Dude, you're doing all that...on an Atom? Doesn't it drag ass? if it were me I'd replace that sucky Atom with a cheap Phenom X4e, those support ECC and can be had for $62. Figure in $30 for an AM2+ board and $20 for a 2Gb RAM stick and for less than $115 you'd have a machine that would be a HELL of a lot faster than an Atom at multitasking.

I have to agree with you but just add how come THEIR asses ain't getting busted for false advertising with the trailers? See the trailer for the last airbender? that shit not only ain't in the movie it was NEVER in the movie, being created just to sucker your ass into buying a ticket...WTF? Why the hell didn't they get busted for false advertising? And why in the hell haven't they been busted for getting together and setting prices on movies and media? Don't we have laws against price fixing? and what about Hollywood Accounting? why the fuck haven't they been busted for that bullshit?

Frankly hearing those blood sucking leeches complain about piracy always puts a smile on my face, because its like a criminal bitching that there wasn't anything good in the house they came to rob. the quicker those leeches die out the better off the world will be, all they do is bribe politicians to get new laws while they ignore any that don't make them money. Man what I wouldn't give to have a full blown BSA style audit on their personal homes, how much you want to bet they'd have pirated shit all over the place?

Yeah TVs not dying...that is why even my little old lady customers ask me about how to watch online. maybe if you assholes wouldn't shit out a bazillion commercials into every damned show so that ZERO tension is possible AND fuck up the bottom of the screen with yet MORE commercials and shit then everybody might actually watch again...hmmm?

I have yet to have a single person give me an answer as why copyrights being insane isn't a perfect example that the system is broken. I mean for the love of God most of Disney's early works, made so damned long ago that planes were made of cloth and antibiotics were just a dream are STILL under copyright. Is having an insane copyright length supposed to make Zombie Walt rise from the grave to make more Mickey Mouse shorts?

I say until We, The People actually have a say at the bargaining table that ALL copyrights should frankly be ignored. The current laws were bought by treasonous bribery against the will of the people and like all laws brought about by bribes and backroom deals they should be treated as the illegal acts they are and promptly ignored. Old Valenti said he would get "forever minus a single day" as the term of copyright and damned if he didn't, so until the laws are made sane again one should simply ignore these laws as worthless as the paper they were written on.

I know that's why I occasionally go to Fox news or Above top Secret or watch Glenn beck, because watching crazies is funny. Of course I do the same with MSNBC and HuffPo because they are just as batshit, just a different kind of batshit.

To me the truly crap your pants scary part is that the majority of folks that vote are old and as many know old folks are a hell of a lot more trusting and likely to believe what they see on TV. Hell last poll I saw had nearly 30% of Americans believing that Iraq did 9/11, how many years ago was that bullshit rumor pushed on a couple of networks? it just goes to show that once bullshit gets into people's heads its damned hard to get it out again.

What was that old saying? Tell a truth, half truth, and a lie and they'll believe all three? Well i think the ultra right and left media prove that you don't even need the truth and half truth parts, just make sure the lies reinforce themselves and conform to the viewers preconceived notions and you're all good to go.

Then just put the damned things behind glass so an employee has to fetch it or have them numbered so you can just walk up to the counter and say you need a number 4 or something.

Those things used to drive me up the wall until I was wandering around the local dollar store one day and saw in their knife section this cool looking serrated curved blade that looks kinda like a curved finger. When i asked the guy if there was a purpose for that he said "man i just LOVE that one, check it out" and whipped out an already opened clamshell and showed me how quickly that sucker slices through those damned things. Right then and there about bought four, two for me and a couple for the family. If you buy a lot of electronics you really need one of those blades, it just blows through those clamshells like a knife through hot butter.

So its just as I said then, you'd be better off just turning it off and calling it a day. Frankly i don't know why so many are getting their panties in a twist, its not like Win 8 is gonna be a hit, its a failwhale and everybody knows this.

I've had a Pentium dual running in the shop with Win 8 for customers to play with, know how many that have WANTED Win 8 after playing with it? NONE, zip zero nada squat. Not the old folks, not the workers, hell not even the kids like it, they ALL find it irritating and want to know "How do i turn this off and get to the desktop?". Hell I figured if nobody else would like it kids would, but even tweeners already know Win Desktop and have no desire for a cell phone replacement, that's what their cell phone is for. the closest i got to a "compliment" was this exchange with a sweet LOL: "That's a nice looking cell phone, is that Android? I've heard of that, its supposed to be nice...what do you mean Windows? Windows what? why that is just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?" and from the mouth of a LOL comes wisdom.

So there's really no point in getting worked up over this or WinRT locking the boot, Windows has less than 5% of the mobile market and the OEMs sure as shit isn't gonna cripple all their PCs to where they will only run Win 8 thus giving them shitpiles of inventory they can't give away. Win 8 will flop as bad as WinME, even worse than Vista, hopefully Ballmer will be "retired" and then they can bring back Ozzie or another of the old guard to right the ship.

