When the next edition of PCSX2 is finally released (0.9.2) it will be stunning to anyone with a dual-core pc. The older version available now is a little slow, and can by unstable in multi-threaded mode. Nobody without a dual-core pc will be able to play a ps2 emulator at a sensible speed for a quite a while, if ever (are there going to be any new single-core cpus?).
Whatever you do, don't post on the PCSX2 forums about it running slow, not working right, asking for release dates of the next version or to become a beta tester, you'll just be laughed at and told to read the rules.
Why would that stop you playing on emulator? I have a ps2-style pc gamepad (including dual analogue and rumble) with a usb plug on the end. It works fine with the ps2 emulator, although I can't say the same about the emulator itself yet...
Pipelining is not keep-alive. Keep alive means sending multiple requests down one connection, waiting for the response to the request before sending the next. Pipelining sends all the requests at once without waiting.
Keep-alive no: Open connection -Request -Response Close Connection Open connection -Request -Response Close Connection -Repeat-
Keep-alive yes: Open connection -Request -Response -Request -Response -Repeat- Close Connection
Pipe-lining yes: Open connection -Request -Request -Repeat- -Response -Response -Repeat- Close Connection
Tic-Tac-Toe games only end in a tie if one side doesn't make a mistake. I a game where you have a maximum of 4-5 moves each it's easy not to make a mistake, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
Unbeatable implies *never* making a stupid move, which is pretty impressive really.
May I remind the editors that your audience isn't 100% american, if you are talking about america you need to say so.
In other news, the UK equivalent to EB (didn't they buy EB?): GAME, has been taking wii pre-orders since late september. We beat you for once! (Note, I haven't looked up the dates, but I bet it's still released in the US first).
"but AMD claims that its quad core is true quad core, while Intel's is two dual-cores grafted together." I'm sure that this was true about intels early dual-cores, if they've done it again then we can expect some truely awful performance from their quadcores...
I remember something recently where a sci-fi show was aired in the UK before america one time, and there were so many lost US viewers from people torrenting the UK version that they have since put a several week delay in the middle of the UK airing of the series, to make the US be ahead of us again. Of course, this loses them UK viewers, but we're the smaller market, why should they care?
Hello people, do a simultaneous showing (or within a day, to allow for timezones) and you'll get people watching in both countries, and far fewer people downloading it. Why can't this be done? I wouldn't mind so much if we were watching different channels, (eg ABC vs BBC), but ones that broadcast in both countries are still often months out (eg sci-fi).
Games are the same, what's the difference between the UK and US versions of a game, really? I can understand needing longer for the multi-language european versions, but a lot of games released in the UK are english-only. So, why can't they sell the US english version here in the UK? Ok, so you may need to organise different legal work, trademarks etc, and different distribution contracts and so on, but you could do this at the same time as you do the same thing for america. What's your european office doing all these months?
As I'm not American, what the hell is "sweeps" anyway? I first heard it in that wonderful movie "Bruce Almighty" (he's a reporter don't you know, and he "goes live during sweeps"), and I still have no idea what it is except that for some reason it makes people watch more tv.
As far as I can figure out this friday's episode on sky one is the start of season 9, so either they're doing a big recap in the hiatus or they really are that far behind the usa. The sci-fi channel aren't showing it at all, so if they normally do then we're having the hiatus like everyone else, but iirc they're normally behind too.
It's not just animated shows that stop half-way through a series, stargate, battlestar galactica (can you tell what kind of tv I like yet?) and many others do it too.
It's really annoying, and I wish I knew why they did it.
More importantly, I wish I knew why the UK doesn't get most American series for years after they're first shown. More and more people are downloading them from the USA now, so surely the viewing figures in the UK are dropping. Are the British broadcasters so blind that they haven't noticed, or is it the American channels that are causing us to be behind?
Only in Corporate America's Internet would this get modded interesting instead of funny/troll. Wait, this isn't America's Internet? Everyone's here? Could have fooled me...
