Gb-16Gb of RAM depending on the model and as someone who put 8gb of RAM in a EEE E-350 netbook I can say having THAT much RAM in a portable? Nice. in my case superfetch loads ALL my apps straight into RAM so the HDD can stay parked which adds nearly another 40 minutes on the battery.
But unless you have piles of money to go for one of those insane gaming laptops your best bet would probably be an A series or even a Phenom II quad if you found one at the right price. my oldest got a Phenom II quad laptop and frankly loves the hell out of it, never slows down no matter how much he throws at it and it even games pretty well.
But why are you trying to do all of that on a portable anyway? Talk about trying to pull a boat with a Pinto! Nowadays if you shop around you can build yourself a frankly insane desktop for around $500, I'd personally slap a Thuban 6 core (the 95w version can be had for around $134) with 8Gb of DDR 3 and whatever 1Tb you could get the best deal on and save the mobile for surfing and media. If you need access on the road you can always remote in and still have much better performance than you'd ever get out of a mobile. Laptops simply aren't made for maximum performance, at best you have a balancing act between power usage and raw horses.
Well when they can get played on the radio or heard by the masses without selling everything they will ever create to the leeches they can make a decent living. For all those musicians out there that want to make some extra scratch at your next gig? let old hairyfeet show you how to market and build a damned loyal fanbase, ready?
Now I'm gonna assume you have the usual swag, T-shirts, your album/albums, hats, the usual stuff correct? how would you like to triple or even quadruple your sales? How? think RAFFLE buddy! You go to the local pawnshop of whatever place you are playing in, buy some $100 pawnshop special guitar or bass. If you want to stand out you can do like I did and when we found a bass I'd get some stickers or temp tats and some glitter fingernail polish and decorate. if there was a knob missing? A Dremel and some dice become cool knobs. Then at the gig you tell the audience everyone that buys some swag gets their name put in the drawing at the end of the show, first prize is this one of a kind instrument customized and signed by the band! Then at the end of the thing you pick some pretty young thing out of the audience to draw the names, third is a shirt, second an album, and finally first prize the autographed guitar or bass they got to see you play for a couple of songs that night.
My last band we had fans follow us across states because they had won or one of their friends won an instrument. It makes them feel closer to the band and to help foster that feeling anybody that won we allowed to sit in the wives and GFs section and hang out with the band. It made for some extremely loyal fans and built a hell of a buzz. As an added bonus if you keep one or two old junkers around if you find a sweetheart in the pawnshop you can substitute the clunker and keep the sweetie. I have a great 82 Washburn that I decorated with 40s Pinup girls that played so well I let the audience have a late 80s Kramer bass I didn't care for and kept the Washburn. to this day I've had guys try to buy that bass off me wherever i play. It may not be nearly as fancy as my Fender 4 and 5 P Basses but its got style.
So I give this idea freely under GPL to my fellow musicians, who knows, maybe one day you'll open for us or we'll open for you. I'll be easy to spot because i always have that Washburn with dice knobs and girlie stickers and my Squire Korean 5 string, those two I NEVER leave home without, the Fender P basses are optional. So if you see a kinda fuzzy bass player playing a Wahsburn with girlie stickers come say hi, and let me know how it went for you! I can tell you that little trick we were making triple what we were getting before even after taking out the cost of the guitar or bass. Its easy and fun, try it at your next gig!
Not to mention anyone continuing to run decade plus hardware frankly needs their head examined as the risk is too high. i used to keep an old Win98 box for DOS gaming but I knew if it went tits up i lost nothing worth caring about but when you have to look someone in the eye and tell them they may have lost ALL the pictures they had taken of their late mother because they had hung onto old hardware too long? Its heartbreaking. I managed to get the pics off in that case doing the freezer trick (and using 3 cans of air to keep the drive chilled as i got the data off) but it was close, anybody who actually uses hardware THAT old in a business environment frankly don't deserve to be in business.
I mean does anybody even remember what kind of hardware we were running when XP came out? i know that I was running a 1Ghz Celeron that frankly cost a pretty penny because the 1Ghz barrier had only recently been broken and all the machines being sold at the shop were 400Mhz-733Mhz and i had an unheard of 256Mb of RAM which was frankly an insane amount of memory when most machines came with 64Mb-128Mb so with my SLI Voodoo cards I was pretty close to cutting edge. now can anybody imagine trying to use that same hardware for surfing the web and doing basic office tasks today? Talk about painful! XP is supported until 2014, Win 7 is supported until 2020, I'd say that's plenty. With those numbers you can easily skip an OS if you don't care for it like I did Vista and will most likely do again with Win 8 and still be supported so I'd say you are getting your money's worth when it comes to support.
Don't forget low rights mode which is a BIG boost to security and works with both chromium based as well as XP. Just for shits and giggles on a box I was planning to wipe anyway i put on Chrome and tried to get Win 7 infected by going to every game crack and 'hey look at teh tittiez!" topsite i could and while they were able to crash the browser that was it, after several scans both offline and online there wasn't squat. having the browser run in lower permissions that even user does severely limit what a malware writer can accomplish. As for ease of use frankly i don't know how we lived without jumplists and breadcrumbs which make getting back to where i was working or jumping around the file tree just too damned easy. Then you have superfetch which makes the PC faster the longer you use it as it intelligently loads your programs into RAM based on usage patterns and I'd say that for a modern system its well worth the upgrade especially when you keep an eye out on sellout.woot you can get Win 7 HP for $80 or even less depending on whether there is a MIR.
That said the reason i still have a couple of XP boxes as well as my Win 7 desktop and netbook is there comes a point where the cost of upgrades simply make it not worth the effort. While win 7 will run okay on that old 1.8Ghz Sempron is it worth wasting the money on? not really, at least not for me, as it is simply being used as a nettop and isn't worth blowing more money on simply to have the latest and greatest OS. But I can't picture running XP on a more modern system, its just too damned old.
