Hate to burst your buble, but the P4 is about the worst CPU power-wise you can get, if it happens to be a northwood it isnt THAT bad, but prescott based P4s are frickin space-heaters. You should put a kill-a-watt meter on the thing and calculate its power-cost, chances are that replacing the P4+mobo with an Atom-based mini-itx might work out in a year or so.

As for the carbon footprint thing, if you are just replacing drives for the power-usage (rather then needing more space), i do not believe you could ever compensate for the CO2 produced in the production/shipping of the new drive. (not within its operational lifetime anyway)

True, my dad runs two hard drives of about 500 mb, both systems get turned on and off every work-day.

Oh come on, once you have a new friendly distro like ubuntu or mint set up, and dont do the half yearly upgrade dance (ubuntu keeps a version supported for two years anyway), shit doesnt just break out of nowhere. I am typing this on an old thinkpad with ubuntu 10.04 installed and the only reason i use the CLI at all is because sometimes i find it more convenient then using the UI with a trackpad, or when i ssh into my servers for maintenance.

If all your GF does is facebook/internet, a simple box with recent ubuntu/linux mint will do just fine. Keep in mind your GF shouldnt have admin access, as it isnt needed and can only pose a risk.

Also, why the hell build her a quad? a dual core is more then enough for that usage pattern

Even if you accept the bold claim that Bill himself apparently is THE guy responsible for every BSOD to ever grace a shitty gateway celeron box, I'm pretty sure that in this case they have actual nuclear engineers doing all the nuke stuff, instead of saying "Hey Bill, we need some software to drive this nuclear reactor, how 'bout you fire up good ol visual basic 6 and give it a whack?"

Honestly, the fact that Bill gates had anything to do with windows/microsoft at all is about as irrelevant as it gets here. it is just "Rich guy puts lots of money into building new nuke reactor in china", where the guy got his money from isnt relevant.

This is Bill Gates as a private person backing a company which does new nuclear stuff, dragging microsoft into this makes no sense at all.

They suck for tablets, since suddenly you have two seperate battery powered devices which need to be charged (not that big of a deal for a wireless keyboard, but still). The GPs point was that with the transformer, Asus made the keyboard so much more then just a simple keyboard dock, that it lifts the device above its competitors. Slide the tablet into the keyboard, and suddenly you double batterylife, have a couple of fully functional USB host ports and a workable clamshell laptop, ready for the typing, on your laptop, on the bus etc..

Poppycock, the reason intel/amd dont scale their clocks much beyond the current 3-3.5 GHz is mostly because the power demands increase exponentially. Intels netburst design had a feature called the Rapid Execution Engine, which basically where the integer ALU's, run at double the clock rate. The 3.8 GHz pentium 4 had its ALUs running at 7.6 GHz, the reason this didnt scale beyond some execution hardware was very much down to the power budget.

And honestly, bulldozer's design team should be hit over the head with a presscot heatsink, bunch of idiots.

Aw man, i hate you guys over in the US. The cheapest C-50 laptop here is 220 euros, and i'm pretty sure the 10" keyboard would be a dealbreaker for me, 12" e350 machines start at 350 euros.

And sadly, all the c50/60 e240/300 machines all come with windows 7 starter and 1 gb of ram, pretty much artificial crippling if you ask me

The trouble with this type of denial attack is making sure you hit all the entrances. If i were to construct a giant underground weapons lab housing my main project, which all of my foes would rather not see in use, i'd damn well construct at least a couple secret access tunnels to a local sheep-barn or an army base a couple of miles away. The same off course goes for necessities such as power/water.

In fact, taking clues from plans for long duration space missions, if your complex has a good source of power (say, a nuclear reactor, OK, that wont work in the case of Iran, since that is what they are working on getting in the first place), you could probably recycle your water long enough to survive a good while without external supply, only food/oxygen remain as problems.

The only realistic way a denial strategy would work is if you can hit the facility before it is finished, and even then you need to keep a very very close eye on what is going on in a 20 mile radius.

fair enough, to each his own, i didnt mean to disparage PC gamers, i was one of them and enjoyed it. It's just that after spending 40+ working hours a week behind a pc, i dont feel like spending more behind a desk at home, personal preference.

As for your points, all except one (RROD, well, and game price) is pretty much ps3 specific, XBL updates are generally really fast and the large dashboard revamp/updates are about as frequent as a windows service pack, and take perhaps 15 minutes to install. I did have a 360 RROD on me, but MS handled that very nicely (and handily enough, i had two 360s, so i continued gaming on the other, yes, not your typical setup)

Yes, i realize the PS3-BR limitation is PS3 specific, and it doesnt invalidate BR as a format, but rather serves as an argument to upgrade future consoles to use faster BR drives.

And yeah, untill i have an internet connection back on par with my old cable (got 80-90 mbit down consistently on my old connection, before moving to a different cable region), download only is not an option, currently i got a crappy DSL line, since my local cable company a) doesnt offer the high speeds my previous one did and b) charges way too much for the lower speed packages. Sadly, my DSL line only hits 12 mbps.

I know, but sadly the most multiplatform games will still be held back by consoles. Furthermore, the combination of lasily couch-surfing and not having to deal with hardware/software issues and constant upgrading, has made me a consolegamer.

a good example of new possibilities would be forza motorsport. Fm4 has no open wheeled cars, partly because there is no animation/simulation code for open wheel suspension. This could be down to the fact that they simply didnt have the code for it, it could also been just beyond the capacity of the 360 to properly simulate/render the suspension components. Newer hardware would solve that.

Another issue that the next gen xbox would tackle is the disk format. downloadable games might be the future, but for the next five years physical discs arent going anywhere (not to mention game retailers haiting DL games), the 360 is really stretching what can be done with DVD discs, and in some cases needs multiple discs per game. Conversely the PS3 might have large discs for storing lots of content, the blu-ray drive is dog-slow, making for long load/install times.

I enjoy my games immensly on the 360, but i cant help but wonder what new hardware would allow for. The 360 has some serious improvements over the 1st gen xbox, both in terms of graphics and what it can do gameplay wise (physiscs, amount of objects on screen etc.), recently with forza 4, i got a very good taste of what the 360 is really capable off, but i couldnt help but wonder, if 2005 era hardware (and let's be honest, in 2005 my PC was stronger then the 360 already) can pull this off, what would be possible with a console built on todays technology?

It's not that i'm bored with the 360, i just am curious about what todays hardware could do, and it's been so long since i last brought home a new console, and had that sense of excitement of hooking up a new console and firing up a new game.

Wouldnt know about the italian angle, but as a dutch guy, one of the reasons to vote for someone to get into the EU stuff is to get him out of local politics, perhaps the italians were just fed up with this idiot so much they decided to "promote him away"

Also, fuck that guy.