The price of petrol in England recently hit £1/litre, which according to your friendly neighbourhood Google is: (UK£ 1) / l = 7.12944458 US$ / US gallon Last time I filled I paid around 98p/litre, which is almost exactly $7/gallon.
Don't complain about $6/gallon, we're even worse off than you. Of course, our little country is so small that it's possible to drive from one end to the other and back on one tank (more exactly London to Edinburgh, as recently demonstrated on BBC's Top Gear). So I guess we use less fuel than most places.
You're obviously unfamiliar with the international electronics market, it's always like this. In some cases the exchange rate for electronics in the uk vs usa is $1 -> £1, and in some (rare) cases it's actually worse than that.
Try looking at the release prices for any major games console in the usa vs the uk, and you'll find the prices are definitely slanted against us. eg: PS3 launch prices where it is $599 for the premium console in the usa and £425 ($806) in the UK. Some places get it for nearly $1000, so maybe we're lucky...
I guess they ship the stuff from all the taiwanese factories to the usa before then sending it on to the rest of the world, meaning we pay double transport and import tax costs?
Not forgetting the compression settings and image format the camera stores the picture as. I've seen a few "8MP" images ruined by the photographer using the "smallest" compression setting and bluring out the whole photo. It's not too hard to imagine that some cameras' "best/largest" compression setting might not be lossless and/or produce a worse picture than a lower MP camera with a better compression chip, or that "higher-MP cameras" might default to a "smaller" compression because the tiny memory card they ship with could only hold one or two photos otherwise.
It's like making a supersonic car that can only be driven for 15 seconds before it needs to be refueled, so you reduce the power of the engine to 200MPH so that you can drive it from one end of the country to the other on one tank and then advertise it as both "supersonic" and "can drive the whole length of the country on one tank" even though it can't do both at once.
And not forgeting the manufacturers that multiply the optical and digital zooms together to get the "maximum zoom", when only idiots or the uninformed use digital zoom. Either zoom the photo yourself on the pc after (better quality this way, especially with cubic sub-sampling (or whatever it's called)), or just GET CLOSER TO WHAT YOU'RE TAKING THE PHOTO OF.
IIRC socket AM2 is supposed to be compatible with at least the next generation of chips, currently called AM3, as well as quad-core cpus, and rumours of ddr3 memory. Maybe what you want is the thing you're not getting while you wait for what you want?
Also can I point out that while Socket A was kept for ages, it supported various different bus speeds through it's life (eg I have a socket A board at home that only supports DDR266 ram and 100/133 bus cpus), so regardless of it being the same socket a cpu upgrade would sometimes require a motherboard upgrade anyway.
Personally I've had a socket 939 system for a year, and I fully expect it to be supported for at least another, and it should take that long for my cpu to drop into the "underpowered" category. At least I didn't buy a socket-754 system, that would have been a real mistake. The server world has been more consistent, socket 940 has been AMD's only server socket for quite a long time, and it's only just changing.
Well I personally think that they won't bother recording "extras" (interviews and making-ofs) in hd resolution, so dual-layer dvd with movie and extras with a hd layer for a hd-quality version of the movie (and some way for it to play the extras off the dvd section) would seem like the logical choice to me.
I have a year-old wireless keyboard + optical mouse at home, and I don't use the mouse because it is frequently innaccurate and eats batteries. I've seen a couple of sets with a charger of some kind (battery (pack) charger in the reciever, or stand mouse in reciever to charge), and aparently these mice are more responsive because they don't use such aggressive power-saving schemes. "Why save power if it lasts 3 days and gets charged every night" I guess.
By reading the following you agree not to sell or use my idea without my consent, and you must impose a similar restriction on anyone you transmit it to. (Can't be too careful these days)
The thing is, why has no-one made a keyboard equivalent? I'd love to have a keyboard that I just clipped onto the reciever and it acted as a wired keyboard for super-responsive gaming, while at the same time it would charge the internal battery pack for when you un-clip the keyboard to use it wirelessly, lying on your bed or just leaning back in your chair or any other situation where a wireless keyboard is useful.