Actually I've found here at the shop the key to not blowing PSUs, even the cheaper ones, is to make sure you have enough headroom. I usually figure in about 100 to 150 watts so if the machine maxes out at say 256w under full load look at a 400w. Most cases now come with 430w minimum so if all you are building is a basic dual core office box you'll have no worries as far as headroom. where i have seen plenty blow is where OEMs push the PSU almost to the limit such as a 220w machine having a 250w PSU which causes too much pull on the cheaper units like that. But I've even got several of those bottom of the line 250w Diablotek PSUs out in the field and they are running just fine with a lower powered CPU like one of the 65w Phenom or Athlon chips. If anybody needs a low power CPU cheap BTW Starmicro has the 65w Phenom I quads for $55, makes a great low power office box IMHO.
In the end it all comes down to knowing a parts limitations. you wouldn't put a turbocharger on a 74 Vega 4 banger and expect it to hold and you shouldn't expect a 250w PSU to take a 240w constant load without it letting out the magic smoke. For gamer PCs that aren't gonna use crossfire i look at around a 650w, a multimedia machine around 400w, and for a basic office box depending on the chip usually a 300w to 350w. As long as you leave some headroom i've found a PSU is a PSU, you just can't then start adding drives and burners and fans and expect that lower end PSU to continue to take the load.
You DO know there are like a bazillion ways to remote into a PC, yes? MSFT has Live Mesh, any Chromium based browser can use Chrome remote desktop, there is VNC in about a dozen flavors, seriously spending all that extra money when there are a plethora of free choices seems a little nuts to me.
This is where Ballmer fucked up IMHO as I saw a LOT of people jump on board Win 7 when they had the $50 HP and $110 family packs but when that ended so did adoption.
Lets be honest folks, for the vast majority even those late model P4s and early athlon X2s and Pentium Ds are more than "good enough' for what they are doing. i can tell you the vast majority of my customers are surfing, webmail, IM, the closest they come to heavy lifting is burning a CD or maybe getting red eye out a picture, oooohhh boy that takes a lot of horsepower. so why should they shell out a minimum of $100 for a new OS or closer to $400 for a new PC? What do they gain?
Finally there are plenty of machines that run just fine on XP but that would need significant upgrades to run Win 7 comfortably. My netbox is a 1.8Ghz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM and an old Nvidia 32Mb card. On XP that makes a great little box for downloading and surfing, quiet as can be and generates almost no heat. To upgrade that machine to Win 7 not only would I be out the cost of the OS but I'd need a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM because socket 754 chips cost more than they are worth and i think the biggest you can get anyway for that socket is a 2.2GHz single core, not worth spending the money on. so why would i upgrade? it does its job and my gaming PC has Win 7 for all the Dx11 gaming goodness, so an upgrade would make ZERO sense for that unit. Instead later on in the year once i've upgraded both boy's PCs I'll use one of their old Pentium Ds as a base for a new box. no hurry though, XP still works fine where it is.
Thanks for the advice but I won't buy Intel after it came out that they were rigging the compiler and bribing OEMs. i know in the end what i do will have little effect but I prefer to stick by my principles. that said even if for the sake of argument i would buy Intel the i series is a really bad deal, I've just looked up the chip in question and you are talking nearly DOUBLE the price compared to the AMD triple, in fact i could get them an unlocked quad for cheaper, and the boards and nearly 40% higher. if I were to do as you suggest it would add nearly $140 to the cost of the build which is just too damned high when we are talking two kids needing boxes.
Anyway I figure I'll go for the triples and who knows? maybe I'll get lucky and they'll be able to be unlocked down the line. The two boards I already have I don't think have core unlocker but we'll see and by using already bought and paid for boards all I'll have to supply is the chip and RAM which should cut the cost of upgrading both kids to around $100 a piece, then i can take their old Pentium D boards and RAM and slap them in a couple of old cases and get most of that back if not a little profit and use that to add more RAM which in the end will probably benefit the kids for gaming more than a fourth core anyway.
But if that is all you need why pay more? my oldest went with the Walmart Phone which i'm sure is JavaME but since all he does 90% of the time is text his butt off that phone is perfect for him, $45 a month gives him unlimited talk and unlimited text which works out great because with him in college he can't wait for nights and weekend to schedule study times. Frankly I'm not surprised if JavaME if having an uptick because those phones like my oldest got are really nice with pop out keyboards and are just perfect for college kids.
Uhh as a Reagan democrat as we were called then let me let you in on a little secret...we voted for Reagan because Jimmy was completely spineless...kinda like the POTUS we have now. If Carter would have actually stood up for himself instead of rolling over like a whipped dog then people might have actually voted for him but in a two party system its one or the other. look at Obama, how quickly he sells us out, yet he will win in 2012 because the MSM is gonna drag mittens into the Rep slot and frankly the American people wouldn't trust that man to sell them a 76 nova much less run the White house. After his little cracks about how he's unemployed and how people should lose their houses because it'll be good for the banks? Even though I can't stand Obama right now if its him or Mittens i'll hold my nose and watch mr Spineless sell us out again.
What you are describing is pretty much exactly what AMD has done with the E-350 which as the owner of a EEE with one I can say is quite nice. Bobcat is a simpler dual core paired with an 80 stream Radeon GPU to share the load and it lets me get 6 hours watching 720p video and closer to 7 if i'm just surfing.
