LadyCrimson

That seems about right. I remember wandering around outside for long minutes and encountered nothing but a few wolves, rats and crabs. And they weren't close together. No buildings, no shacks, the occasional cave entrance. For some reason the game didn't inspire me to want to explore. It's weird because FOV certainly has plenty of low population areas too, with empty beige landscapes, but somehow I didn't find it 'lifeless.' Even in Two Worlds1 the urge to explore was more present than I had in Oblivion. Don't know what the difference is. Funny how the brain works.

Woke up earlyish and have been having a relaxing morning surfing the interweb. Then baseball game, then Game of Thrones.

I don't know what it was exactly, but I found Oblivion very dull to explore too. It was (at the time) all pretty & shiny but something was missing. I'm not sure if it was repetitiveness or just a sense of generic, empty blandness to the overall "look". Grass, trees, running through a town. At any rate the exploration boredom is the main reason I didn't get terribly far into that game. I kept trying but after a few hours I was bored. Another reason to buy Skyrim for me is curiosity about the new engine & of course any modding tools/abilities. Hope it's like FNV where any small things that might bother me, I can mod more to my personal tastes. Always a plus for any game. Just never did it for Oblivion... edit..typos & stuff

Oh, that. Yeah, Superfetch/RAM caching. I don't think of that as being used since it's available/freed as soon as something you run needs it. Although if you open so much stuff that the "free" runs down to 0, you can get hesitation/jerkiness when rapidly opening yet more things, as the cache is freed etc. If you're working on something that needs all the RAM in rapid succession & you don't like the jerky slow-downs (or your system can't handle them), there's ways to clear the ram cache if you want, but generally no reason to.

You must have a lot of background processes running all the time. I have 6GB ram and with a video editor, graphic editor (lots of stuff open in it), 9 browser windows, music player all running right now it's only at 1.5gb of ram being used. If I open & run FNV on top of all that, it goes up to about 2.5-3GB. Edit: lol, yeah, that's why I do that too.

I've had no issues so far with 2006 and up games on Win7-64 (Titan Quest, Kotor2, etc), but I also haven't tried to install dozens of games or anything. Most very old ones don't work at all (without dos box I guess) for me on Win7, and I didn't expect them to. I install all games in a separate Games directory instead of the Programs & Programsx86 folders and make sure to install and run As Administrator. To be honest, if you have a large collection of very old games that you like to play frequently, I'd stick with XP on that system. Then when you're ready to build/buy a shiny new PC, just put Win7 on that one and keep the XP system as well.

Lords of the Realm2 keeps crashing on me on Win7 (the GoG version), so I gave up on that for now. Playing through Caesar3. I think some of these old faves are finally losing some of their replayability for me. Still love them & would put them on top20 lists but reaching the point where I've done just about everything you can possibly do with them 5x over, even with map editors & long breaks. :D

Happy to see the Red Sox finally start to win some games. The catcher situation is a mess tho... I had a horrible headache most of the day, almost a migrane. Finally seems to be feeling better, which means I won't be able to sleep now.

2009's Exam. Closed room/tension thriller. 8 ppl who want the same job, stuck in a room for a last 'test', have to figure out what the test is/what is wanted from them. I assume a small budget and I didn't recognize any of the actors, but it was well done imo. If you don't like talk-based films that build tension via character conflict you might not like it/find it boring, but I liked this one. 8/10 Edit:one of the acting stand-outs was Luke Mably, who apparently had a smaller role in 28 Days Later.

Yes, .esp/.esm mods will take priority. Edit: if you've actually managed to alter the default FalloutNV.esm, that would be over-written with the new version when you download the patch. But I don't think you can do that with the GECK by it's lonesome. Don't know about other ways.

Only problem with that one is that Swiftech is doing the waterblock. They are the worst manufacturing quality I've seen on water blocks. Made the mistake of buying one once for my CPU. I took a look at it, the low production values, the screws that didn't quite fit and a few other things and threw it all in the rubbish bin. Bought EK products instead. If they had had somebody else making the blocks, I would probably have considered it. Oh? I'd know nothing about such things. Good food for thought. But perhaps the waterblock on the card isn't as bad as what you bought as a separate piece for your CPU, if that makes sense. I've seen some reviews that think they're awesome, so...sigh. Never can tell, always a crapshoot seems like...and I personally think almost everything these days is built w/inconsistent quality, so ten ppl end up w/something cool and 5 ppl end up w/something that's junk. Not that it matters much anyway, since I won't be buying one anytime soon.