Yes, Avast has to be one of the best virus scanners around, simply because it can stop the virus/malware even getting into your pc in some cases. It does go a little nuts when downloading torrents of archives (eg rar) though, because it tries to decompress it every time there is a write to the file. Of course, that's better than having a scanner that doesn't understand rar files at all, and it's a simple matter to make it not check your incoming directory, and set up your torrent program to move the downloads to another folder when they complete (where they will be scanned). Maybe setting it to use an alternate file extension for partially downloaded files might help as well, but I haven't tried it in the many months since that feature was added to the downloader I use (and/or I turned it on).
The problem isn't technically the cpus running at different speeds, it's the cycle counters being out of sync and a thread that reads the cycle counter (normally for super-accurate timing) being shuttled between the cpus. Obviously this can only happen in a multi-core system and not a cluster, unless it's a cluster of multi-cpu machines, in which case the multi-cpu nodes have trouble not the whole cluster. Having different speed cpus in a system causes two problems: A program could read different cycle counters and suddenly decide that many hours have passed (or it's jumped back) since it last read the counter, and/or it will see time running at a different rate depending which cpu it's on as their cycle counters increment at different speeds.
The source dedicated server (mostly for counterstrike source) uses the cycle counter for timing, and it goes absolutely haywire in a mismatched cpu system (at least on windows). The most obvious effect is that the uptime counter can't make up it's mind about how long the server's been up, but there are movement prediction etc errors too.
For more fun try running counterstrike source (itself, not the server) on an amd X2 system with cool & quiet on and without the windows patch. CS will read the speed of your cpu at the low-speed setting when it starts, then when the cpu switches to high speed it'll run twice as fast as it should and also make you move twice as fast from everyone else's pov. Strangely when this happened to me months ago I didn't get any warning from VAC, even though the server was secured. Personally I think moving twice as fast as everyone else is a hack, but what do I know?
Other than these two, I haven't seen a single program using the cycle counter for timing, but that doesn't mean that there aren't loads and loads of them around.
By far the most annoying thing I've found about driver-based copy protection is that not one of them works on windows 64-bit. There are many games that I -have- to crack because otherwise they won't run on my pc at all. A friend of mine mentioned that he has a game that is like this (can't remember the name), but the company making the copy-protection HAS released a 64-bit version that works with 32-bit games, but atari (I think) won't release a patch for the game that includes it, forcing him to crack it anyway.
Just don't copy-protect games, ok? Microsoft don't stop people copying their disks, in fact the tools for ripping the image to iso, integrating a new service pack and burning it back to disk still bootable are freely available (Microsoft even make disk images downloadable, especially for the MSDNAA).
Instead make the game either need activating online or only restrict the online play to stop people who are using the same serial key. Don't do anything aggressive either, requiring a reinstall which nukes saves to change to a legally bought key will not encourage people to buy your game.
All in all, the best games for working on 64 bit edition (imo) are UT2004 (doesn't require the cd after a particular patch and there's a 64-bit version now too), any steam game (hl2 or cs:s etc) again, don't need a cd to play and are 64-bit, any number of mmo games (none that I know of need a cd to play, most don't even need a cd to install).
Or, I have a suggestion if you really want copy protection: put it in the installer on the cd. Make the installer validate your key and check the authenticity of the disk, then let the installed game run without it. Combine with the "can't play multiplayer with the same key" protection and you'll have a relatively effective protection system that fewer people will complain about. Sure, people will crack the installer eventually, but it will take them longer to crack than the game exe (at least I think so, you'd have to ask a cracker really).