That doesn't help me decide which is the better path for the kids though. they play games like L.A. Noir and the new Star Wars MMO and are needing more horse than their Pentium Ds can give them but i have two chips nearly the exact same price. on the one hand the Phenom X4 9500 which is a 2.2GHz quad, on the other the Athlon X3 455 which is a 3.3GHz triple. The question becomes which would be better in the long run, a lower clocked X4 or a higher clocked X3? Since I don't have either game i have NO clue whether they benefit from more MHz or from more cores, does anybody play these games and can give me a hand? My gut says that gaming would probably benefit more from raw speed than having a fourth core but then again I don't play PVP MMOs but i heard they benefit from more cores. Either way what they get will probably have to last them a good 3 years so i'd hate to flip a quarter and make the wrong call. Any suggestions?
BULLSHIT, complete and utter BULLSHIT. The president has ALWAYS had the bully pulpit and if Obama wasn't completely spineless and bought and paid for he could have easily gotten those things done as well as blocked that bill. he could have gone on national TV and said "This is WRONG, its EVIL, its immoral and against everything this country has been based on!" and gotten people to support him easily. How sad is it when both them dem and rep talking heads all just go along and don't give a shit and the ONLY one I saw make a truly impassioned speech against this gestapo crap was that nutter Glenn beck of all people. He said "You do NOT trash the constitution, I don't care how "evil" the enemy is! We have been able to stop them at every point in the past without trashing our constitution and there is NO rational reason to trash it now!".
The facts are Obama is more spineless than Jimmy Carter and more bought than Dubya. sadly i actually have more respect for old dumbass Dubya because while i didn't agree with a damned thing the man did at least he DID stand by what he believed even if he was wrong IMHO. Obama will happily lie his ass off right to your face and then turn around and sign whatever crosses his desk without a whimper. I have NO doubt history will judge him as in the top 5 under worst presidents!
Actually if you'd ever lived in the area you'd know there is a reason for that, its because when the cops get behind on their ticket quota they like to troll the exits looking for speeders. if they are bad behind on their quota they may give you a ticket for as little as 3MPH over so you really have to watch it on the offramps around LR. All in all though one of the nicer places to drive except for the quality of the roads but to their credit they are adding lanes and fixing holes it'll just take awhile. you want a beautiful scenic drive though try highway 5 going from Conway to Branson. Man the views are breathtaking with lush mountains and incredible scenery, plenty of passing lanes that are all smooth as glass, and folks are nothing but friendly. my GF lives up in that area and we take turns with me coming up and her going down and the view is always so relaxing.
that is why i never understood all the folks making ugly jokes about AR, I've been all over the south and even when i had ass length long hair and a biker jacket folks all over AR were friendly and easy enough to get along with, and other than speeding tickets even the cops didn't seem to be much for hassling folks, unlike TX where being a prick seems to be a requirement of all cops. But if you are ever going through that area try highway 5 its truly just a lovely drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignore Drinkypoo as obvious troll is obvious. The same poster tried to claim last time there was a post on AMD that they were "trapped" on Vista as there was no drivers for their laptop chip and when i pointed out several sources for the chip in question for both XP AND Windows 7 i got "Those don't work...and go fuck yourself!" which is not only pathetic and sad but also complete lies as i had sold a machine with the EXACT SAME CHIP running XP, it ran just wonderfully. Drinkypoo is a Linux + Nvidia fangirl and will spew FUD any time either Windows or AMD is mentioned.
As for ION what Drinkypoo fails to mention is Nvidia has abandoned it along with the rest of their chipset business after intel refused to give them access to the newer bus designs. there will NEVER be an ION 3, ION will never get NCQ support, the Nvidia chips you see now are it and won't be getting a single update as Nvidia is not in the chipset business anymore and the IGP developers were let go nearly two years ago. So anybody using ION for anything would have to be nuts as its obsolete and won't be getting replaced by anything but shitty Intel IGP.
As for SB? Frankly Intel has it waaay overpriced compared to socket AM3. Intel has been nuts lately with sockets anyway with LGA775, 1155, 1156, 1366 and 2011 all being produced. I recently priced the i3 and frankly i could have gotten a black edition quad and a nice motherboard and still come out about 35% less than going with an i3 dual and bottom of the line board. On an HTPC frankly the extra cost really isn't worth it as the unit simply won't be doing that much heavy lifting with the GPU doing the decode. I've built a couple of E-350 HTPCs as well as a couple of Phenom II based and with both we are talking full 1080p over HDMI with very little CPU usage so IMHO its just not worth the price difference. I recently built a customer an AMD Athlon quad HTPC and even after making a profit they ended up with a unit that not only does 1080p but games thanks to an HD4830 and transcodes and rips movies for just a hair under $600 with Win 7 HP X64, you just can't beat that price for that kind of performance.
But don't waste your breath on drinkypoo unless your post is "AMD kills kittehs and Windows burns babies!" all you'll get is shit flung at you, with each lie getting worse and more unbelievable than the last. AMD has not only opened their specs to the Linux driver devs but actually paid out of their own pocket to hire devs to help them so i don't see how a company could be more committed to Linux support than that. if you go to Phoronix you'll see they've made HUGE strides in an insanely short amount of time and IIRC most of the E-series features are supported now. Of course its even better in Windows but considering the help AMD is giving I wouldn't be surprised if the two platforms are equal as far as features go in another year with most AMD CPUs and APUs already perfectly usable in linux with free drivers.
Don't forget that back then EVERYTHING was hackable and the companies would give you details on the entire system like you wouldn't believe! I remember writing to Commodore about my VIC and ended up with a manual that had every single opcode for the CPU, had all the pins listed for every single I/O on the board, the amount of detail they gave you was just unreal. I have a customer that had one of the old Commodore 128s back in the day and thanks to all the details they gave him on the graphics subsystem he was able to do a pretty sharp for the time animation routine for one of his customers which was one of the very first retailers of those big old home sat dishes.
