LadyCrimson

Tried Netflix for the 1st time. It's nice to stream all these movies to my PC screen, but little disappointed in streaming video quality. Even Hulu at 480 looks a bit better when fullscreen. Lots think it's the MS Silverlight player or sneaky throttling. Oh well, what can you expect for 9-13 a month. It looks ok overall and it keeps you from hogging too much bandwidth.

Not sure about invisible, but you can grab the top bar of the active window and "shake" it to make all other open windows minimize (Aero Shake). The only hide thing I know of at the moment is hiding icons in the notification area of the taskbar.

No. It won't even start. Anyone have any ideas? It works in Win7 for me so far. Seems fine, except for the much-faster movement speed w/a faster PC... >.> All I did was put a direct shortcut to the swkotor2.exe on my desktop - ie, don't run it from the CD autoplay menu - and used the compatibility 'run in XP-SP2' mode. One issue: On my PC at least, I can only use up to 1280x1024 resolution w/black bars on the sides. The black bars may be a monitor setting I set, tho, rather than the game itself...I don't remember...

I no longer have top favorite games. They're all kind of blending together into one giant mass called "just another fun time-passer video game."

Whenever the power goes out for a while and I'm reading a book by dim candlelight, I think, "So this is how the pioneers did things. Glad I wasn't a pioneer."

Can't speak to the book, as I haven't read it. But the movie is obviously aimed to appeal to youthful ladies who dream of ultimate romance. Or something. Themes:growing up, teen rebellion/maturing, sacrificing everything for love. Typical romance formula, with a bit of Romeo & Juliet feeling conflicts perhaps. Seriously...Twiglight (at least the first film) isn't a vampire movie. It's a youth romance movie that happens to have vampires (and werewolves) in it.

If this turns into a series, it might give me a reason to temporarily get HBO again, like I did for Rome. And if it turns out to be a good series, I hope it lasts longer than Rome did. >.> It would also save me from having to read the entire book series. Which still sits on my shelf with only the 1st one read.

I only saw 1st Twilight after it came on cable on-demand (for the 2nd or third time I think), so you can guess how much I care about seeing the 2nd one. But I did find the first one entertaining in a teen-angst, unintentional, lol-comedy way, so I'll probably watch the 2nd when it, also, comes on cable on-demand.

Crysis - well, it's pretty. I wish I could see my FPS in it tho...maybe if I get a newer version of FRAPS it'll work w/Win7-Crysis64. Odd. Probably won't get far in it...just wanted to see what all the past hoo-ha was about. Dawn of Discovery gives you silly "take a break" messages after you've been playing for 2 and 4 hours. Kind of funny.

I keep watching because hubby keeps watching, and I like to spend time with hubby. But I have a feeling it won't be long before I decide that SG:U hour is an hour not spent w/hubby. Hubby has some kind of obsession with the SG shows/spinoffs...even when he thinks they're not very good, he seems compelled to watch every episode.

Was rest of the world in any position to laugh at their tactics? Wasn

Dawn of Discovery (Anno 1404). Except for the super-slo-mo saving game times and restrictive DRM, a nice city-builder strategy game. I like it, especially the Continuous free play mode where the "huge" map size is actually huge. Hopping from island to island making new settlements/cities, sailing around the map making trade/political relations...all with Casear3 or 4 like city-building. Awesome.

After trying lots of things, I discovered that for some odd reason, crysis64 doesn't like 8AA setting on my pc. On 4AA, it runs fine. On 8AA it crashes constantly. Well, at least I can play it now.

I bought Crysis, installed. It opens up the setup menus just fine, but when I try to start a new game, I get the loading bar which at 100% gives me the "press any key to continue" message. I press "any key" and screen goes black and freezes, have to close the program. Anyone else get this to run in Win7-64? I tried it in Vista compatibility mode...tried running the Crysis64 and the regular Crysis etc... :/

Finding a good one is the hard part. If you get a bad one, they can really screw things up. Or at the least, don't really get rid of the sluggishness. I don't use them regularly and only use them in alan's friends situation...where it's been ages and you're trying to avoid having to reformat. I also tend to manually delete things off the list, rather than have the program delete everything it finds wholesale. Hubby just tried that CCleaner one, said it wasn't bad. I think I'll try it myself.

