Dillon 1st MRB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Pr...nal_x64_Edition They made XP 64-bit. It was actually free if you had bought XP. It wasn't exactly common, but I had it.

I should be very clear that 8 GB is only good if you have a 64-bit OS. While there are 64-bit versions of XP and Vista out there, they are nowhere near as common as Win7's 64-bit.

"I hadn't had unprotected sex in years. Now I can!" E-Herpes

Just read a fairly interesting article on what benefits people more, an SSD upgrade or going from 4GB to 8GB of RAM. Well, I done got my socks knocked off on this one. I had figured an SSD + 4GB RAM would be about equal to 8GB of RAM. Well, I was completely and utterly wrong. Check this out, particularly you quartermasters office folks. 8 GB of RAM is so well utlized by Photoshop, it makes no difference what type of disk you have. Have only 4 GB? You need a faster HD. But, if you are looking for bang for the buck and you use Photoshop, go with 8 GB of RAM. It still will give you over twice the performance of an SSD. source: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/d...ssd-vs-8gb.html

Going to have to take a picture this weekend. Wish I could rock the Billy Mays with the full chin cap, but we are what we are.

K. Swartz: I rode Jasko's ass all the time and he liked it.

I used to believe that there were large-scale agendas out there..... Now I just think that there are too many powerful people who disagree on just about everything. Its cat-herding. Now, if we had 6 or 7 major political parties, I'd believe that it could be done.

Not sure what happened here, but apparently people in this area 160 miles NE of Toronto suddenly got stupid: KKK and Lynching victim win first price at costume contest Couple of things wrong here. 1. The costomes were allowed in a Royal Canadian Legion Hall 2. Some asshat thought it was a good costume. 3. A hell of a lot of asshats voted it as the best costume when there was a perfectly good tranny standing 3 feet (~1 metre) away, so they obviously weren't the only entrants.

Brokeback Mountain. Saw that one in prison. Made me cry. "It's 11:59 on Radio Free America; this is Uncle Sam, with music, and the truth until dawn. Right now I've got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone: "the chair is against the wall, the chair is against the wall", "john has a long mustache, john has a long mustache". It's twelve o'clock, American, another day closer to victory. And for all of you out there, on, or behind the line, this is your song."

We'll see what happens. If spending is cut a decent amount and some tax shelters/loopholes are removed, we might get somewhere. But we have yet to see D.C. ever do both at the same time when that is what is really needed. Raised taxes on the rich never work because they have their 401k's at 50%, have a home-based business that loses money, own a house, and can generally dodge taxes like fricken' they are Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix. I'm always leery of making significant cuts in the military, particularly in the R&D... philosophically, its like life insurance: you spend money on it hoping you never need it. You don't plan on not using it, just hope you don't have to.

If we really look at what has been done, there's been a lot. But, the truth of the matter is that a President cannot really do much. They can propose legislation and direct the various departments of the beauracracy, but major changes require Congress to hammer it out in two different versions (House and Senate), and then its sent to the President. What with the big gains by republicans, the real indictment is that Obama did so much... without enough focus on near 10% unemployment. I'll be very curious to see what happens with a divided Congress (Democrats will get Washington, Republicans will get Alaska, but Colorado is too close to call) where there are only 50-51 votes in the majority of the Senate and a pretty overwhelming Republican majority in the House.

Corsair Force 60GB- $124 Just throwing it out there..... I think you should get it. Then tell me how good it is.

You could choose to not shave whatever you want and compete.... as long as there are pictures.

Alrighty folks, its coming up on November and its time for No-Shave November. The rules are simple: you shave on October 31, and then just don't shave. Take a picture of yourself freshly shorn (shaven) and post it up.Post a pic every week so we can see who is winning.

I'm hoping it is.... I've got this special underwear with a... well, 16" appendage. The best part? It has an electric "wiggle."

I always thought this was a happy feeling..... my bonus check = Santa!

My wife and I are going as a football player and a cheerleader. Guess who gets the pom-poms?

IIRC, those 6-cores go for only $200-$250. If you already have the mobo for it, its a decent enough upgrade. But I wouldn't bulid a system around it. There are better ways to go and I'd sure have to have a need for it.

$1700? That's a damn big budget, even for Canada. You could go top of the line AMD for less than $1000. If you can re-use your case, DVD, monitor, keyboard, and mouse, you can have a kickass system for ~ $500. Intel will cost you a bit more, but you will get more performance out of it. Now, whether or not you would use that power is up to you. Some will, most won't.

Most gaming systems will have plenty of headroom with a 500W PSU. Now, the big caveat is if you go SLI/CF. What is important to remember is to never go cheap with your PSU. Ignore what the GPU's recommend. They are hedging their bets that you bought Unkle Joe's PSU rated at 550W. However, you buy a good quality PSU, and you will be fine. Here is from my favorite tech site, The Tech Report. The GTX480 system (not just the gpu) only draws 407 watts. But you would want more PSU. 93W it not a lot of headroom. But 650W would be fine. Unless you look at two video cards. Then it gets more complex.

Craigslist. My usual posts there go like this: CPU model blah. Never overclocked or over-volted. Great process, just upgrading. Take a picture of both sides (pins being good is important.) Then list it for less than what you see it for sale on Newegg.

I wouldn't go the SLI/CF route unless you are using a more recent card. If you are going to drop $100 a new card, you might as well just get a 4850 which is a much better card than a 9800, and is running ~$80. Its a DX 10.1 part so it will take advantage of DX11's improved AA pathways. As for the swtich to AMD. Well, to be very straightforward, I run an AMD/ATI setup, but I've run AMD/Nvidia just as often (depending on what the best card I can get for the money is). But I have chosen AMD for a while because of how good of an upgrade path I've had. Think back to AM2 sockets... It ran DDR2 and came out in early 2006 (!). The AM2 CPU's could drop into the AM2+ motherboards. But the AM3 CPU's, could too. Technically, you could run the same freaking motherboard for 4 years and keep dropping in new processors. In the same time frame, Intel came out with 4 different sockets, none of which were compatible, and Sandy Bridge will be 2 new sockets! Now then, for a hexacore, there just isn't a whole lot of demand for them in gamess. Now, if you were doing a lot of video conversion, it would help, but even then you are better off using an i7 with hyperthreading (4 logical cores, 4 "virtual" threads). If you go AMD, go for it because you can get a very nice Quad core Phenom II at 3.4ghz with an unlocked multiplier (free and easy overclocking) for $159. A comparable Intel CPU would cost you $50 more. And with a deadend socket. For me, I churn my systems fairly regularly - about every 6 months I make a major upgrade. It is worth it to get a new CPU when my mobo is going to be still good. Right now, I could sell my CPU for ~$100 and get the above mentioned PhII and only spend $59 of my own money. Pretty good upgrade for $59.

He's probably playing 1.3, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, and Pong.

Well, yeah. Its essentially a reworked 8800 GT, which was a great card... in 2007. But, unless you are pushing some new games you could be great for DODS. However, since you play Civ 5, I'd look to upgrade. Its got some pretty good eye candy for an RTS. But, you could get ~$100 for your card, making an upgrade cheap.

Its a very solid card. But just don't jump for a couple of weeks. The 6850 is a better card, but it isn't worth the $20 price difference right now. If that price comes down a bit, I'd go for that one. BTW, the 9600GT was also a card I had. It was great for DODS, but on more recent games/engines, it did start to show its age rather badly.