Humanoid

I'd have to say it's not a fantastic time to be looking to buy, because Intel's new Haswell CPUs are just a few months away. On the other hand, the main advantage it will offer will be in the area of integrated graphics, so if discrete graphics are an absolute must then there's less disadvantage in buying now. On SSDs, I feel they're even more beneficial to notebook PCs as compared to desktops due to the likely extensive usage of standby/sleep - being able to start doing stuff the moment I lift the lid is an immeasurable convenience. For what it's worth, my laptop is a doddery Core 2 Duo from early 2009ish with a failing video card, but the third-party self-installed SSD in it has given it a new lease on life: for desktop applications there's essentially no difference in responsiveness between it and a shiny new top-of-the-range PC. Obviously my machine pre-dates the introduction of mSATA, but honestly, even if that were an option for me, I'd probably have removed the spindle drive anyway: the noise and vibration aren't worth the extra storage space for me when 2TB external USB-powered drives are available for barely more than $100. I personally don't think the new trend of spindle drives supplemented by small 24-64GB SSD 'caches' are really all that either. The user has no control over how it's used so it's really best treated as a slightly faster spindle drive at best and nothing more. On displays: It's very unfortunate, but apparently no one in the world manufactures 14" IPS panels. This sucks because it's my preferred size as well. At 15.6" and 13.3" you have options, but at 14" it's mostly a matter of finding the least-bad TN panel.

It was bad timing for an Aussie - launched while I was asleep and by the time I woke up in the morning, all the good early bird tiers were gone. To be honest, I've largely ignored this thread as it seemed mostly about business aspects that I have little interest in, the side effect being I really know little about the proposal in general. Nonetheless my plan was to give it as much time as possible and decide my level of commitment towards the end of the campaign, all the while keeping tabs on both of inXile's project to help determine that. But then just now one of the $250 slots opened up and my sense of sneaky opportunism kicked in and grabbed it. I feel a little bad about holding onto a tier I might not necessarily *really* want - the source rulebooks feel a bit less of a reward because they'll be something easily purchasable separate from this campaign - but there's not really any "optimal" tier for my intended spend of ~$200.

Personally I wouldn't accept a spindle drive as a primary drive for any notebook today, let alone a relatively high-end one. Fortunately mSATA support is fairly common now, and ought to be a relatively easy addition - however if you choose to add it yourself instead of as a factory option, you will of course need to move the OS manually to it. I also lean towards the Alienware despite my dislike of its tacky chassis, mainly due to the better screen, although even then it's barely satisfactory. Modern laptop screens, with a few exceptions, tend to be woeful TN panels (the first resort of any cost-cutting vendor).

I remember the brouhaha in the late 90s when the Wal-mart version of Heavy Gear came with a shiny decked-out mech for multiplayer purposes while non-Wal-mart purchasing plebians had to level their way up to that equipment level. I suppose if you squint hard, the current method is a 'lil bit more egalitarian than that, not that we'd blink at it for any more than a fraction of a second nowadays.

The good news is that it appears that whatever their using is non-proprietary, so unlike PhysX, this will work on both vendors products, assuming a card of sufficient horsepower. Aside, it appears the hair is the only part of Lara not encrusted in several layers of dirt...

Don't all physical tiers also get a digital copy anyway? A quick scroll through the options reads like that's the case to me.

What's the problem with saying "etc, etc" anyway? I've heard it in conversation more than a few times. But yeah, the dialogue/VA did have a stilted feel, I don't particularly remember any specifics but have the feeling it was more down to dialogue flow as opposed to individual lines.

And by "it" you mean three of them, right?

2013 release as opposed to 2011 release (though it might have been late-2010). No specific details about the changes, but one that can be assumed is, like the 2713, more conservative use of the anti-glare coating: the previous model's coating was so thick that some people just couldn't unsee the texture of it. I assume it will also gain USB3.0 ports, and miniDisplayPort input. And continuing the tangent, yeah, I have a 46" TV, and while I'd love to go larger, and with plasma instead of LCD, it's basically just a display for my HTPC and not a TV as such. My TV reception is all screwy, and has been for months, but I haven't bothered fixing it.

Had to abort my first intended DLC-run of NV late last year when I concluded that it was too impractical to continue using my pure explosives-based character - got up to Vegas but having to heal myself every time I used an explosive in VATS got pretty tiresome. I understand why the pseudo-immunity to damage during VATS in FO3 was taken out, but this is one of the unfortunate impacts given the engine behaviour. Ended up buying M&B Warband in the end, unfortunately the non-demo version also still graphically glitches out similarly, but fortunately less frequently, to how the demo did. First thing I did was to go find mods to tweak away my biggest annoyances from the demo, that being the requirement to walk around the pointless village/town maps to get quests from them, the way cattle herding works, allowing battle to continue if you get knocked out, and perhaps a bit cheaty, but I changed all the pointless stat allocation from companions (7 dead points in Inventory Management, really?). Also made all tavernkeeps into ransom brokers. It's a fun distraction, but I can't think of another game that is simultaneously as involved but yet so shallow as this.

I did specify "first sentence", but yeah, not sure if that's always the case. But yeah, the point is that there was never a point in which I'd be (internally) screaming to myself "no, why the hell did you say that?!?", such as the "I'm not working for Cerberus" response.