Thanks to him knowing exactly how the C128 drew successive lines he was able to cook up this cool animation of how the dish tracked the sat, how the data streamed down from the sat to the dish and finally to the home, but according to him it was a little TOO slick because computer graphics were so rare at the time they ended up having to set his display to the side of the booth because people were piling up in front of the screen watching his animation to the point they couldn't conduct business!
So I'm really grateful for the time i spent at the VIC and thanks to it and the C64 there was such a wealth of software for it that it really exploded the computer and helped give birth to what we see today. Between Commodore starting the first price war and MSFT selling MS-DOS to anybody with a buck so that Compaq could take the faster 386 and clone the IBM 5150 (which is where we get the word PC from,as the buzzword back then was "IBM PC compatible") we went from computers being the toys of the rich to a truly mass market commodity that now gives us honestly insane levels of power for incredibly cheap. So happy anniversary Commodore!
How about my own little anecdote instead? i don't know about the other guy but I've watched relatives turn into zombies thanks to those damned reality shows, we are talking smart people just turned into lumps that breathe watching endless reality crap. i have to wonder if one dissected the signal you'd find some hidden message like on "They Live" with words like "Don't think" and "obey" popping on the screen. I know that the girls at the cableco always point me out when i come in because i don't have a TV, not because they find that fact shocking, its because they simply can't understand how someone can't be watching reality TV. You can ask them about Survivor or Idol, that Jersey thing or the cooking one and they know ALL about every contestant and just tons of completely pointless bullshit about these "personalities" if you want to call them that.
Finally the REALLY scary part to me is how many families are using the idiot box for a babysitter for their kids. My kids would come in from visiting one of their friends and would have these shocked looks and say something like "Can you believe they have TVs everywhere but no books?" which frankly I find horrifying. Can you imagine growing up with nothing but reality TV crap to "stimulate" your mind?
Well if given the choice I know I'd rather be on stage, playing the bassbeast and making that lumber roar! Recording is fine and dandy but i always looked at it as an illusion, almost nobody is gonna sound like they do in the studio IRL, its just too polished and rehearsed. But live in front of a crowd is where i come alive, i take my 50 foot amp cord and head out there in the audience and dance with some cuties while I play, or kick on one of the funky effects i have programmed in my Zoom and just go nuts, now THAT is fun!
Why so big? If its a work laptop I'd be looking at one of the 60Gb models, especially if you are doing the heavy lifting on a server. I have to admit I've been tempted to pick up one for my little EEE (the 1215B model great little unit if you know anybody that needs an ultra portable cheap) just to see how much performance I can squeeze out of her but frankly i'm already getting 6 hours plus on a battery when watching HD video and I can tack over an hour onto that if i'm using ExpressGate instead of Win 7 HP so it would probably be overkill. I'm really impressed with the little EEE though, it actually has enough kick I'm using it for music editing in Audacity and a drummer in a box (hell of a lot better than dealing with a metronome IMHO) using hydrogen and she never lags so i'm just amazed.
But if you need it for work and they won't cough up a decent system i'd look into getting one of the quad AMD laptops for myself and then just taking it off as a work expense. I mean if my oldest can PVP in the new Star wars MMO with his and not lag i'm sure it'll do something as trivial as you know, work ;-)
Best bet IMHO is the new AMD E-350 mini boards. you are talking about a unit that uses 18w for the chip and around 35w all told full load, has a Radeon chip built into the APU that has support for just about every format, many of them even have a PCIe so if you decide you need even more GPU you can add it easily but since they do 1080p over HDMI I really don't see the point but its nice to have the option, and you can pick up one for $70 after rebate if you don't mind using a DVI to HDMI adapter or $100 if you want an HDMI built in. Oh and they hold 8Gb of RAM which is nice as Win 7 superfetch will load all your apps into RAM to make it VERY snappy. Great little unit and easy peasy to make a whisper quiet HTPC with one, I've built a couple for customers and they are happy as can be with it. And Netflix works just fine in WMC friend, it shows up under Internet TV along with about 2 dozen free channels.
As for TFA the point of this is.....what exactly? any TV new and fancy enough to have that port will already have streaming built in and the ones old enough they could use this won't have the port. Sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me. For those customers that didn't have the money to go HTPC I recommend the WD TV Live which is small and looks nice in an entertainment center and whether they choose HTPC or WDTV for the kiddies i recommend the Nbox Media Player as its simple enough for young ones to use and with a 200Gb drive you can load all their favorite shows and movies on them no problem and no have to worry about little Suzy crying because her sister scratched their favorite Dora disc. Oh and for those that have clueless family/friends that want to be able to rip DVDs? Tipard DVD ripper, best $30 they'll ever spend as its literally "push button to rip movie" and its default setting is to a bog standard DivX 5 which will play on anything and it has built in Streams and CUDA to help speed ripping.
That is one really nice thing about today, when i started with HTPCs they cost an arm and a leg to build and now you can build a really nice unit with frankly insane amounts of power for cheap, hell you shop around you can build one nice enough to even game on for less than $600. And when I started out pretty much the only software you had was this buggy shit that came with whatever cap card you got, now their is WMC and XBMC and MediaPortal and MythTV, man its never been easier to have a nice HTPC!
Riiiight, because schools are gonna have enough bandwidth to run the entire school on VMs on a server just so they can use Chromebooks...fanboi much? this reminds me of a conversation where someone said "Name ONE thing Linux can't do!" and I said "How about the tight integration of GPO plus AD plus Exchange plus Sharepoint?" and what i got as a response was a page and a half of kludge, including 4 different projects that had been abandoned for over a year, just so they could say "Linux does everything windows does!".