According to a finnish news site this is iphone specific. Oh, sorry. I just meant the notion of invasion of privacy via tech, and that it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of stuff has similar problems that no one has yet discovered/blown the whistle on. That sort of thing.

It may not be rational, but I really want the EVGA GeForce GTX 580 FTW Hydro Copper 2.

Hm. The way they're describing the leveling of enemies/world makes it sound like I might like this game more than I initially was thinking. The skill/chr method doesn't bother me much, as long as the gameplay is fun (obviously). Agree that it's not necessarily dumbing down, depends on how it works/feels. The world screenies are decent enough I might buy it for eye candy alone. I could use more open world eye-candy.

Selected the Win7 updates I want and hit the go button. Now crossing fingers that nothing breaks.

I find Will Farrel funny for about 3 minutes, than he just becomes childishly annoying. So ppl like that work in skits ala SNL but in movies..for me not so much.l But I don't generally like slapstick comedy. Sometimes, but not too often.

I think that's a good point. It's not the same thing, but increase in TV size (as a sales factor) seemed to level off for a similar reason ... it may seem silly now, but those size increases were an awesome thing once, even without HD resolutions. (edit:friends who had 32" tube TV's were sooo lucky, lol). Going from 19" to 27" was kewl, and 27" to 50" even better, but most ppl don't care about a huge screen past a certain point and thus TV's turned to new "features" to attract buyers. Definitely more difficult to sell something that's difficult to show a "must have" advantage for in a 15-30 second ad. Or that's too techy for the average consumer to care about.

Watched this little 2009 "thriller/horror" film called Frozen. In style it reminds me of Open Water. Tiny cast, more 'real situational' horror (vs zombies/mask wearing serial killers). Slow build, more talking than action etc. The acting is quite a bit higher than in Open Water however. It's nothing to write home about, and some elements were pretty redonkulous/improbable of course, but for the type of film, thought it was fairly effective at making you squirm in a 'what if I was in that situation' kind of way, particularly a couple of scenes. I'd give it 6 or 6.5 out of 10.

I have nothing to back it up, but I'd guess this isn't iphone specific these days. That is, with all the tracking, gps, bla bla stuff being added to cars, phones, and the kitchen toaster, the notion of true privacy, while always a bit of an illusion, is becoming something you can't even pretend to have anymore. Get used to it. That said, if this is primarily because of all the GPS type programs/uses, such devices should probably have prominent warnings about possible info-risks of using them. You'd be surprised how many ppl forget/don't realize what it can mean. Like, on Twitter, I refuse to allow 'tweet my location' function to be on, and I don't understand the trend of ppl liking to use apps that broadcast their location ("I'm at Mr Boggle's Beer Bar on 123 Ave!") from their phones to win 'titles'. Don't get that at all. ...another reason I haven't bought a cell phone yet. And I'm not looking forward to the day when I finally have to buy one of these overly computerized, chipped & gps'd cars, either. Or whatever.

So if the guesses are right, it'll be a couple more years before this computer I built 1.5 years ago is challenged by any game I might personally want. Meaning that, barring a new graphic card 2-3 times, I shouldn't have to build a new PC for another 4-5 years. Awesome. Frankly I'm glad things have slowed down for a while. ...do you think the economy the last couple yeras may have slowed down development on new consoles? Or maybe not development per se, but the release.

So there's that viral songified Double Rainbow video/song, by "schmoyoho", based on the viral non-song video, which is funny. But then there's also by "RoomieOfficial" that's more of an actual song/not so much funny. I like it. His singing version of the Sheen "Winning" is cool too. ...people are so creative, and instead of the creativity languishing unseen/unavailable, the internet lets me see it. I like that.

Started the LotR2 campaign last night. Looks slightly fuzzy but generally fine on my monitor etc. Took a screenshot. Stared at the tiny 640x480 image. It wasn't this small before, was it? I probably had a 12" monitor when I first played it.

Well, that would explain it then, thanks. At least I know I haven't lost my mind.

Finally got around to buying Casear3 & Lords of the Realm2 from GoG, so I can play them on Win7 if I want. Which I think I'll do this afternoon. But strangely, GoG claims I've bought Jagged Alliance Deadly Games...it's on my "shelf"/I can download it. Problem is, I don't remember buying it. Not saying I absolutely didn't, maybe I did months ago & forgot, but it's not the kind of game I'd normally buy. Hm.

It was only a 3.8, not sure if that's enough to felt down there much, from Pacifica. ...and unrelated, nostalgia-gaming only takes you so far. Wish my few Most Wanted games were out, but alas, no.