m3ch4

Yikes, with that much hardware (cpu/hdd) you have to have a pretty killer cooling system and power supply. Heh, my problem is I keep thinking from a single user perspective, instead of looking at it from a business' which would be much more towards that sort of grouping of hardware.

I agree with Koel, one of the biggest problems is the shock value that game producers are trying to create. Well, mainly just rockstar, but I think all their games are garbage anyways so I've ignored them mostly.But it really boils down the player, no rating system or polititian or anything liek that really makes any difference. If you like a specific genre of game, you will go out and buy it, regardless of what anybody says of the game. Ratings are useless if parents don't respect them, and there are few parents that actually look at them. All parents do is complain about violence in video games after they see their kids play the games they just went out and bought.If parents (and politicians) are going to yell and scream about video games, how about they just actually be PARENTS and screen the stuff coming into the house. It's not that hard really, they just don't want to take responsibility for it, even though it is their kids...funny, huh?

heh, let's leave the banning to the mods, I don't think his comments warrant a ban anyways... Building your own pc is the best way to go, for sure. But if you don't have the time, and you do have a bit of cash, pre-built is decent. Of course there are different levels of prebuilt... There's Alienware/Northwest, which will run you up quite a bit of cash... There's Dell/store-bought, which will run you a bit of cash and be decent/less-then-decent... Then there's Friend-PreBuilt, which is great, becuase you get a homebrew prebuilt at base price, plus you get to put a little bit of cash in a friend's pocket. (which is always great for them =D) Hehe, since I've done this for friends I love this option the best =) But back on topic...I've got a friend who owns an Alienware who swears by it, he purchased a crazy laptop off of them which looks as good as it performs. He hasn't had anyproblems with it yet, so from him to you, they're okay.

HAHAHAHA!!! But it works out, becasue they'll each buy all the systems! You WIN =D LOL You get the best of all worlds! Personally, I'm going to wait till all the consoles come out of the gate and see how they do, I don't think any of the games that first come out on the systems are going to be that great. (they don't tend to anyways...) plus everything is so expensive...I still have no idea how they can even OFFER these consoles at these prices...$300 bucks for a basic x360 system? wtf? It should be like $500 at least...but then no one would buy it... anyways, yeah, so I'm waiting, probably the best thing to do would be stick to PC if you haven't been sucked into the money-eating-garbage-games vaccum that is the console market '''

That amount of drives does sound pretty crazy...it's been suggested to reduce the drives and increase the size and I'd go for that.Unless you have different data on each drive, in which case it would make sense to have all those different drives. Like, one drive for music files, one drive for backup, etc, that way when you go to access the drives you're only pulling specific data from specific drives and not creating a back up of the flow of data (which I guess isn't really a problem, ata/scsi still allow data to flow pretty quick).I like hte idea of just networking a bunch of computers. If each computer has a pretty small case, and one or two drives in it, it works better in my mind, seperate cooling, seperate power, etc. Plus with giga-byte network capabilities it would be quick to access data as well, if that is an issue to people.

Hi, here's my problem, my main internet computer just died on me again, it's a hardware problem that is going to take a bit of time to fix (ie, enough time to let me put money away to buy a new mobo). In the mean time I have a (pair) of p3 computers in working order (that I just recently aquired and have yet to set up) that I can use as a temporary replacement. My only concern is that I would like to keep them up and running once I fix my main computer so I don't want to install the only real version of windows xp that I own on one of them, otherwise I can't use it for my main computer.I'm looking for suggestions from people for the best operating system to install on the temporary computer(s). The computer will only be used for internet related stuff, browsing, chatting, downloading. They are p3s, 733 mhz each most likely, 256 ram with 20 gb space each and base-10 ethernet cards.If you could please make a suggestion it would be greatly appreciated. (ps, if this is in the wrong area, my apologizes, it seemed the most appropriate place to make the request)

LOL that's one crazy find....how exactely did you find that? was it a typo that you entered or did you find this randomly while surfing?

Viz has got it down. P2p software is good in and of itself, if used to transfer legal files between users, say popular freeware programs or large files. p2p software can be used to save server space or used as a "server" if the person that wants to share their files doesn't have one, takes longer, but still usable. The fact that p2p software is mostly used for illegal transfers and that is all it is seen as being used for, is why the programs and their creators are coming under fire. Plus, there is no way that a company that is being taken advantage of by having their programs/music illegal transfered among millions of people would be able to sue each and every person that has illegally downloaded it. Not only is it not financially viable, it'd be tough to legally track down each and every person that has or has had the program/song downloaded. The p2p people are the only people they can blame, and even though it doesn't make sense to sue them (and the courts know this) they still need to blame somebody. Our whole world is centered around being able to lay blame, even if the supreme court didn't want to rule against p2p sharing, they still would have had to rule to. See, the good thing about this ruling... "...The court stated that distributing a file sharing peer-to-peer software with the intent or purpose that it be used to violate copyright is illegal and the distributor is subject to legal action for the violations of the software's users..." ...so anyone wanting to sue any of the p2p software creators would have to prove that the software was designed specifically to allow the traffic of files that infringe on copyrights. Otherwise there are no grounds. =)