Give it up friend, Chromebook is for surfers silly rabbit NOT for kids! Its a throwaway design that they are charging laptop money for, its a dead end, and the last numbers I saw had the major Chromebook OEMs not even selling 3% of their stock, which considering we are talking $500 for an underpowered Atom netbook? yeah and people say MSFT gouges on price!
Okay I'll play, how are those Chromebook gonna run the educational software they've already bought? How is it gonna run the software that those kids will use IRL like MS Office, which BTW schools can get REAL cheap thanks to MSFT edu pricing? Answer they can't, Chromebooks would be good for surfing but we aren't buying machines to teach little Johnny how to surf. You are also ignoring that both MSFT and Apple have big discounts for education and that with disc imaging you can have a boned install back up in a few minutes.
Here is a prediction: In three years Chromebooks will be abandoned by Google just like Wave and everything else they threw at the wall and it didn't stick. so far every Chromebook released has been overpriced and underpowered and frankly they just don't sell. Since Google has a well known history of keeping only the hits and tossing the misses, even if they aren't complete failures but just fair to middling that will be the end of Chromebook. I mean when you can buy TWO atom netbooks for the price of a single Chromebook? Its too damned high. For a school of any decent size the downsides will far outweigh the upsides of Chromebook, sorry. Now YOU scream Negative nancy and wave your Googleflag and chant "all can go to hell except cave 76!" because obvious fanboi is obvious. They could go Apple OR MSFT OR Linux even and end up better off in the long run than going Chromebook, sorry.
While I agree with all of your points the flipside is frankly kids simply aren't learning the skills at home they require and learning computer skills is a BIG requirement for getting anywhere anymore. you just don't realize how computer illiterate someone can be until you try teaching an adult that has never used them how to operate a computer and use the web safely. i have a neighbor downstairs that is 57 years old and had NEVER touched a keyboard! I've taken him under my wing and thanks to his boss being a really decent guy he gave me a couple of office lease P4s from their shop (one for me to keep in return for setting the other up for him and teaching him the basics) I'm slowly but surely making progress but when you are dealing with someone who simply hasn't ever used one its almost like learning a completely new language. i'm literally having to start with "This is the on switch, this is a file" because he simply has zero frame of reference.
Now compare that to my oldest who is now a sophomore at the local college. On the first day of class they give the kids a PC skills test to see how many were gonna need remedial classes to learn how to research, take their online courses, etc and it took him maybe 3 minutes before the teacher told him to stop and said "Who taught you? Because its obvious you won't be needing any kind of help in this area." and he later told me he said "My uncle had a mouse in my hand practically from the time i could walk" so now he is earning some extra credits helping out as a TA on their remedial computer skills class.
The computer really is an essential tool to get anywhere in life anymore but you'd be surprised how many young people are getting little to no hands on training at what is such an important skill. you'd think with tech being so cheap every kid would be at home learning this stuff but when my boys were in HS they were practically the only kids with PCs at home, the rest had game consoles. But unless you want a job that has "you want fries with that?" as part of your daily routine you NEED these skills and sadly too many kids come home to a console baby sitter and parents that don't care as long as little Suzy ain't bugging them. Personally i think one quarter of the classes kids take in the 4 years of HS ought to be "life skills" where they teach them everything from computer skills to budgeting to how to watch over your 401k because the world isn't getting any simpler folks and the kids just aren't getting these things at home.
Cool page and its nice to see somebody gets it. its not so much about the making extra cash (although that always helps) but about building buzz and a fanbase, anything to help you connect better to the audience. Here is another cool trick we used to do, i called it "The wheel of cheese". Now since i'm good at making up grooves in just about any key what the singer did was cook up this roulette wheel (I think it cost like $25 worth of scrap material) and it would have all the major keys as well as two "mystery prize" slots. We'd pick some sweet young thing or random dude and have them spin the wheel and whatever it landed on we'd have to come up with a song on the spot in that key. it was a fun little game and the audience loved it.
Another cool trick which i love to do is I have a 50 foot amp cord and on smaller stages i'll go out into the audience with my bass and get some girl to dance with me while I play. it really gives a party atmosphere to the show and there is nothing that will inspire a bass player like a 22 year old babe bouncing to the beat ;-) of course the audience not only got a kick out of that but on the nights my little hot blooded Cherokee GF was at the show she'd put up with it for a couple of minutes before grabbing me by the back of the neck and pointing me back towards the stage. They all get a charge out of it and laugh when the singer would make a crack like "Better get back up here Beast or that hot tempered Indian GF of yours is libel to scalp your ass!" and I'd just shrug and make my bass roar.
Its all about putting on a good show in the end, and giving the audience and good fun evening which i'm sure you know. as long as everybody has a damned good time they will keep coming back and keep telling their friends and THAT is how you get a good buzz going about your band. Anything that helps the audience connect with the band is a GOOD thing in my book. that's why I still let 'em call me beast to this day, because a decade ago on a radio show the DJ said "One of these things is not like the others...we have four clean cut college boys and this big hairy beast of a bass player that looks like he should be playing for Judas priest" and ever since then wherever i play somebody will holler out "Hey its the beast! Make it roar beastman!" and i'll kick on the fuzz and give a loud bass roar. Anything that generates positive vibes, ya know?
Well just off the top of my head there is gaming, VMs for old programs, and industrial and embedded work. I have a client that has an $85000 C&C lathe they use for custom columns run by an ISA card that if my first "gamer" PC ever dies along with the spare i sold them (The gamer is a 100Mhz Pentium with 12Mb of RAM, the spare a 200Mhz Pentium II with a whopping 64Mb of RAM, both have DOS 3.2 from their original machine cloned onto them) then I'll be looking at FreeDOS to see if it'll run the software. I can understand why they want to keep that old thing going, not only did it cost an arm and a leg but it really does make beautiful custom columns and the software is easy peasy to use, just a shame the company went out of business in like 89 so good luck getting more modern software or a better than ISA interface for the thing.
