Hah, yes!

My parents bought one of the very first wave of Vista laptops, just a few weeks after the official launch. With 512mb of RAM, it ran like an absolute dog and that should never have been listed as the minimum spec. That said, surely some of the blame here must attach to the hardware vendors? Whatever MS put on the box as the minimum spec for Vista, they must have known they were pushing borderline-unusable PCs out the door.

I also remember the constant UAC prompts, but suspect MS made the right call here in the long run. It was infuriating for users, to be sure, and probably did result in a good few either disabling UAC or just habitually clicking "yes" to every prompt. But it also got a lot of people complaining to developers, which in turn persuaded them into better habits. A lot of people who turned off UAC on their early-era Vista machines probably didn't do so on future machines. These days, a lot of people know to think carefully before clicking yes to an unexpected UAC prompt.

I'm still not seeing anything about this that addresses the biggest problem that's hit previous gaming services such as OnLive and the like. That is to say; input latency.

30ms latency is indeed a generally acceptable figure for normal online gaming. But don't forget that what you're talking about under normal circumstances is the latency between the server and the client. So that latency is only relevant to the server-side game interactions. What we're talking about here is having an additional 30ms latency before you even get to that point. What that translates into is a far more distracting gap between the player's control inputs and a visible reaction on-screen (added on-top of the standard display-related latency, which even on a really good gaming monitor is likely to be at least 10ms).

This is really, really distracting, particularly in games which use mouse controls, where it is highly noticeable that there is a delay between mouse movements and in-game response. 30ms is roughly equivalent to what you'd get from a particularly horrid vsync implementation (e.g. what you see in the PC versions of Skyrim and Fallout 4), which can be distracting in regular gameplay and a real killer in any kind of competitive online action game.

The Hardwareluxx benchmarks are interesting. They certainly don't show "no" impact on gaming. In fact, what they show is more or less what you would expect to see with decreased CPU performance.

If you look at the 4K benchmarks, there is minimal-to-no impact. That's not surprising, because you would expect most modern games to be GPU-constrained at 4K, outside of some really fringe cases. Drop to 1080p, however, and you are looking at roughly a 4% or so reduction in framerates. Their test rig has a 1080 Ti - one of the best gaming cards money can buy right now and one that you would expect to be able to eat most games for breakfast at 1080p. It's not unusual for games on high-end graphics cards to hit CPU constraints at 1080p and, indeed, this is usually how sites like Eurogamer's Digital Foundry benchmark CPUs for gaming performance. By their usual standards, that 4% performance loss is pretty severe.

Will it actually affect anybody's gaming performance in the real world? Possibly. Gamers with older CPUs but a more recent graphics card (a fairly common combination) still using 1080p monitors may well see modest but still noticable performance hits based on those benchmarks. Even if it's not a huge real-world impact, it's a massive reputational blow for Intel.

I'll be the first to agree that real-money loot boxes in gaming are a terrible thing (if they're only available with in-game currency, I don't give a stuff). At their most benign (e.g. Overwatch), they are an inducement for people to continue to sink cash into a virtual slot machine. At their worst, when used as part of a pay-to-win system, they fundamentally corrupt a game's mechanics.

And yet...

I really, really wish that gamers (of all people) had not been jumping up and down and begging for Government intervention. Should you boycott games for containing loot box systems? Yes. Should you take to social media and cause as much brand damage as possible? Definitely. But bringing Government into things? Not going to end well...

Popular authoritarianism and censorship is on the march at the moment, driven by both the religious right and the snowflake left. Do we really think that Governments poking around with one area of video-game regulation are going to limit themselves to that particular area? That this won't turn into some kind of "think of the children/think of the trans community" moral crusade.

There's a real risk here that games are rushing headlong towards a cliff that could see German, Australian or even Chinese-style censorship of games spreading worldwide. The US might be at least partially protected due to its First Amendment, but here in the UK, with an authoritarian Government faced with an even more authoritarian opposition, I'm getting properly worried.

Yeah, the basic consensus seems to be...

