Recent Posts
As a gamer, I choose to deal with Steam on some terms... i.e. if a game has other DRM on steam, I won't use it. And steam has somewhat of an upside to me. I no longer have a huge collection of boxes to things that I will never install again, and I can delete stuff from my HD without worrying about where it is. Steam is actually quite decent. I thoroughly enjoy it.-Josh (March 09, 2013, 09:24 PM)
Dunno about GPU - haven't researched the market for a while, but I've been burned enough by bad AMD/ATi drivers (and noisy fans) that it'd take some convincing. And they still don't support PhysX, do they?-f0dder (March 07, 2013, 11:46 AM)
Not had many problems with ATI/AMD drivers (far fewer than I had with nVidia on my last system). There were a few dodgy Catalyst releases early in version 12 but verion 13 seems rock steady to me.-Carol Haynes (March 07, 2013, 12:04 PM)
@wraith - PoE? I think you meant EoP this time didn't you?-40hz (March 06, 2013, 05:28 PM)
@Miz - re: Graphics cards - I sometimes think it's a waste to worry too much about future-proofing your GPU since the technology evolves so rapidly that no matter what you buy today, you'll wish you had the money to get something else a year from now.
So since the GPU is one of the easiest things to swap out, I'm more inclined to re-alocate any money I find for a new build to the things that can't be most easily changed, such as the CPU or mobo. After that I go for what gives me the most bang-for-the-buck overall performance-wise; or, that adds additional capabilities - like more easily supporting multiple VMs. That (to me) means maxing out the RAM first, and then going for a better GPU.
But I'm also not a heavy duty gamer. I like games, but I don't need this week's bleeding-edge masterpiece to have fun. And most of what I do enjoy isn't the latest or the greatest by a long shot. So your priorities and expectations may be different than mine. And rightly so if they are...-40hz (March 06, 2013, 05:28 PM)
Most people that I deal with have not seen a way to setup Windows 8 without using an email address.
On at least one computer I set up I could see no way to avoid using an email address except refusing to connect to the internet when prompted - that way it let you set up a local account - up until then it was insistent that you use a live.com address.
I presume different manufacturers organise the setup process in different ways.
Whatever - the majority of non-techie end users just turn on and follow the instructions. When MS says enter your email address now they do it without questioning and end up with a live.com account whether they ever want to use it or not.
I haven't seen anyone (except me) using Office 2013 (and I am going to uninstall it and put 2010 on) and that defaults to SkyDrive for all saving and loading. Yes you can change it but I come across too many end users who have no idea how to save something other than by clicking Save - they don't even know where the files are stored.
This is a worrying development in all major OSes because they are ripe targets for hackers and over time the picking are going to make it more and more worth it. Unfortunately the one thing that seems to be clear is that the hackers keep showing they have the upper hand!!-Carol Haynes (March 06, 2013, 04:24 AM)
It's only going to get worse as consumers are pushed to cloud services - hell if you buy a Windows 8 machine most people seem to think that HAVE to sign up for a Windows Live (aka hotmail) account and have their machine permanently linked to Microsoft's servers.-Carol Haynes (March 05, 2013, 02:44 AM)
Precisely.
Once again Carol is spot on.
Right now I'm dealing with two small companies that have brought in Windows 8. Every single Win 8 installation they've done so far was set up with Windows Live. When I asked them why they did that, they said (as Carol observed) they didn't think they had a choice in the matter. And if Microsoft's app store ever catches on, you really won't have a choice since you'll need to have a Live account to use it.
Sorry. But this really sucks.-40hz (March 05, 2013, 08:22 AM)
I guess I'm just old fashioned enough to feel that if you're a company with the resources and budget Microsoft can bring to bear on product development, it's not unreasonable to expect a device that works as advertised - and have a company that is willing and able to stand behind it.-40hz (March 04, 2013, 09:21 AM)
Seriously? You've "returned Surface Pro, and unlikely to purchase another piece of hardware directly from Microsoft ever again" because one Microsoft store you came to happened to be closed and another was too long a drive to make it that very night? And you think this is a story worth publishing to millions of people?
It's like those people on newegg that give 1 star reviews to Asus motherboards because FedEx took too long to deliver.