Never heard of any of those Playfish games either... I feel like I'm seeing a minor resurgence of enjoyable single-player games, both bigger and low budget, also. Or at least, even if the game has MP emphasis, that the SP is still fun/worthwhile enough I'll buy it. Especially during economic downturns where paying for a lot of online accounts might not be top priority for people. WoW's crazy kind of online success could be a fluke, never to be duplicated. I think things will eventually settle into some kind of balance between online-only and single-player options.

Aye, I still remember when $20 seemed like a lot of moolah. Are other countries having these kind of price hikes, too? Or other US States? I haven't seen any (pc, reg. non-collectors edition) game on the shelf for more than 59.99 around here even when just released (I know console tend to be 5-10 more or something). Maybe every once in a great while, but it's rare. Do I live in some kind of game-price bubble area? Kinda agree w/the Hollywood thing. The emphasis on graphics and realistic engines is, perhaps, akin to the emphasis in movies on budget-busting CGI and action/explosions. And then the big movie houses are so befuddled if a small, cheap indie movie rakes it in.

That made me laugh. We're not rich but we're still in a similar position where if I wanted to go all out for gaming, I could, so I definitely know what you mean. I don't see $50-$60 for a game being that excessive these days, especially since it's been that way a long time - as opposed to, say, my grocery store bill. I find that article an interesting viewpoint, even if it's overly gloomy. Entertainment industries have their fluctuations and restructurings, just the way things go as economies * consumer interests fluctuate and alter. The movie/TV industries have similar financial issues + fickle fans...things will shake out. Who knows...a "collapse" of the current way of things, while initially disruptive, could lead to something better down the line. I might not like change very much, but sometimes things just aren't working very well (from either consumer or business PoV) and one has to change directions. Or get new hobbies. Edit: I still haven't bought a console, so I still buy PC games, and likely always will as long as they're available. Consoles may be the wave of the future but they still haven't gotten to the point where I want one...they may someday, just not quite there yet...

If I don't talk to Baby-kitty at least once a day he starts shredding magazines out of frustration that he can't read. ...spent yesterday/this morning tweaking Win7. Borderlands AA still doesn't seem to work... ...giggling at how almost everything on my computer now falls into that x86 folder. ...if I put my hamsters on the bookshelf, they always go straight for the WoW paper CD container and start chewing. Everyone's a critic.

Except for using all my RAM and having DX11 for future gaming (I guess), I'm not impressed with Win7(64bit) over XP in other way. Perhaps as people have more time to figure out all the little tweaks I'll like it more. It's not that it sucks (it seems ok performance wise, altho not faster in anything I personally use) but every Windows version comes with so much unnecessary UI "ease of use"+visual crap that I find utterly useless and less easy (and more clicking!). :/ Turned a lot of it off but...ah well. I did, however, manage to get the XP-style Quick Launch back, which goes a long way to making Win7 interface much more bearable for me. I cannot stand the new Win7 taskbar. I don't care if you can Shift-click on a "pinned" shortcut to open multiple instances rapidly...still can't stand it, I say. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/888-q...le-disable.html

NVM, I finally found a page with some nice detailed/illustrated how-to instructions...hopefully it'll work for me.

So now that it's been out for a bit...has anyone had any trouble with Win7 in terms of pc's with Win7 seeing non-Win7 PC's over a LAN? Y'know, for sharing files and such. I've heard from some that it's a big pain in the arse to set that up and get it working.

Trying to decide if installing XP-SP3 is worth the "trouble" just so I can play Dawn of Discovery or Dragon Age....eh nothing ventured nothing gained..

The end boss stuff was pretty lame. Altho I would have had a difficult time bringing him down if I hadn't had a never-ending ammo revolver. bang bang bang *hide* bang bang bang for what felt like forever. lol I leveled up to 41 in 2nd playthrough and then found myself being a little bored... Haven't tried going back to Total War:Rome yet, I'll check out some mods, thanks. Complex is good, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I just want simple. Hmm wonder if Lords of the Realm2 will run on XP...that was always a hoot.

I'm finally trying out Rome:Total War, after hearing so much about it. ....strategy complexity seems nice & the battles are kinda cool, but the world map interface...I do not like at all. Well, maybe I'll get used to it & think it's the best ever. Sometimes a game that initially makes me go "hrmmm" I end up obsessing over for weeks...