I've had a psu die, but that was "technically" my fault. I'd plugged either the front panel headphone socket or mic socket into the motherboard wrongly, and when I plugged in my headset there was a loud BANG and my computer turns off. I check around and there's a faint haze and a burning smell lingering around the power supply, so I figured that it had died violently. I borrowed a psu off a friend nearby, plugged it in, turned it on and nothing happened (I'd removed the offending front-panel connection from the motherboard by now). Needless to say I was a little confused, but thankfully my pc was perfectly ok, just the fuse had gone in the plug. How can the fuse -and- the power-supply die at the same time you ask? Well, I don't know either, but maybe the completely destroyed remains inside the qtec 450W psu hold some clue (maybe 550W, it was 2 1/2 to 3 years ago). Oddly the motherboard, onboard sound, and headphones all survived, so what actually happened I still don't know. After this I bought an early tagan 480W psu (they hadn't added their signature 20+4 split plug yet, it had an adapter) and have been recommending them ever since.
I've also lost most of a pc to a gigabyte motherboard's power-regulator add-in card thing (for stable 6 phase powar!!!) falling out of it's dodgy socket above the cpu and catching fire as a few of its and the motherboard's power-control chips exploded from the sheer unexpectedness. The tagan psu shut off automatically (saving itself), but it didn't save the motherboard or cpu, which I expected to be dead really, or even the graphics card, which as I figure it shouldn't really have been affected. From now on I'm staying clear of gigabyte if I can. Asus seem all right so far though.
In case you're wondering I replaced the motherboard with an asus "A8N SLI-deluxe", my puny A64 3000 with a nice dual-core 3800, and the stupid twin 6600GT gigabyte "3d1" graphics card with a radeon x800 GTO. Unfortunately I've had to replace the radeon since, my first ati card in many years, because it kept showering the screen with random black pixels during 3d. Turning down the gfx memory clock avoided it, so I guess the x800 had a bad ram chip.
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Is it just me or are most of the board's advertised features part of the southbridge chip, which isn't new?
It seems the only change is the northbridge supporting the core2 now.
In other words, amd fanboys go back to sleep, nothing to see here for you.
When the next edition of PCSX2 is finally released (0.9.2) it will be stunning to anyone with a dual-core pc. The older version available now is a little slow, and can by unstable in multi-threaded mode. Nobody without a dual-core pc will be able to play a ps2 emulator at a sensible speed for a quite a while, if ever (are there going to be any new single-core cpus?).
Whatever you do, don't post on the PCSX2 forums about it running slow, not working right, asking for release dates of the next version or to become a beta tester, you'll just be laughed at and told to read the rules.
Why would that stop you playing on emulator? I have a ps2-style pc gamepad (including dual analogue and rumble) with a usb plug on the end. It works fine with the ps2 emulator, although I can't say the same about the emulator itself yet...
Pipelining is not keep-alive. Keep alive means sending multiple requests down one connection, waiting for the response to the request before sending the next. Pipelining sends all the requests at once without waiting.
Keep-alive no:
Open connection
-Request
-Response
Close Connection
Open connection
-Request
-Response
Close Connection
-Repeat-
Keep-alive yes:
Open connection
-Request
-Response
-Request
-Response
-Repeat-
Close Connection
Pipe-lining yes:
Open connection
-Request
-Request
-Repeat-
-Response
-Response
-Repeat-
Close Connection
Tic-Tac-Toe games only end in a tie if one side doesn't make a mistake. I a game where you have a maximum of 4-5 moves each it's easy not to make a mistake, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
Unbeatable implies *never* making a stupid move, which is pretty impressive really.
May I remind the editors that your audience isn't 100% american, if you are talking about america you need to say so.
In other news, the UK equivalent to EB (didn't they buy EB?): GAME, has been taking wii pre-orders since late september. We beat you for once! (Note, I haven't looked up the dates, but I bet it's still released in the US first).
"but AMD claims that its quad core is true quad core, while Intel's is two dual-cores grafted together."
I'm sure that this was true about intels early dual-cores, if they've done it again then we can expect some truely awful performance from their quadcores...
You mean 98 SE, surely? Wouldn't that be the same idea as XP SP2?
(IIRC SP1 didn't add many new features, and SE did).
I remember something recently where a sci-fi show was aired in the UK before america one time, and there were so many lost US viewers from people torrenting the UK version that they have since put a several week delay in the middle of the UK airing of the series, to make the US be ahead of us again. Of course, this loses them UK viewers, but we're the smaller market, why should they care?