But I bet there are a lot of machines just like that C&C that need access to DOS and thanks to FreeDOS that access exists even for modern hardware. Just because something is old doesn't mean it isn't still useful and valuable as that $85000 machines attests to. So my hat is off to the FreeDOS team, keep up the good work!
Actually that was my last band we were doing that trick with, although I intend to continue it with the new one. As for where we are playing? kinda busy right now trying to get the album recorded with just me and the singer/guitarist doing all the work because we had to fire the drummer over booze problems. So at the moment its me playing bass/keyboards and doing the mixing while Brian does vocals/guitar/drums. Once we have the 12 songs picked that we want for sure on the album (kinda hard to pick when you have over 60, but lucky for us we have our own little digital 16 track studio so it isn't costing us anything but time to lay them down) we are gonna have my oldest wallpaper some flyers up at the local college and hopefully get us a college drummer that can stay off the bottle long enough to get some real work done. But if you want to hear some of the rough two tracks shoot me an email and I'll send you a link to the FB page. Kinda hard to describe really, kinda a SRV meets RHCP with a dozen other styles thrown into the mix. Just remember those were recorded live off a digital 2 track with a drummer that has serious booze issues.
As for the ACtard? You'd be surprised what you can find in a pawnshop for $100 nowadays, some damned nice sounding guitars and basses can be had. We gave away Squire Strats, Kramer Focus, a couple of cool Epi Les Pauls,Washburns, Ibanez, if we didn't consider it good enough to play on stage for at least a few tunes we didn't buy it. And I'd remind the ACtard that i actually kept one of those pawnshop specials and to this day I get compliments on the tone and styling. But if the ACtard would feel better only giving away new instruments there is always RondoMusic which has some nice Tele and LP Junior knockoff for less than $100. One of the bands i recently sat in with had me show them how to do the trick and bought the Rondo Tele and I can tell you that for a $100 Tele it actually played and sounded pretty nice. We all signed the back of the Tele and the lead guitarist liked it enough he played it for nearly half the night before we gave it away and said he was gonna order one for himself and use it as a base to put some hot rodded pickups in.
So while you may be a giant douchenozzle Mr ACtard for everyone else this is a cheap and easy way for a band starting out to quickly build a fanbase while giving something cool back to the fans. in my last band we were clearing an extra $800-$1400 a night depending on the size of the club and that was after figuring in the cost of the pawnshop special! And we NEVER had a single audience member not be thrilled to win a signed and customized by the band guitar, I mean seriously who wouldn't be happy to go see a band and come back with a guitar or bass that the band had decorated and which you saw played on stage before it was handed to you? And you get to hang with the guys afterward and can sit in the wives and GF section?
It sounds like you need to be looking at one of the A series quads if you are gonna try to do compiling and other heavy lifting on a mobile device like that. The A series turbo core will speed up when you aren't slamming all four cores and they will hold 8Gb-16Gb of RAM depending on the model and as someone who put 8gb of RAM in a EEE E-350 netbook I can say having THAT much RAM in a portable? Nice. in my case superfetch loads ALL my apps straight into RAM so the HDD can stay parked which adds nearly another 40 minutes on the battery. But unless you have piles of money to go for one of those insane gaming laptops your best bet would probably be an A series or even a Phenom II quad if you found one at the right price. my oldest got a Phenom II quad laptop and frankly loves the hell out of it, never slows down no matter how much he throws at it and it even games pretty well.
But why are you trying to do all of that on a portable anyway? Talk about trying to pull a boat with a Pinto! Nowadays if you shop around you can build yourself a frankly insane desktop for around $500, I'd personally slap a Thuban 6 core (the 95w version can be had for around $134) with 8Gb of DDR 3 and whatever 1Tb you could get the best deal on and save the mobile for surfing and media. If you need access on the road you can always remote in and still have much better performance than you'd ever get out of a mobile. Laptops simply aren't made for maximum performance, at best you have a balancing act between power usage and raw horses.
Well when they can get played on the radio or heard by the masses without selling everything they will ever create to the leeches they can make a decent living. For all those musicians out there that want to make some extra scratch at your next gig? let old hairyfeet show you how to market and build a damned loyal fanbase, ready?
Now I'm gonna assume you have the usual swag, T-shirts, your album/albums, hats, the usual stuff correct? how would you like to triple or even quadruple your sales? How? think RAFFLE buddy! You go to the local pawnshop of whatever place you are playing in, buy some $100 pawnshop special guitar or bass. If you want to stand out you can do like I did and when we found a bass I'd get some stickers or temp tats and some glitter fingernail polish and decorate. if there was a knob missing? A Dremel and some dice become cool knobs. Then at the gig you tell the audience everyone that buys some swag gets their name put in the drawing at the end of the show, first prize is this one of a kind instrument customized and signed by the band! Then at the end of the thing you pick some pretty young thing out of the audience to draw the names, third is a shirt, second an album, and finally first prize the autographed guitar or bass they got to see you play for a couple of songs that night.
My last band we had fans follow us across states because they had won or one of their friends won an instrument. It makes them feel closer to the band and to help foster that feeling anybody that won we allowed to sit in the wives and GFs section and hang out with the band. It made for some extremely loyal fans and built a hell of a buzz. As an added bonus if you keep one or two old junkers around if you find a sweetheart in the pawnshop you can substitute the clunker and keep the sweetie. I have a great 82 Washburn that I decorated with 40s Pinup girls that played so well I let the audience have a late 80s Kramer bass I didn't care for and kept the Washburn. to this day I've had guys try to buy that bass off me wherever i play. It may not be nearly as fancy as my Fender 4 and 5 P Basses but its got style.
