No, no, no, you got it all wrong. Borrow huge, build your bunker and live plush. When tech goes to heck in about 5 years, no one will know you owe. So, you can live in the lap of luxury today and still have your bunker tomorrow.

And probably also a faster/larger-cache HDD. One of those hidden tech jumps that processor producers and software makers take performance credit for.

Interesting articles. Thank you. I'm a bit concerned though about hearing words like 'far more processess' 'far larger codebase' 'far more memory used.' I thought MS was throwing the baby out with the bathwater with Vista. No more bloat code; lean and mean. Naive, I know.

I'd wonder what Vista does with alt-tabbing and swapping vid memory to hdd. Does it favor it's own 3d base when going from a game to desktop? Swapping out all your game data from the vid board to main mem or worse the hdd?

I understand what you're saying. But, realistically, your gamers are going to have X19xx's or 79xx's in their rigs. Mainstreamers are going to have X18's or 76/66's in their rig's or worse. 1-3 month old namebrand boxes are going to have only the intel X6300's or the lower-clocked 64 X2's. A Vista review using his rig isn't much of a value either.

I'll still take his rig though.

FX60 and the 8800? Heh, a typical household rig 

If the writer of the article would give me a rig like his, I'd use Vista too.

And I have to wonder: why can't XP run DX10? It's just an api right? If you have the hardware, shouldn't you be able to run XP and DX10?

I can hear the reports of laptop fires now.

Copper and shipping cost is up yes, but I really think it's them making the laptop Vista capable. It'll have to be 1gb ram for sure (no more 'living' with 562 or 768), dual core cpu, faster/larger hdd, and a dedicated 3d accelerator card built in to really run Vista. That'll drive the cost up to be sure.

Heh, I just keep staring at that 'optional' XP update that allows the new uber-remote-desktop feature of Vista (Terminal Services Client 6.0) to control XP machines. Uh, yeah, I'll be downloading that soon. 

Beats me. But the 'Lies and Propaganda' department said it will be addressed in a future patch.

The only thing I can think of, since I'm pretty sure only Dell can sell new Dell, it that the whole thing is refurbished. Of course, that just makes things worse, because now the computer ain't even worth $250.

The processor falls way short for most/all games, even TS2.

Bottom line: Dell.com says it's a $359.00 computer. Unless it's $9.95 a month with no strings attached, it's not a good deal.

Even still, if you can buy a $150.00 video board to put in it straight up, why not $350.00 straight up for the whole computer?

ETA: The E773 monitor included in the package is a refurbished CRT monitor. As far as adding value to the package; it doesn't.

Some notes:
With Nvidia 'GS' always means less pipelines (in this case 4; more is better), and in some cases, a smaller memory interface (larger is better); for instance, all of the 7300GS's have a 64bit memory interface (there's a lot of AGP cards with better memory interfaces than that), while the 7300GT's have 128bit memory interfaces.

Be careful of that 512MB memory on that 7300GT. The lower level 7xxx Series Nvidia cards now have something called 'with Turbo Cache'. This means it has lower onboard memory (in this case probably 256MB) and takes system memory to make the card 'look' like it has 512MB. If that's the case, don't bother, because any spill over in the graphics workload will be taken up by system memory anyway.

Anyway, enough notes. IMHO, the best performance card you have up there is the 7900GS. It has 20 pipelines; a 7900GT would have 24; but that's not that bad. If you could, try to find a 7900GS made by EVGA or BFG; PNY cards are overpriced for no good reason.

A long time ago, heh heh like 6 months ago   I'd say your value card was the 7600GS. A lot of people I know liked it. Unfortunatly, Nvidia is really pushing that blasted 7300 series. But, who knows, by the time you buy/build, the 7600GS would be even cheaper because it's being replaced. If so, the 7600GS would be your best value.

It's actually a decent movie. But it's British humor, so it's probably a bit dry for most of our (American) tastes. I have to admit though, I think I like British comedy because most of the cliches are new to me.

'...How's that for a slice of gold.' Heh, I really don't know what that means, but it sounded funny when Sean said it. 

Oh man! Would I have fun at that workplace. Sticky's for everybody. 

The autorun.exe and another file named something like autorungui.exe always regen if deleted.

If you use the spyware scanner to put a block on them, you'll probably notice problems starting the game up from disk.

Random thought: if these particular files are the spyware, then it's clever spyware indeed, because that would mean it's tied to the cd autorun. I wonder if you use an image, do you get the phone home?

...like a Hoover. 

What JM said. And, if you think it passed you by and you allowed it without realizing, then you should be able to 'view allowed' on just about any firewall program and check it to block.

Firewall

giggy:

I know you've already fixed this issue, but I figure I'd let you know about a work-around that I've discovered on a similar issue: try changing the in-game display resolution.

Some people I've heard from with various chipsets made by both ATI and NVidia had corruption issues with 1024 x 768 resolution. I guess the game hates it, which is a shame, because most games default to it.

I've never given it much thought, because most of my monitors now are LCD and I always play in-game at the native res. So, I'm never on 1024x768 anymore.

If it's using the board I'm thinking it's using (some form of the Intel P865), then you can't have the 800MHz DDR2 with 4gigs. It slows down to 667MHz.

Well, since the newer Elders are now College Grads, I had one wait to get to the old folks home before getting the job that gives up a Cowplant. Now, I Cowplant most of them.

Ayslhyn:
You know, its weird. But, I've had the same card throughout TS2's lifespan and I've only recently noticed water effects. The most notable have been pool water effects. There are a lot more ripples and waves now than before. Before, it was static blue water. Since I haven't installed a water effect hack, the only thing I can think of is that it might have changed with either Family Fun of Glamour Life.

Well, a problem with that video card specifically, I'm not sure of.

What I am hearing about the 91.47 drivers from Nvidia is that the installation .exe from 9/14 was crap. It either installed the drivers incorrectly or not at all. Worse, it was hard to rollback to earlier drivers because of the junk files installed. Everybody on the NForce boards had ideas to fix it, but I never really saw any solutions.

By the way, if you were to go back to the Nvidia driver download site, you'll see a small message in the 'list of updates' that states as of 9/29 they reworked the installation file but kept the driver number the same. Do you know when you installed 91.47? If it was before 9/29, you might want to try again.

Heh. I can't even get the 91.47 drivers to load on anything.

I'm starting to think I'm better off being stuck with the 91.31 drivers.

I'm hearing a lot of bad things about the 91.47 drivers. Anyway, can you rollback to an earlier version?