Hello people, do a simultaneous showing (or within a day, to allow for timezones) and you'll get people watching in both countries, and far fewer people downloading it. Why can't this be done? I wouldn't mind so much if we were watching different channels, (eg ABC vs BBC), but ones that broadcast in both countries are still often months out (eg sci-fi).
Games are the same, what's the difference between the UK and US versions of a game, really? I can understand needing longer for the multi-language european versions, but a lot of games released in the UK are english-only. So, why can't they sell the US english version here in the UK? Ok, so you may need to organise different legal work, trademarks etc, and different distribution contracts and so on, but you could do this at the same time as you do the same thing for america. What's your european office doing all these months?
Just a theory, but does "Six Axes" mean that it senses the 3 rotation directions and the 3 directions of motion?
Or it could mean 2 axes in motion sensing + two axes on each analogue stick...
Is this true? 'Cause normally things like this just use the charge cable to power the wireless...
(Fairly sure this is why you can't use an xbox 360 wireless controller in a pc even when connected by the charge cable.)
As I'm not American, what the hell is "sweeps" anyway? I first heard it in that wonderful movie "Bruce Almighty" (he's a reporter don't you know, and he "goes live during sweeps"), and I still have no idea what it is except that for some reason it makes people watch more tv.
As far as I can figure out this friday's episode on sky one is the start of season 9, so either they're doing a big recap in the hiatus or they really are that far behind the usa. The sci-fi channel aren't showing it at all, so if they normally do then we're having the hiatus like everyone else, but iirc they're normally behind too.
If you want to see the kind of stuff we get on sky then look here: http://www.sky.com/portal/site/skycom/tvlistings , but yes, the sci-fi is mostly american.
It's not just animated shows that stop half-way through a series, stargate, battlestar galactica (can you tell what kind of tv I like yet?) and many others do it too.
It's really annoying, and I wish I knew why they did it.
More importantly, I wish I knew why the UK doesn't get most American series for years after they're first shown. More and more people are downloading them from the USA now, so surely the viewing figures in the UK are dropping. Are the British broadcasters so blind that they haven't noticed, or is it the American channels that are causing us to be behind?
Only in Corporate America's Internet would this get modded interesting instead of funny/troll. Wait, this isn't America's Internet? Everyone's here? Could have fooled me...
The price of petrol in England recently hit £1/litre, which according to your friendly neighbourhood Google is: (UK£ 1) / l = 7.12944458 US$ / US gallon
Last time I filled I paid around 98p/litre, which is almost exactly $7/gallon.
Don't complain about $6/gallon, we're even worse off than you. Of course, our little country is so small that it's possible to drive from one end to the other and back on one tank (more exactly London to Edinburgh, as recently demonstrated on BBC's Top Gear). So I guess we use less fuel than most places.
You're obviously unfamiliar with the international electronics market, it's always like this. In some cases the exchange rate for electronics in the uk vs usa is $1 -> £1, and in some (rare) cases it's actually worse than that.
Try looking at the release prices for any major games console in the usa vs the uk, and you'll find the prices are definitely slanted against us. eg: PS3 launch prices where it is $599 for the premium console in the usa and £425 ($806) in the UK. Some places get it for nearly $1000, so maybe we're lucky...
I guess they ship the stuff from all the taiwanese factories to the usa before then sending it on to the rest of the world, meaning we pay double transport and import tax costs?
Not forgetting the compression settings and image format the camera stores the picture as. I've seen a few "8MP" images ruined by the photographer using the "smallest" compression setting and bluring out the whole photo. It's not too hard to imagine that some cameras' "best/largest" compression setting might not be lossless and/or produce a worse picture than a lower MP camera with a better compression chip, or that "higher-MP cameras" might default to a "smaller" compression because the tiny memory card they ship with could only hold one or two photos otherwise.
