New Laptop

[The Xeno]

Busy cleaning bloat and figuring out Vista.

2x AMD Tl-56's a Go6150, 160 gig HD, and all those middle-of-the-road specs.
But Compared to my compaq, I'm typing on a tech palace.

.... Soooo much bloatware, and I do think it needs a chill-mat >.<
Huzzah for the tax-free weekend.

[Fear Of The Duck]

you know what annoys me? when i go to the shop and see a laptop like yours or better for less than i paid for my pentium m760 2ghz, 1gb ram 100gb hdd a year and a half ago.

[deadeye]

You know what annoys me? Retailers only carry Vista machines

I hate that aswell. I'm after a new PC but all new ones now only have Vista, and i doubt that most of the games that i have will work on Vista.

[Spacey]

OR you can buy a Vista partition the drive and use both Vista and XP I will later when I'm not being lazy download and install XP Pro onto my mom's comp...

I was just going to suggest that.

[quickshot84]

You know what annoys me? Retailers only carry Vista machines

never buy retail then :p

can get the same thing from a wholesaler for sooo much cheaper.
its the only way to buy

[The Xeno]

can get the same thing from a wholesaler for sooo much cheaper.
its the only way to buy

Only if you have the willpower to avoid putting together a machine more expensive than your car.
Cheapest I could get was a lenovo at 1K - to much for me, and at anything below that local circuit city had better deals.
For what it's worth, CC had laptops with twice the specs of simmilarly priced best-buy brands. Albiet they were far more annoying about getting you to buy some overpriced internet security package thingy.

Mercy... this HP came with enough bloat already. I counted 17 icons on first boot.

Vista is completely and utterly crap my mother just bought a new comp and her brand spankin new Vista machine is as slow as my smokin laptop fragged to to death it also takes up 15GB

I was/am very curious to see how Vista performs. So far, it hasn't been much of a change from XP - I haven't really started digging into the guts yet. At this point i've had no compatibility problems, save Azureus/java (but I use utorrent), peerguardian, and some XP specific wireless sniffing apps - I can't tell if problems installing daemon tools are just a bad D/l or vista.

It is a resources hog though - eating 25-30% of my ram, and has a differant restore point concept that XP - stashing 15% of my HD space for RP's. (that got changed fast )
The new secuirty is like kaspersky/zone alarm alerts on speed... <_<

OR you can buy a Vista partition the drive and use both Vista and XP I will later when I'm not being lazy download and install XP Pro onto my mom's comp I have a student key so XP is free for me

Meh, I lack such a key and I'm not about to lay down money to buy another Xp license.
Worst comes to worst, i'm finally gonna pull the trigger and go full linux.

[The Xeno]

You have no problems with Torrents so I'm assuming you have lots o' "free stuff" if you don't have a problem with it and you look hard enough you can find student licenses get XP for free

On a technical level, I have no problem with Torrents. On a libertarian, para-military, sons of the south level, I have no problem with torrents - but I have yet to download a music file via such.
(though i'll loot off of youtube if I own/owned the CD/LP etc.)

As for the Xp (which i will say, I see differently than a music file)... I don't know if it's worth the hassle to find a copy that passes the genuine check (idk because i haven't looked) - the XP on my compaq failed its test ( iirc it was a legit copy... maybe >.<), and I have suffered much greviance thereof.

After I get up the nerve to risk all my MP3s I'm going to update my XP Pro to XP Media Center

Hehe

[Mystake]

what is this student key business?

[Nicholai Brocov]

I uh, got some money for my graduation present, immediately I thought to upgrade to a better system.

Spent $2,473 on my laptop and $640 for another one for school. Got it off Newegg.com from Acer America. I was drooling over every desktop I could get for way less, some even with SLi capability. But that's not what I really was after. I was looking for a quality desktop replacement. One with a collective and stable clock rate for the FSB and RAM. I went from 400Mhz from my Pentium 4 1.8Ghz to 533Mhz with my laptop's Pentium M 2.0Ghz with centrino of course. Not a huge upgrade I know.

However, since for it seems the longest time most game designers are struggling to keep up with computer hardware. I decided to basically sit this one out so to speak, I'm glad I did after the coming of the next-gen consoles.

