Bad hardware?

And that car (and brand) once again shows that GM was run by idiots and probably should have been left to whither on the vine. Saturn was one of their most successful lines for a while and then they decided to bring it truely back into the fold and utterly ruined it. Reliability went into the shitter, the character was lost (see Ion) and then all we got was rebadged GMs or imported Opels (Aurora, Astra, and to the extent the Vue which was partly honda)

Well, you might be in the minority then in alot of cases. Most of my gamer or high end 3d making friends who attempted to go XP x64 had serious issues from day one which never really got resolved. It was almost all driver related issues but still, it was the bastard step child of XP. And you are doing something seriously wrong if you cant get your games to work under X64 without cracking. Under Vista, and now Windows 7 I havent had any major problems with my game collection going back to games from 2001/2002 (XP release era). Sure, some of them have required work arounds and tweaks to get to function but I've never had to crack them to get the functionality to work. Maybe its just the fact that, again, you're running on the bastard child x64 release from Microsoft? Finally, with Vista. You say it called home constantly? For what? Updates (which it checks in the background), media center content updates, defender updates, and you also have the customer experience improvement whatevers they call it if you agree to them. Seems like fairly typical stuff considering its, ya know...part of the programs that are installed. XP doesnt have them, so of course its not going to send out that traffic. You're stutter and file transfer issues sure sound like buggy drivers or hardware issues to me yet you blame it on the OS without taking any time to troubleshoot it. My box is our file server, torrent box and regularly plays streaming video and music. No slow downs, no real stutters (except when the gf launches a file transfer to my machine and Im coping files between hard drives and the os starts to do something else. Normal stuff) Now, after it stablized after release Vista is pretty much perfectly stable. It multi-tasks great, uses memory the way it was intended to be used (whats the point of having 8Gb of memory if 99% of its sitting there unused. Thats a retarded waste of electricity) as a cache. Let the OS buffer your shit and then when an app REALLY needs it (but 99% of the apps out there still arent coded to use more than 2Gb of memory) let the OS back out of the memory and assign it to your app.

Actually, Windows does support this both under Vista and Win7. On a per device basis. I dont use it, and its hidden under the audio device properties but its there.

Actually, the lack of increase going from 1066 to 2000mhz makes sense because its using a CPU that 1.) Lacks an integrated memory controller 2.) has a shared FSB to the northbridge that has the memory controller and 3.) Doesnt even need that much bandwidth to be maxxed out (most current games are GPU limited not CPU). So bandwidth isnt the limiter but latency still is. So, I bet you WOULD see more of a hit switching to ECC vs non-ecc on the same bandwidth memory however I cant really find many modern benchmarks to support that. Logically, it makes sense however but I've been known to be completely wrong before so it wouldnt be the first time ;)

I've only twice had memtest throw errors on sticks that were bad when the system was clearly crashing in a method "similar" to memory errors. Swapping out the memory made the system completely stable. this has happened on ten systems, so memtest only picked up errors on 20% of the of the bad sticks. I think this could partly be attributed to the way memtest tests (its not exactly real world, whether its doing linear tests or its "random" mode -- non match real world usage honestly) but also it could very well be an issue with the integrated memory management built into new processors (we've had much harder problems detecting issues with athlon processors than intels for some reason) or maybe Im shooting shit into the wind too. All I know is I rarely rely on memtest for anything anymore. The PC-doctor toolkit seems to hit bad memory more frequently but it takes HOURS to run a full pass on even small memory amounts (running it on a machine with 8Gb was just gdamn painful) but still...hours of testing vs just buying a new kit of 4Gb memory for $40 and RMA'ing the old shit. Simple math

I was wondering with its USB port could you connect a powered hub and run multiple devices on it or is not a true usb root hub just a single port? Cause this thing would be awesome if I could connect my three external hard drives and my laserjet

Yea, I do work at Staples and I agree it SHOULD be mentioned in the ad and I can only guess as to reasons its not (Ads are made way before the sale so possibly the rebate "terms" arent settled yet, its copy and pasted, or there's no legal requirement to list on the ad how it comes back IANAL) however the sales tags AND the rebate form both list if its a visa debt card. Also, many banks will let you cash these cards out (how I dont know since its against the terms of the card) but I've been told this by quite a few customers who know how to work the system. Frankly, I'll be damn happy when rebates are done away with period. its just a way for companies to make money off all the customers who never send them in or companies that just flat out deny for the dumbest reasons (how you didnt copy the upc in color? so sorry...fuck off) and it makes my life more complicated doing my job.

Not an honest company? Take it you didn't bother to actually read the rebate offer or the price tag which both make mention of it being a visa debit card? That has nothing to do with dishonesty but rather being too lazy to read what you are in essence agreeing to. Are rebate cards a crappy deal? Yes, just the same as rebates in general are.

And despite the fact that Win7 beta and RC were open and free to nab and the RC doesnt expire for almost a full year you couldn't even begin to try it? Its not hype, its Vista Sp3. Even more stable (honestly I've yet to have my 64bit Vista or my g/f's 32bit Vista crash short of a few outliers which were MY fault), more responsive, more logical interfaces and overall improved. Alot of so called IT Professionals like you don't seem to understand how OS releases (major ones that is) from everyone work. Shit breaks at first, nothing works properly and then 1-2yrs down the line is completely or mostly fixed up. 9x was that way, 2000 was, XP was, etc. Vista just got fixed alot quicker, all hail Win7

Umm, the spec and SOURCE for the design of the processors is already opensourced. http://www.opensparc.net/

The advantage is fairly obvious - its open, so people can play with it early. they can pickup bugs, they can code new works based upon, etc. so Sun uses OpenSolaris as its "open-beta" before rolling changes back in the core, enterprise stable version of Solaris

While they could add in support for the processors, Linux support for sparc (atleast when I played with debian on an older sun sparc based machine) was pretty poor. Somehow I dont see the architecture being fully supported or as scalable as it is under Solaris. Also, how good IS linux at dealing with 128 threads on the fly in one go? I know Linux is used fairly heavily in supercomputers but thats because its cheap and customizable and generally scaled OUT...not up like the T1/2 does

To increase the knowledge of the rest of the windows tech community...what "trojan" was this? Cause it'd be pretty impressive to have shrunk the OS, live, without him noticing, copied over system files, nuked the live OS, booted over to an alternate copy AND survived an os restore by somehow tricking the factory restore partition into believing the new trojan partition (that wouldn't be created as bootable and would be deactivated upon the restore option which nukes the system partition) was the original coded partition 0 (or 1 if the restore partition is set as bootable first). Just want to know

Actually, in Vista as long as you have the key on the bottem of the computer you can use ANY vista install disk to repair, or reinstall the OS. XP, and to a lesser extent Win2k were the outliers because they had different versions that required different disks and different licenses. On Vista, even the basic disk has the features of all the others its the license key that determines what you get. Sure as hell makes repairs at our shop easier. Ignoring how much better Vista's auto repair tool is to begin with and the fact that you can generally repair an install with system restore without having to do a faulty "repair" install or nuking from orbit