It's like making a supersonic car that can only be driven for 15 seconds before it needs to be refueled, so you reduce the power of the engine to 200MPH so that you can drive it from one end of the country to the other on one tank and then advertise it as both "supersonic" and "can drive the whole length of the country on one tank" even though it can't do both at once.
And not forgeting the manufacturers that multiply the optical and digital zooms together to get the "maximum zoom", when only idiots or the uninformed use digital zoom. Either zoom the photo yourself on the pc after (better quality this way, especially with cubic sub-sampling (or whatever it's called)), or just GET CLOSER TO WHAT YOU'RE TAKING THE PHOTO OF.
There, that's you told.
IIRC socket AM2 is supposed to be compatible with at least the next generation of chips, currently called AM3, as well as quad-core cpus, and rumours of ddr3 memory. Maybe what you want is the thing you're not getting while you wait for what you want?
Also can I point out that while Socket A was kept for ages, it supported various different bus speeds through it's life (eg I have a socket A board at home that only supports DDR266 ram and 100/133 bus cpus), so regardless of it being the same socket a cpu upgrade would sometimes require a motherboard upgrade anyway.
Personally I've had a socket 939 system for a year, and I fully expect it to be supported for at least another, and it should take that long for my cpu to drop into the "underpowered" category. At least I didn't buy a socket-754 system, that would have been a real mistake. The server world has been more consistent, socket 940 has been AMD's only server socket for quite a long time, and it's only just changing.
Well I personally think that they won't bother recording "extras" (interviews and making-ofs) in hd resolution, so dual-layer dvd with movie and extras with a hd layer for a hd-quality version of the movie (and some way for it to play the extras off the dvd section) would seem like the logical choice to me.
I have a year-old wireless keyboard + optical mouse at home, and I don't use the mouse because it is frequently innaccurate and eats batteries. I've seen a couple of sets with a charger of some kind (battery (pack) charger in the reciever, or stand mouse in reciever to charge), and aparently these mice are more responsive because they don't use such aggressive power-saving schemes. "Why save power if it lasts 3 days and gets charged every night" I guess.
By reading the following you agree not to sell or use my idea without my consent, and you must impose a similar restriction on anyone you transmit it to. (Can't be too careful these days)
The thing is, why has no-one made a keyboard equivalent? I'd love to have a keyboard that I just clipped onto the reciever and it acted as a wired keyboard for super-responsive gaming, while at the same time it would charge the internal battery pack for when you un-clip the keyboard to use it wirelessly, lying on your bed or just leaning back in your chair or any other situation where a wireless keyboard is useful.
Anyone?
Yes, Avast has to be one of the best virus scanners around, simply because it can stop the virus/malware even getting into your pc in some cases. It does go a little nuts when downloading torrents of archives (eg rar) though, because it tries to decompress it every time there is a write to the file. Of course, that's better than having a scanner that doesn't understand rar files at all, and it's a simple matter to make it not check your incoming directory, and set up your torrent program to move the downloads to another folder when they complete (where they will be scanned). Maybe setting it to use an alternate file extension for partially downloaded files might help as well, but I haven't tried it in the many months since that feature was added to the downloader I use (and/or I turned it on).
The problem isn't technically the cpus running at different speeds, it's the cycle counters being out of sync and a thread that reads the cycle counter (normally for super-accurate timing) being shuttled between the cpus. Obviously this can only happen in a multi-core system and not a cluster, unless it's a cluster of multi-cpu machines, in which case the multi-cpu nodes have trouble not the whole cluster. Having different speed cpus in a system causes two problems: A program could read different cycle counters and suddenly decide that many hours have passed (or it's jumped back) since it last read the counter, and/or it will see time running at a different rate depending which cpu it's on as their cycle counters increment at different speeds.
The source dedicated server (mostly for counterstrike source) uses the cycle counter for timing, and it goes absolutely haywire in a mismatched cpu system (at least on windows). The most obvious effect is that the uptime counter can't make up it's mind about how long the server's been up, but there are movement prediction etc errors too.