Anyways here are my specs. Still stock.
Acer America TravelMate 8100
2.0Ghz(2.99Ghz) Centrino Pentium M 533Mhz FSB 2Mb Cache
1022Mb DDR2 SDRAM Dual soDIMM Modules
100Gb 5400RPM HDD w/Windows XP Pro
15.4” WSXGA+ (1680x1050):16.7 million colors
PCI-Express ATI Mobility Radeon X700 128Mb DDR vRAM Clocked@400Mhz DX-9 w/Duelview Support

For the longest time the toughest obsticle for this system to get over has been the over heating. But thank goodness for compressed air, not even dust can hold this beast back now.

I've played Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source,City of Heroes/<Villians> (hehe), Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and most notably Guild Wars which I seem to keep coming back to, I CAN'T LEAVE!

Oh, all on max detail settings and this thing just eats it up. I get a lot of FPS lag on higher resolutions at max detail but still, most games don't aim to run much higher than 1024x768 so I don't push it too much. Maybe 1280x1024 on a good day.

I'm getting Doom 3, Black & White 2 and Fable:The Lost Chapters pretty soon so basically I'm gunna benchmark it with quality titles for as long as I can until I find a game I want but can't play.

Well, grats on the new lappy Xeno, I can't believe you went with HP though, bleh. BTW dualcore is overrated as I'm sure you've come to realise, unless you multitask like no other.

[Nicholai Brocov]

I used to use pricegrabber.com all the time before two sites stood out in most of my searches for 'best prices' of things I was looking for.

Newegg.com for computer hardware and in some cases software.
Amazon.com for damn near everything else.

Simple as that really, now I treat Newegg's power and advanced search engines like a bible for all manner of hardware profiling. Since 2003 I've been going on there to selectively build my 'fantasy' systems.

So far I've bought two power supplies, three video cards, two neon lighted cooling fans, one keyboard and two sticks of ram from them all in all. I've let people rebuild my computer before, NEVER AGAIN!

[The Xeno]

I love newegg.

Well, grats on the new lappy Xeno, I can't believe you went with HP though, bleh. BTW dualcore is overrated as I'm sure you've come to realise, unless you multitask like no other.

Aff, I don't think I've yet to find a multithreaded app. >.<
Still, when going stock, you don't have much of a choice. This was the only laptop under $800 I could find with 2gig ram, a passable IGP (Go6150), Ls Dvd/Cd +-, 160 gig hd, integrated a/b/g/n, etc. that also packed a 12 Mo same as cash deal, free printer &co.

I'm getting Doom 3, Black & White 2 and Fable:The Lost Chapters pretty soon so basically I'm gunna benchmark it with quality titles for as long as I can until I find a game I want but can't play.

Heh, I don't hold out to much hope for Doom 3 - but so far I've gotten some old games; Fallout 2, Mechwarrior 4 mercs, to run - and I just recently fired up DoW and can play on medium settings with ease (beyond that it gets ugly real fast though ) Farcry and that new BF are next to test.
The problem with Doom I've heard, is that while I can strip the settings down to run it (on a Go 6150), it guts the experience - as one of the many things the igp can't handle fluidly are the shadows.

But meh, I've been living with an Via/Sg3 - anything a step up

[The Xeno]

I'm aware of the controversy - Was it penny arcade that did the spoof a few months back?
Eh, it can't be as bad as the Silent Hunter copy protection saga.

[Solus]

...BTW dualcore is overrated as I'm sure you've come to realise, unless you multitask like no other.

I agree, unless you are using an applicatin optimised for dual core.. i also have a dual core machine, purely because on their own, both cored perform well, and if I need the 2nd core muchly in the future, at least ive got it there if i need it.

same principal with my firewire card. i dont use it, but its installed, etc. just for when i need it.

lol i like being prepared.

re copy protection: Splinter cell Chaos theory (old i know) ive heard some things about its copy protection... starforce i think it was called... Ubi soft wants to use it in their games henceforth... the problem is its a malicious little ... umm... thing that tampers with your alcohol settings and even maybe your 'noskrnl' i think it was called. uninstalling the game dont get rid of it, removing it manually is risky aswell...