But you SHOULD try it APK, after all it is free and runs in Virtualbox and frankly the whole "WTF are they high?" moments you'll get when running it make it VERY entertaining. Hell you've got an i7 so its not like running a VM is even gonna make that chip sweat, so try running it for just a half an hour and see what a difference it makes. i can tell you it was like tying a boat anchor to my workflow, it just doesn't have any consistency and it feels like you are getting slapped around between the desktop and metro (which you can't turn off BTW, it runs even when you are just using the desktop) so its REALLY entertaining, in a MST3K bad movie kinda way.

I mean good lord man they ripped off the UI for the mid 90s AOL crapfest so how can you NOT try it just to laugh your fucking ass off?

My board is an AM3 that is about 4 months old and it don't have it either, they didn't start on the desktop until Liano. I haven't had the chance to put one together yet (still scoring good deals on AM3 and AM3+ so I've been using those instead) but from what I understand the FM1s are already using it, as is later E series chips. I have one of the first Brazos E350 and Asus used EFI and NOT UEFI so it has none of the locks like secureboot. Its quite possible some of the OEMs might just go that way instead as the only advantage UEFI over EFI is secureboot which I'm sure will just cause more support calls so I can see many just using EFI.

But according to AMD's press releases they are committed to CoreBoot and all chips going forward will be built with Coreboot. as another said one COULD tie Coreboot into UEFI but from what I've seen its gonna be a very basic EFI that works as a BIOS (So they can support larger HDDs) which quickly hands off to Coreboot which takes care of the rest. what really pisses me off is Asus offers Expressgate with their machines but frankly its become so crippled its not worth messing with if you aren't a 14 year old girl. its pretty much designed around FB and chat now and it doesn't even have Skype anymore, and no easy way to add any apps to it. That is a shame as having an OS that boots in 6 seconds and gives me full Wifi is nice, but without being able to even add support for any video other than Flash it just too crippled to make a difference.

So as long as AMD is going with Coreboot there is nothing wintel can do, not unless they want to risk another antitrust. But you are right that AMD rules, I have been selling AMDs exclusively for 2 years with nothing but happy customers and I eat my own dog food, me and my boys are rocking two hexacores and a quad and they do anything we can think up and are crazy fast. I even sold my full size for a EEE E350 netbook and having a machine that plays 720P for 6 hours on a charge or does basic office work for 7 is damned nice.

If your board supports it might want to look into snatching a Thuban while they are cheap, I went from a 925 to a 1035T and I can tell you that Turbocore kicks ass and take names. If you watch their email fliers Tiger has been selling Thuban for as low as $100 which is damned cheap for a 6 core. I paired mine with a $30 Hyper N520 cooler and it runs around 95f idle and barely reaches 122 under load, just a great chip. Oh and 1 final note, if you don't know about them Starmicro sells chips for all the older sockets cheap, its a great way to max out that older AMD PC.

Hate to break the news to ya sparky but most machines are laptops now and having crap sucking resources KILLS THE BATTERY which most people WILL care about. Sure on my desktop, where I have 6 cores and 8Gb of RAM? Who gives a crap. But on my dual core laptop running on the 6 cell? You're damned right I care, I care a hell of a lot!

This is the same bullshit attitude by MSFT that caused Vista to be a failwhale, they thought they could just throw more cycles at it and completely missed the fact that netbooks and laptops were all going thin and light. Nobody is gonna want Win 8 if it kills a good hour+ on the battery compared to Win 7.

Oh there was nothing wrong with the LOOK of Vista, in fact I'm using a Vista Black theme on my Win 7 as it uses less resources than the Aero bling see through crap and I just fine it nicer. The problem with Vista was the BUGS, oh lord was that thing buggy as hell! I personally got bit by the "media slows down the network" bug which considering I love to have music playing in the background REALLY pissed me off, I also got bit by the "Vista loses network shares" bug which since I keep a nettop as a file server and download box having to reboot every time I wanted to access the shares because Vista would have a "senior moment" and lose access was irritating as hell. Neither of those bugs were present in Win 7 RTM so that alone was worth the upgrade for me.

As for VirtualPC...why? One of the biggest problems Ballmer has is NOBODY is developing for WinRT and WinPhone 7, which means nobody is developing for Metro. Hell even MS Office is gonna be a desktop and not a Metro app so odds are there really won't be a need for you to have Metro on Win 7. I suppose if you really want to VirtualBox already supports Win 8 if you have hardware VT so if you want to you can, I just don't see much of a point.

BTW did you know there is NO WAY to kill Metro, even if you use just the classic desktop (which sucks and is crippled BTW, no expanding start menu or list of most used programs for instance) that Metro is STILL RUNNING in the background 24/7? You can't stop it, its always sucking resources even if you don't use nor want it. While this might be fine on a desktop with a shitload of cores and memory on a laptop or netbook it blows giant chunks.

In the end after running Win 8 CP for nearly a month and having it in my shop for my customers to try I have to say I honestly can't find any positives about the experience and a whole lot of negatives. It really is pointless without a touchscreen (watch any of Sinofsky's talks on Win 8 and count how many times he says touchscreen) and since the vast majority, including my new netbook and desktop, don't have touchscreens it just isn't an upgrade over Win 7, in fact like Vista was a downgrade from my XP X64 I'd say Win 8 is a downgrade from Win 7. Its just not made for the desktop, anybody that uses it for a few weeks will see that.