For more fun try running counterstrike source (itself, not the server) on an amd X2 system with cool & quiet on and without the windows patch. CS will read the speed of your cpu at the low-speed setting when it starts, then when the cpu switches to high speed it'll run twice as fast as it should and also make you move twice as fast from everyone else's pov. Strangely when this happened to me months ago I didn't get any warning from VAC, even though the server was secured. Personally I think moving twice as fast as everyone else is a hack, but what do I know?
Other than these two, I haven't seen a single program using the cycle counter for timing, but that doesn't mean that there aren't loads and loads of them around.
By far the most annoying thing I've found about driver-based copy protection is that not one of them works on windows 64-bit. There are many games that I -have- to crack because otherwise they won't run on my pc at all. A friend of mine mentioned that he has a game that is like this (can't remember the name), but the company making the copy-protection HAS released a 64-bit version that works with 32-bit games, but atari (I think) won't release a patch for the game that includes it, forcing him to crack it anyway.
Just don't copy-protect games, ok? Microsoft don't stop people copying their disks, in fact the tools for ripping the image to iso, integrating a new service pack and burning it back to disk still bootable are freely available (Microsoft even make disk images downloadable, especially for the MSDNAA).
Instead make the game either need activating online or only restrict the online play to stop people who are using the same serial key. Don't do anything aggressive either, requiring a reinstall which nukes saves to change to a legally bought key will not encourage people to buy your game.
All in all, the best games for working on 64 bit edition (imo) are UT2004 (doesn't require the cd after a particular patch and there's a 64-bit version now too), any steam game (hl2 or cs:s etc) again, don't need a cd to play and are 64-bit, any number of mmo games (none that I know of need a cd to play, most don't even need a cd to install).
Or, I have a suggestion if you really want copy protection: put it in the installer on the cd. Make the installer validate your key and check the authenticity of the disk, then let the installed game run without it. Combine with the "can't play multiplayer with the same key" protection and you'll have a relatively effective protection system that fewer people will complain about. Sure, people will crack the installer eventually, but it will take them longer to crack than the game exe (at least I think so, you'd have to ask a cracker really).
I've had a psu die, but that was "technically" my fault. I'd plugged either the front panel headphone socket or mic socket into the motherboard wrongly, and when I plugged in my headset there was a loud BANG and my computer turns off. I check around and there's a faint haze and a burning smell lingering around the power supply, so I figured that it had died violently. I borrowed a psu off a friend nearby, plugged it in, turned it on and nothing happened (I'd removed the offending front-panel connection from the motherboard by now). Needless to say I was a little confused, but thankfully my pc was perfectly ok, just the fuse had gone in the plug. How can the fuse -and- the power-supply die at the same time you ask? Well, I don't know either, but maybe the completely destroyed remains inside the qtec 450W psu hold some clue (maybe 550W, it was 2 1/2 to 3 years ago). Oddly the motherboard, onboard sound, and headphones all survived, so what actually happened I still don't know. After this I bought an early tagan 480W psu (they hadn't added their signature 20+4 split plug yet, it had an adapter) and have been recommending them ever since.
I've also lost most of a pc to a gigabyte motherboard's power-regulator add-in card thing (for stable 6 phase powar!!!) falling out of it's dodgy socket above the cpu and catching fire as a few of its and the motherboard's power-control chips exploded from the sheer unexpectedness. The tagan psu shut off automatically (saving itself), but it didn't save the motherboard or cpu, which I expected to be dead really, or even the graphics card, which as I figure it shouldn't really have been affected. From now on I'm staying clear of gigabyte if I can. Asus seem all right so far though.
In case you're wondering I replaced the motherboard with an asus "A8N SLI-deluxe", my puny A64 3000 with a nice dual-core 3800, and the stupid twin 6600GT gigabyte "3d1" graphics card with a radeon x800 GTO. Unfortunately I've had to replace the radeon since, my first ati card in many years, because it kept showering the screen with random black pixels during 3d. Turning down the gfx memory clock avoided it, so I guess the x800 had a bad ram chip.