It sort of parallels how superior DXHR's dialogue system was compared to Mass Effect's superficial similarity. In the latter, you just had to hope that Shepard would say something approximately equivalent to the thing you just selected, in the former, highlighting a given option revealed in full the first sentence of Jensen's dialogue before allowing you to confirm. It made a huge difference in how much control I felt I had of my character.

A third more performance for triple the price. Pointless from a consumer perspective of course, but as a 'halo' card, it's always a marketing win to be able to say you have the best, fastest card in the business.

There's been bugger-all improvement in CPUs since the first generation i# series, which is what you have. There's not really any incentive to Intel to push along development really, what with AMD being utterly uncompetitive in that area for years now. Especially since those first gen ones overclocked really easily, should be able to hit 4GHz easier than the following model did actually. Gorth - the new model Dell U3013 comes out in a month, after just now refreshing the 27" equivalent. Dell are a bit weird in that while they charge a significant "Australia Tax" on most of their stuff, they don't really on monitors, which if anything go on sale more frequently here than over in the US. Feels like they tell me about a 30% off sale every second week. For what it's worth, I picked up my pair of U2711s more than a couple years ago now for ~$650 each back when they were $1100+ RRP. They've changed the system now so that you can no longer stack discount codes with sales, but reduced the RRP accordingly such that the final price comes out to pretty much the same. They've just superceded my model with the new U2713H (no 'M' at the end, which signifies the cheaper, but still (e)IPS models), I gather the main improvement is a better, less aggressive, anti-glare coating. Do I regret not going for the 30" in the first place? Sort of - I only ever game on one panel, especially since for the bulk of the screen ownership I only had a 1GB 5850. But both then and now I wouldn't have been able to justify two of them at about $1050-1100 each. I would consider replacing one in the future to get an asymmetrical setup going I guess. Fake edit: Yeah, PLS is basically Samsung's version/competitor of IPS, so Asus would be sourcing their panel in that display from Samsung.

(I don't really care to repost my specific complaints about Steam from that other, big thread. This is more about explaining why I feel the way I do about Steam.) How "evil" is Steam? I feel as a company they're about equivalent to Google - they engage in some vaguely creepy crap that I'm not entirely comfortable with, but nothing so bad as to provoke real hostility. I'd rather they not do what they do, but I tolerate it. Unlike Google though, I'd feel it's safe to say their service is far less essential - they didn't pop up to solve a problem that needed to be addressed - as opposed to being stuck in a world of, er.... AltaVista (or more recently, Bing). Steam's existence, more-or-less some occasionally cheap games, does not provide enough benefit to trade-off against its downside. TL;DR: My problem with Steam is that it's an unnecessary, no matter how minor, evil. It's not a massive imposition, but neither has its introduction made my computing experience any better than what existed before.

For the longest time, I thought that Arma was shorthand for that America's Army game.

For me, the main attraction of IPS is the colour accuracy moreso than the viewing angle aspect (which tends to be more noticeable on notebooks than desktops). I see it like going to an SSD: once you go IPS, it's very hard to go back. No experience with that specific screen of course, or indeed any 1080p 27" panel. While it's significantly fewer pixels than the more conventional 2560x1440 panels normally seen at this size, I'd say it's hard to go wrong at that price (it's about half the going rate of the Dell/HP 27" models).

I'm under the impression that Bethesda's term for their alphas is "final release".

Makes it sound like the various hijinks with EMM386/QEMM on DOS all over again.

For most users, the appeal was that it was free money, which is the best kind of money. If your electricity was cheap enough, it meant that (environmental concerns aside), you'd be getting free money by letting your PC run some calculations overnight instead of turning it off. However it now sounds like the amount of "work" (and therefore time) to earn any real money is now so high that it really isn't worth it unless your electricity is free.

Hopefully the blueprints help make the interior layouts less headache-inducing than New Vegas. Drawing a very long optimistic bow: blueprints totally mean top-down turn-based tactical-squad game.

Space Cadet Table was the competitive high-score game of choice in my youth. Unfortunately at the frequency Win95/98 required clean installs, records tend to not have much of a verifiable trail.

I own original release boxed copies of both AoW and Shadow Magic but haven't ever played either. No particular reason, just never got around to it. (I also have all the games on GoG for the hell of it) Hopefully this breaks that trend. If I were to play one of the games right now though, is there any reason besides storyline to not jump to the final instalment immediately?

Thinking they should do Wasteland: East Coast instead. Less marketing cachet, sure, but I imagine a lot more creative freedom.

By changing power source, do you mean actually changing the PSU or just trying a different wall socket? Thermal protection was my initial thought too, but the OP seems to indicate all fans were spinning (though check the PSU fan too, it may be non-obvious). At least we have that now, in the original Athlon days, 3 seconds is more time than it took for your CPU to burn in a plume of blue smoke. If you have access to a multimeter, try taking voltage measurements from the back of the ATX power connector to the motherboard. Other random thoughts: - No beeping means it's unlikely it's the RAM (unless there's no PC-speaker present), though if multiple sticks are present, take out all but one and try each individually in the first DIMM slot. - Do you get any video output at all during the two seconds it's on? Thinking if so, it's less likely to be a CPU issue. - Whenever I see a power issue, I tend to think it's 50:50 on either the PSU or the motherboard, though granted most of my failure cases tend to have been totally dead motherboards instead of the odd two-seconds thing.