So I give this idea freely under GPL to my fellow musicians, who knows, maybe one day you'll open for us or we'll open for you. I'll be easy to spot because i always have that Washburn with dice knobs and girlie stickers and my Squire Korean 5 string, those two I NEVER leave home without, the Fender P basses are optional. So if you see a kinda fuzzy bass player playing a Wahsburn with girlie stickers come say hi, and let me know how it went for you! I can tell you that little trick we were making triple what we were getting before even after taking out the cost of the guitar or bass. Its easy and fun, try it at your next gig!
Not to mention anyone continuing to run decade plus hardware frankly needs their head examined as the risk is too high. i used to keep an old Win98 box for DOS gaming but I knew if it went tits up i lost nothing worth caring about but when you have to look someone in the eye and tell them they may have lost ALL the pictures they had taken of their late mother because they had hung onto old hardware too long? Its heartbreaking. I managed to get the pics off in that case doing the freezer trick (and using 3 cans of air to keep the drive chilled as i got the data off) but it was close, anybody who actually uses hardware THAT old in a business environment frankly don't deserve to be in business.
I mean does anybody even remember what kind of hardware we were running when XP came out? i know that I was running a 1Ghz Celeron that frankly cost a pretty penny because the 1Ghz barrier had only recently been broken and all the machines being sold at the shop were 400Mhz-733Mhz and i had an unheard of 256Mb of RAM which was frankly an insane amount of memory when most machines came with 64Mb-128Mb so with my SLI Voodoo cards I was pretty close to cutting edge. now can anybody imagine trying to use that same hardware for surfing the web and doing basic office tasks today? Talk about painful! XP is supported until 2014, Win 7 is supported until 2020, I'd say that's plenty. With those numbers you can easily skip an OS if you don't care for it like I did Vista and will most likely do again with Win 8 and still be supported so I'd say you are getting your money's worth when it comes to support.
Don't forget low rights mode which is a BIG boost to security and works with both chromium based as well as XP. Just for shits and giggles on a box I was planning to wipe anyway i put on Chrome and tried to get Win 7 infected by going to every game crack and 'hey look at teh tittiez!" topsite i could and while they were able to crash the browser that was it, after several scans both offline and online there wasn't squat. having the browser run in lower permissions that even user does severely limit what a malware writer can accomplish. As for ease of use frankly i don't know how we lived without jumplists and breadcrumbs which make getting back to where i was working or jumping around the file tree just too damned easy. Then you have superfetch which makes the PC faster the longer you use it as it intelligently loads your programs into RAM based on usage patterns and I'd say that for a modern system its well worth the upgrade especially when you keep an eye out on sellout.woot you can get Win 7 HP for $80 or even less depending on whether there is a MIR.
That said the reason i still have a couple of XP boxes as well as my Win 7 desktop and netbook is there comes a point where the cost of upgrades simply make it not worth the effort. While win 7 will run okay on that old 1.8Ghz Sempron is it worth wasting the money on? not really, at least not for me, as it is simply being used as a nettop and isn't worth blowing more money on simply to have the latest and greatest OS. But I can't picture running XP on a more modern system, its just too damned old.
Actually I've found here at the shop the key to not blowing PSUs, even the cheaper ones, is to make sure you have enough headroom. I usually figure in about 100 to 150 watts so if the machine maxes out at say 256w under full load look at a 400w. Most cases now come with 430w minimum so if all you are building is a basic dual core office box you'll have no worries as far as headroom. where i have seen plenty blow is where OEMs push the PSU almost to the limit such as a 220w machine having a 250w PSU which causes too much pull on the cheaper units like that. But I've even got several of those bottom of the line 250w Diablotek PSUs out in the field and they are running just fine with a lower powered CPU like one of the 65w Phenom or Athlon chips. If anybody needs a low power CPU cheap BTW Starmicro has the 65w Phenom I quads for $55, makes a great low power office box IMHO.
In the end it all comes down to knowing a parts limitations. you wouldn't put a turbocharger on a 74 Vega 4 banger and expect it to hold and you shouldn't expect a 250w PSU to take a 240w constant load without it letting out the magic smoke. For gamer PCs that aren't gonna use crossfire i look at around a 650w, a multimedia machine around 400w, and for a basic office box depending on the chip usually a 300w to 350w. As long as you leave some headroom i've found a PSU is a PSU, you just can't then start adding drives and burners and fans and expect that lower end PSU to continue to take the load.
You DO know there are like a bazillion ways to remote into a PC, yes? MSFT has Live Mesh, any Chromium based browser can use Chrome remote desktop, there is VNC in about a dozen flavors, seriously spending all that extra money when there are a plethora of free choices seems a little nuts to me.
This is where Ballmer fucked up IMHO as I saw a LOT of people jump on board Win 7 when they had the $50 HP and $110 family packs but when that ended so did adoption.
Lets be honest folks, for the vast majority even those late model P4s and early athlon X2s and Pentium Ds are more than "good enough' for what they are doing. i can tell you the vast majority of my customers are surfing, webmail, IM, the closest they come to heavy lifting is burning a CD or maybe getting red eye out a picture, oooohhh boy that takes a lot of horsepower. so why should they shell out a minimum of $100 for a new OS or closer to $400 for a new PC? What do they gain?