*dances* YEAH! I get to burst everyone's bubble =D Specs: X360 vs PS3 take a look at this article for a moment, it's been posted once before in another thread, but ignored for the most part. A quick synopsis below... this article describes the ps3 and the x360 according to the information released during e3 (which was the last time any information was released about either of these two systems, just so you know). XBOX 360 / PLAYSTATION 3 PERFORMANCE COMPARISON SUMMARY Now that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 specifications have been announced, it is possible to do a real world performance comparison of the two systems. There are three critical performance aspects of a console: * Central Processing Unit (CPU) performance. * The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell. * Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance * The Xbox 360 GPU design is more flexible and it has more processing power than the PS3 GPU. * Memory System Bandwidth * The memory system bandwidth in Xbox 360 exceeds the PS3's by five times. If you take a few minutes and read the article you'll find some very interesting facts and quite a few debatable points. For instance, Optykal brought this up, multithread capabilities. All consoles up to this point have been single thread, and every game has been designed around this concept, now we're getting consoles that allow for multiple threading. The xbox 360 seems to be geared quite heavily towards that, and the article talks about how, for gaming, that is a better feature. The ps3 doesn't seem to be leaning towards multithreading quite as heavily, but that may be simply because programmers haven't really delved into it considering that it's quite new, and Sony may understand that developers may not be ready to shift to multithreading programming quite yet and may be letting the world become more used to multithreading before forcing developers to create games using it.

I don't know about you, but I really don't see much of a problem with that computer the way it is.What exactely do you use your computer for? what do you want to upgrade it for the purpose of? If you're just doing surfing and regular computer work, then there' no real point in upgrading much =/If you want to do gaming or be using some high preformance resource hogs, then go for motherboard, cpu and ram (you can never have enough ram =D )If you're just worried about you computer being bogged down and you're starting to notice that it's getting slow then some routine maintenance will probably do the trick. how have you set up your partitions (as in, do you have a partition for operating system, paging file, and then just regular data?) and how often do you drfrag/check for spyware?

There's nothing wrong with sticking to windows2000. All this means is that microsoft won't be focusing as much on it, no more updates is all. The os still works fine (for a windows =P), ms has just decided that because they have xp and longhorn coming out that they need to focus on those as their main operation systems to give suport to.

I think this ruling is kind of fruity.Okay, so a company creates a program that allows peer to peer connections for the purpose of legal sharing of software. Someone comes along and takes that software and puts some illegal files into their "share" folder and people start distributing them, somehow the software creators are liable? They can't control how their program is used, all they have is good intentions.thta's like saying you could sue a car company if a car that was produced by them was used in a drive by shooting. It's just stupid.UNder this ruling, if a programmer was contracted to creat a piece of software that allowed a company to share files internally within it's country-wide intranet so that the company could distribute files to their employees in a peer-to-peer type of format, that programmer would be liable for any illegal files that were sent around within the company, becuase he was the one that created it? BULLall the supreme court has done has made it easier for companies to file frivilious lawsuits. =P more BULLAs a side note, if I as a programmer (although I am not) placed a disclaimer within the install legal agreement / startup menu thing, stating that "this program was designed for and created with the purpose of distrubting legal files that do not infringe upon any form of copyright. By using this software and distributing illegal files or files that infringe on anytype of copyright, you agree to accept any and all responsibility associated with breaking the law, and free the creator of this program from any responsibility that may lay with them." blah blah blah. something like that, would that free a programmer from any responsibilty, or does this ruling say that such a disclaimer doesn't matter?

I'd vote for starcraft 2, but IT"S NOT OUT YET *glares angrily at Blizzard* It's been how long, and still no sc2 =P

That rumor is fake, there is no special ending if you beat the game on legendary. It's been brought up a thousand times on the bungie.net forums and been squashed just as much.If you bought the special edition halo2 case and watched all the extra movies about the game you would have all your questions answered as to why different elements of the game are as they are, why the game was released before it was done and all your other burning questions. =Pbtw, for the guy who mentioned Cortana has gone insane, she hasn't, and working with gravemind isn't even an option so put it out of your head ^_~ As soon as Master Chief is done kicking *bottom* back on earth (the Ark) then he'll come back to save Cortana. Or, here's an idea, they order the rings to fire, and then all life is destroyed in the galaxy except for that on the Ark. Cortana isn't a biological life form, so she won't be destroyed =P

LOL halo2 no contestI never really liked the gta series that much, anything to do with gun-totting-hip-gangster-wannabes doesn't really interest me much. The concept of running around on missions doing things is fine, but I couldn't get into the story behind it or anything like that. I don't think I played it for more then an hour at most =Pargueably halo2 doesn't have much of a real story either, but the multiplayer is all I really care about it anyways, and other then the 2 player co-op for gta:sa, there is no multiplayer for it, so there's another aspect that turned me off to it.