I have 8 GB of memory and never reboot, nor close apps. The latest Firefox versions are much more efficient in their memory usage, or at least constant (2 GB fro me, but I have a lot of extensions and in-memory caching). When I run a profile without many extensions (only adblock some small stuff) it is much faster though. So, not many memory leaks, but it's still too slow and bulky.

Shouldn't your i7 show 8 threads in the task manager as hyper-threading is on (by default, I would think, but I do not own an i7 system)?

I wouldn't quite say that. Lower CPU utilization equates to less electricity utilized, which equates to a lower power bill. I would much rather have a processor use only 15% of my CPU's resources in order for me to be able to view a movie instead of having to use 85% of the CPU's resources in order to view a movie.

What the hell is up with their model numbers? Quick, is that i5 you have a dual core or a quad core!? At least Intel's older Core 2 processors differentiated with "Duo" or "Quad", and AMD's simply uses "X2","X3" or "X4".

1: The source code to Halo was not open sourced, the source code to Duke Nukem 3D was.
2: What was so special about Halo compared to Duke Nukem 3D?
3: Doom is almost 20 years old (it's 16, actually), and people still play it (offline and online). People still make maps/mods for it. Will people do THAT for the games of today? I highly doubt that.

Seeing as 56k modems didn't exist in 1996, I think your argument is invalid.

And I'll assume that that Counter-Strike server was on a dedicated server with a dedicated Internet connection, unlike the MW2 server, which was hosted by one of your peers. You can have the best Internet connection in the world, but if the server your connected to has a 56k-like Internet connection, you'll only get that.

We're talking about school computers. Not the rig you built to play Crysis at 4096x3092 with all settings maxed. And I'm not knocking that, my rigs are self built, but most people (including schools) usually purchase pre-built computers from companies. And those pre-built machines usually have low end processors (thus using less electricity) and use the IGP. And, because of that those machines usually have lower end power supplies.

Not quite. Visual Studio Express is free for commercial usage.

Just pirate it. Not buying it IS NOT enough. You HAVE to pirate it to show them that we (PC gamers) are NOT pushovers.

They're probably either begging for it to be a bomb so they don't have to developer for the PC anymore

"See, MW2 didn't meet our projected sales requirement! We shouldn't develop for the PC anymore!"

Continually tinker. Learn more Linux, more programming. Also, I would recommend something other than C# as your primary language (.NET/Mono concerns). Perhaps C or C++?

A simple DNS lookup shows that www.gimp.org resolves to 128.32.112.245, while developer.gimp.org resolves to 128.32.112.248. Because of the similarities of the IP address, you know that it is being hosted by the same people/group/company. A simple whois on the IP addresses shows that they belong to the University of California. I've tracerouted www.gimp.org from several machines I have access to (physical and remote), and they all return "Destination host unreachable", or something along those lines. My guess is that it was a hardware failure(?)

I loved that they used IE6 in the screenshot.