Finally there are plenty of machines that run just fine on XP but that would need significant upgrades to run Win 7 comfortably. My netbox is a 1.8Ghz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM and an old Nvidia 32Mb card. On XP that makes a great little box for downloading and surfing, quiet as can be and generates almost no heat. To upgrade that machine to Win 7 not only would I be out the cost of the OS but I'd need a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM because socket 754 chips cost more than they are worth and i think the biggest you can get anyway for that socket is a 2.2GHz single core, not worth spending the money on. so why would i upgrade? it does its job and my gaming PC has Win 7 for all the Dx11 gaming goodness, so an upgrade would make ZERO sense for that unit. Instead later on in the year once i've upgraded both boy's PCs I'll use one of their old Pentium Ds as a base for a new box. no hurry though, XP still works fine where it is.
Thanks for the advice but I won't buy Intel after it came out that they were rigging the compiler and bribing OEMs. i know in the end what i do will have little effect but I prefer to stick by my principles. that said even if for the sake of argument i would buy Intel the i series is a really bad deal, I've just looked up the chip in question and you are talking nearly DOUBLE the price compared to the AMD triple, in fact i could get them an unlocked quad for cheaper, and the boards and nearly 40% higher. if I were to do as you suggest it would add nearly $140 to the cost of the build which is just too damned high when we are talking two kids needing boxes.
Anyway I figure I'll go for the triples and who knows? maybe I'll get lucky and they'll be able to be unlocked down the line. The two boards I already have I don't think have core unlocker but we'll see and by using already bought and paid for boards all I'll have to supply is the chip and RAM which should cut the cost of upgrading both kids to around $100 a piece, then i can take their old Pentium D boards and RAM and slap them in a couple of old cases and get most of that back if not a little profit and use that to add more RAM which in the end will probably benefit the kids for gaming more than a fourth core anyway.
But if that is all you need why pay more? my oldest went with the Walmart Phone which i'm sure is JavaME but since all he does 90% of the time is text his butt off that phone is perfect for him, $45 a month gives him unlimited talk and unlimited text which works out great because with him in college he can't wait for nights and weekend to schedule study times. Frankly I'm not surprised if JavaME if having an uptick because those phones like my oldest got are really nice with pop out keyboards and are just perfect for college kids.
Uhh as a Reagan democrat as we were called then let me let you in on a little secret...we voted for Reagan because Jimmy was completely spineless...kinda like the POTUS we have now. If Carter would have actually stood up for himself instead of rolling over like a whipped dog then people might have actually voted for him but in a two party system its one or the other. look at Obama, how quickly he sells us out, yet he will win in 2012 because the MSM is gonna drag mittens into the Rep slot and frankly the American people wouldn't trust that man to sell them a 76 nova much less run the White house. After his little cracks about how he's unemployed and how people should lose their houses because it'll be good for the banks? Even though I can't stand Obama right now if its him or Mittens i'll hold my nose and watch mr Spineless sell us out again.
What you are describing is pretty much exactly what AMD has done with the E-350 which as the owner of a EEE with one I can say is quite nice. Bobcat is a simpler dual core paired with an 80 stream Radeon GPU to share the load and it lets me get 6 hours watching 720p video and closer to 7 if i'm just surfing.
That doesn't help me decide which is the better path for the kids though. they play games like L.A. Noir and the new Star Wars MMO and are needing more horse than their Pentium Ds can give them but i have two chips nearly the exact same price. on the one hand the Phenom X4 9500 which is a 2.2GHz quad, on the other the Athlon X3 455 which is a 3.3GHz triple. The question becomes which would be better in the long run, a lower clocked X4 or a higher clocked X3? Since I don't have either game i have NO clue whether they benefit from more MHz or from more cores, does anybody play these games and can give me a hand? My gut says that gaming would probably benefit more from raw speed than having a fourth core but then again I don't play PVP MMOs but i heard they benefit from more cores. Either way what they get will probably have to last them a good 3 years so i'd hate to flip a quarter and make the wrong call. Any suggestions?
BULLSHIT, complete and utter BULLSHIT. The president has ALWAYS had the bully pulpit and if Obama wasn't completely spineless and bought and paid for he could have easily gotten those things done as well as blocked that bill. he could have gone on national TV and said "This is WRONG, its EVIL, its immoral and against everything this country has been based on!" and gotten people to support him easily. How sad is it when both them dem and rep talking heads all just go along and don't give a shit and the ONLY one I saw make a truly impassioned speech against this gestapo crap was that nutter Glenn beck of all people. He said "You do NOT trash the constitution, I don't care how "evil" the enemy is! We have been able to stop them at every point in the past without trashing our constitution and there is NO rational reason to trash it now!".
The facts are Obama is more spineless than Jimmy Carter and more bought than Dubya. sadly i actually have more respect for old dumbass Dubya because while i didn't agree with a damned thing the man did at least he DID stand by what he believed even if he was wrong IMHO. Obama will happily lie his ass off right to your face and then turn around and sign whatever crosses his desk without a whimper. I have NO doubt history will judge him as in the top 5 under worst presidents!
Actually if you'd ever lived in the area you'd know there is a reason for that, its because when the cops get behind on their ticket quota they like to troll the exits looking for speeders. if they are bad behind on their quota they may give you a ticket for as little as 3MPH over so you really have to watch it on the offramps around LR. All in all though one of the nicer places to drive except for the quality of the roads but to their credit they are adding lanes and fixing holes it'll just take awhile. you want a beautiful scenic drive though try highway 5 going from Conway to Branson. Man the views are breathtaking with lush mountains and incredible scenery, plenty of passing lanes that are all smooth as glass, and folks are nothing but friendly. my GF lives up in that area and we take turns with me coming up and her going down and the view is always so relaxing.
that is why i never understood all the folks making ugly jokes about AR, I've been all over the south and even when i had ass length long hair and a biker jacket folks all over AR were friendly and easy enough to get along with, and other than speeding tickets even the cops didn't seem to be much for hassling folks, unlike TX where being a prick seems to be a requirement of all cops. But if you are ever going through that area try highway 5 its truly just a lovely drive.