The 56 isn't a bad card. In theory a bit pricier than the 1070, but we'll see what the miners do to the respective prices when it actually hits the shelves. Performance is mid-way between the 1070 and 1080. Power consumption is high, but if you're not worried about that, then this is a gaming card that for certain given budgets will be the rational purchase.

The 64 aircooled is in theory pricier than the 1080. It offers a very similar level of performance to the 1080, but with much higher power consumption. There doesn't seem to be any reason to buy it beyond brand loyalty to AMD, should you be so inclined.

The 64 watercooled looks like an absolute disaster. Prices are comparable to the 1080 Ti, but with a level of performance only very slightly better than the base 1080. In addition, various sites have reported issues with the sample cards they were sent. PCGamer's had nasty coil-whine. Eurogamer reported that their card was overloading a 1000W PSU and that they had to switch to a 1200W to keep it stable. God only knows why anybody would want to pay almost as much as you pay for a 1080 Ti for a card with significantly lower performance and possible "issues".

Nvidia's Volta cards probably aren't coming out tomorrow, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the first wave of consumer cards in 6 months time.

I'm one of those guys who likes to have a top-end gaming PC. Spend quite a lot of money on it. Put a lot of thought into when to do part-swaps and when to go for a whole new system.

I'm not really sure this is going to matter all that much for most people, even for people like me. Even for high-end gaming (i.e. trying to hold 60fps with high/ultra graphics settings at 4k), the CPU upgrade cycle isn't particularly intense. If you're using a decent Skylake or Kaby Lake (e.g. a 6700K or 7700K) you should be good with it for years. Your GPU is going to be the bottleneck under almost all real-world scenarios.

If you're on an older CPU (a second or third gen i7, for instance) then you might be starting to hit CPU bottlenecks and it might be time to think about an upgrade. But then the sockets changed for Skylakes, so you'd be looking at a new mobo (and other associated components) whatever you went to.

tl;dr version - you probably don't need a CPU upgrade. If you are one of the fringe cases that does, you were always going to be looking at a new mobo (and probably starting over with a new PC anyway) whether or not Coffee Lake changed the socket size.

Yes, I did wonder whether any of this was related to the problems with Anniversary Update and Avast antivirus. For those unaware, this saw a large portion of Win10 64-bit PCs running Avast go into a BSOD reboot-loop during the installation of the Anniversary Update.

There was an Avast update that fixed the issue within around 48 hours, but it was still a fairly major headache in the interim. It's not entirely unreasonable of MS to have acted to prevent a repeat of this.

What's badged as Amazon Logistics seems to actually vary a lot from country to country, depending on local conditions and labour laws.

Here in the UK, it is an absolutely bare-bones system with very few actual employees. It's mostly self-employed drivers hired on a contracted basis via a system that seems to be total chaos.

I've certainly had problems with the Royal Mail as well in the past. When I was in my late teens, our local Post Office was raided by the police due to a systematic programme of theft of and from parcels (this was in the very early days of Amazon, when they still mostly sold books). Hilariously, we had one package arrive which had been opened and DVDs stolen from it, while the books were left intact.

But by and large, our Royal Mail has a fairly well established logistical chains and is reasonably good at keeping things moving through the system. Amazon Logistics in the UK, by contrast, is a case of "give it to whichever guy-with-a-van turns up on the day and hope for the best".

Here in the UK, our biggest problem isn't the postal service. I've had experiences with both the USPS and the Royal Mail. By and large, the Royal Mail is not that bad. It has its problems, sure, but I've generally found it more reliable than the US equivalent. Our geography is generally just easier for that kind of thing, I suspect.

The biggest problem we have over here in the e-commerce sphere is Amazon Bloody Logistics. This is the single worst delivery organisation I have ever encountered, by a long reach.

Lost parcels. Parcels randomly delayed for days or even weeks in transit. Parcels delivered to the wrong address. Delivery status screens which may or may not update, and which probably contain the wrong information when they do. 15 hour delivery windows with no estimates within that. No opportunity for Amazon's call-centres to contact drivers or even delivery depots. No ability to re-route missed parcels to post-offices or collection points.

There's a theoretical option to have parcels sent to a pick-up locker instead, provided you select this option before dispatch. When this works, it works well. Unfortunately, over the last 12 months, Amazon have systematically widened the number of products this isn't available for to the point it's nearly useless. Even for products that are allegedly eligible, the system will often just say "nope, can't do that" for no readily appreciable reason.

It's also highly variable across regions. Urban areas seem to fare much worse than rural ones. I'm in London and promised Sunday-deliveries never emerge here. Friends and family in more rural locations seem to be slightly better served.

Over the last 12 months, I've shifted a large portion of my online shopping away from Amazon as a result of their whole-hearted adoption of Amazon Bloody Logistics. I'm also going back to bricks and mortar stores to a greater extent than at any time in the last 5 years.

Even Valve only implemented refunds in response to a) growing legal rumblings and b) EA's Origin jumping the gun by going first and putting the publicity spotlight on Valve.

It's an issue where competition genuinely worked for the customer. It probably didn't hurt that threats of legal action in certain jurisdictions were hovering in the background.

Going from TFA, it appears to refer to vapour-chamber cooling. Now that's not actually an MS innovation; it's already in use on tech such as very high-end PC graphics cards (it's on the Nvidia 1080 Ti in my PC). But this is probably the first time it's been used in a piece of mass-market hardware like this.

Having read the Eurogamer/Digital Foundry articles, the quote you pick out appears to mean that users with 1080p displays will be able to enable supersampling, where the console renders an image at 4k but then displays it over a 1080p output.

It's basically a very, very resource heavy version of antialiasing and has been available in many PC games for years now.

The Switch is an ergonomic nightmare. I've got mild RSI and I have to be very, very careful about using it undocked, or via the joycons attached to the grip. Fortunately, the Pro Controller, while expensive, is fine in terms of its ergonomics (though the lack of analogue shoulder triggers reduces its quality as a controller).

But the Switch itself is about as bad as you can get. In undocked mode, the control inputs are right on the very outer edge of the unit. If you have normal-sized hands, the only way to hold it is via "pinching" the edges. Your hand is entirely unsupported and will slip into a cramped posture by default. The same problem is also present with the joycons when using them undocked.

Modern video game controllers have "wings" for a reason, even though they are generally just hollow plastic. They fill the palm of your hand during play and prevent you from cramping up your hand. This is both more comfortable in immediate terms, and less likely to lead to problems with your hands over prolonged use. Nintendo have completely ignored two decades of ergonomic progress with the Switch. A lot of people will be happily using their units right now and not (yet) feeling any ill effects, but storing up all kinds of problems with their hands for later in life.

If you want to play Zelda, then go ahead. It's not really my cup of tea, but some people seem to like it a lot. But for the love of god, get a Pro Controller if you're going to do so. No game is worth inflicting long-term pain on yourself.

I'm well outside the 18 to 24 demographic myself, so I may not be best placed to comment on this, but I'm not really sure how many of today's big movie releases are really targeted at that demographic.

Increasingly releases seem to be split into three categories:

1) Very Important Movies About Very Important Things (TM), also known as Oscar-bait, which is usually targeted at the middle-aged-and-older demographic.

2) Millennial/Gen-X nostalgia-fests based on comic-book franchises or reboots of old movies and the like which were big for people born in the '70s and '80s, but probably don't have much resonance for people born after around 1990 or so.

3) Kids' films, for which the actual spending-demographic is usually the parents in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are actually footing the bill.

That makes commercial sense, because those demographics are where the spending power lies. A visit to the cinema these days can be a fairly pricey affair, so I suspect the 18-24 demographic might just not be seen as worth chasing.

AMD's issue here isn't necessarily that they have more of these problems or that the problems are more serious. It's that they have a reputation for having more of these problems and for them being more serious when they happen.

A lot of people, self included to a degree (though I do try to counter it) have picked up trust issues around AMD products over the years. In many cases, including mine, that may well be because we tried running AMD CPUs which just run a bit hotter than the Intel equivalents with cooling that would have been acceptable (but no more) in an Intel system, and ran into stability/longevity problems as a result. So it's more of a user-error than something innate in AMD's hardware. But the reputation is there and it's very easily reinforced by stories like this, even if it's a bit unfair.