DarkWarrior45

Firefox with the right plugins should do you well. Chrome also has equivalent plugins that achieve the same results. Really it's a matter of personal preference between firefox and chrome. Malwarebytes (at least the free version) only runs when you tell it too. And a MSE and malwarebytes combo is actually a very good idea because they catch things that the other does not; it's always an extremely good idea to have multiple anti-spyware programs. MSE, Faronics, and malwarebytes will not conflict with each other, as long you uninstall Mcafee beforehand. In computer security, paranoia is a virtue.

I really cannot offer an explanation as to why snipers, and other people, prefer bolt action rifles. I'm a defense oriented shooter who's experience is mainly with pistols. But if I got a rifle, I wouldn't get anything but bolt action because: 1) Although I have seen rounds jam in a bolt action rifle before (they usually get stuck in the breach when they do), they are easy to clear. And they don't jam as often as a semi-auto rifle. 2) They are easy to field strip and clean. The bolt comes out, which allows a cleaning rod to go straight through the bore. I also hate guns that are difficult to take apart and clean. 3) Accuracy. I can't explain why, but for some reason the bolt actions have always seemed to be more dead on than others. And no, the muzzleblast will not break glass; not enough force. The muzzleblast is a result of the gas expansion behind the round exiting the muzzle. Now you can shatter glass at point blank range with a blank round. Some actor accidentally killed himself (supposedly, unconfirmed, secondhand story) because he was horsing around with a pistol loaded with blank rounds.

Borderlands is one of those select few games that I keep coming back to. I would go with the GOTY edition, as its has all 4 DLCs included with it. It's also one of those select few games that plays well on multiple systems; the PS3 version looks very similar in graphics quality to the PC version with graphics maxed out, so the developers did not let the game suffer from console limitations. Very few games can claim this. And the most important thing, it is downright fun and addicting. My 2 cents worth: Buy It!!!

It's always good to have a good anti-virus. The only computers that I've owned that have had bad infections were those Windows machines without antivirus. However, I strongly recommend against paying for an antivirus, and would strongly recommend ditching Mcafee. The IT department at which I work at uses Mcafee Enterprise on about 3,000 computers along with Mcafee's unified threat management server; all of which is outperformed by the free Microsoft Security Essentials (no joke). The only advantage we gain with Mcafee is the commercial support, of which is almost nonexistent. If you want an anti-virus, I would recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. I've had extremely good luck with it. Mcafee will need to be uninstalled prior to installing another anti-virus, or else you'll hose up your computer. You will need a scrubber that will pull Mcafee out by the roots, as its uninstaller leaves part of it behind. I also very strongly recommend using a router that has a firewall in conjunction with whatever security solution you end up with. Cisco, Lynksis, and Netgear routers all have this. Word of caution though. No single security solution, anti-virus, white-lists, etc, will completely protect your computer and you from viruses, keyloggers, rootkits, and pirates. Part of it is being self aware of where you're at on the web, and also aware of what you're downloading. Safe surfing habits and a good head on your shoulders will always outperform security software, no matter how good it is. PS: Windows 7 Enterprise, if you by some off chance have this edition, has its own whitelisting software built into the OS. The software is called Applocker, and can both blacklist and whitelist applications.

Either way, the new engine explains why the TES V development has taken so long, and why we haven't heard anything until now. And I'm actually very grateful, as I hated Gamebryo with a fiery passion. And I'm looking forward to the TES V release.

Not just that, but onboard video is considerably better than it use to be. My buddies cheap $500 HP laptop from walmart can run Bioshock and Medal of Honor, quite well in fact. PC requirements are not as much of an issue as it use to, although it is still an issue. The i7's helped as well, as most people have absolutely no clue how fast these chips really are. And to clear things up, games are NOT ported to the PC. The game engines (especially Unreal and Crytek) are now setup to cook/compile for all three major platforms, PC, 360, and PS3. The issue comes from the fact that developers have to hold back the graphics part so that it can run on the 360, despite the fact that PC and PS3 are far more capable than Microsoft's piece of crap. Me personally, I think everyone should develop cross platform games like they did Devil May Cry 4; they scaled the graphics back for the 360 and PS3, but they allowed players to really crank the settings up very high on the PC version.

Assang is not an American citizen, this I know, and I know that he can't be charged with treason, but he can be charged with espionage (I believe). And I thought I posted that any American who "leaks" classified information can be (and should be) charged with treason, such as for example the people who actually are leaking this information. And it does aid America's enemies, and it also harms America diplomatically because it shows that America cannot keep a secret. As for the debate of classified information, there are some things that governments do need to keep secret, especially military secrets when there's an active war going on in Afghanistan right now; they're secret for a reason.

I like the Confederate Flag, mainly because of Heritage (Heritage, not hate). I grew up and live in the good ole' South, and it is my country and my homeland. And a little fun fact, the flag we typically call the Confederate flag, the Bars and Stars, was NOT the national flag of the Confederacy, it was the Battle Flag. The national flag is this: http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/confederate-national-flag.jpg

Don't look just at the wattage; the amperage on the 12 V rails mean much much much more than just raw wattage. You want at least a triple 18 amp rails, or a single rail with at least 45 amps. Any less than that and you're likely to stress the power supply with that setup, especially if you add stuff later on down the road or if you overclock. On the RAM, I buy exclusively Corsair for gaming and high performance systems, and there's a reason for it: reliability. I have never seen a corsair stick go bad. I would also stay away from OCZ on their power supplies (this is a personal opinion that says nothing about the company), as I'm a big fan of power supplies made by SeaSonic, which are namely SeaSonic (duh), Corsair, and Antec. PC Power and Cooling also makes a rock solid power supply. Again, personal preference on my part. As for the case, I like Silverstone right now. Lian li is good, but I don't like a lot of their layouts. Cooler Master is also good too if you get the right case. I use a Cooler Master Stack 830.

What Operating System? First, scan your computer with utilities such as Malwarebytes to make sure you don't have an uninvited guest hogging up resources. Then run a program called CCleaner to help clean the gunk out of your computer. Then defrag your hard drive (Also, if your boot drive is more than 50% full, that will affect your performance). Secondly, upgrade your graphics card. This may, depending on which graphics card you get and also on the spec of your existing computer, require a power supply replacement. I would recommend nothing less than a GTX 260 for gaming. This, after cleaning up your computer, is where you will see the biggest performance gain in your games. Thirdly, upgrade your RAM to at least 4 GB. You will see system wide performance increases with this, not just in games.

I'd say let California sink or swim on it's own. Now if they are smart, they would declare bankruptcy and then makes plans and steps to get themselves out of their own mess, and not pay off loans with more loans. Should the other 49 states do something about it? My opinion says no.

Contrary to popular belief, but when the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment talk about Freedom of Speech, it is guaranteeing the freedom of expressing your opinion about something, such as me saying that I think Obama should immediately resign. It does not protect freedom of Libel (flaming is libel) and it does not protect publishing classified information. Publishing classified information is called Espionage, and it is illegal. It is also considered Treason against the US for an American to leak classified information, and it also puts the US at risk, and it puts our troops lives on the line. Me personally, I hope the US prosecutes Assange.

Soul Caliber IV is good, but I find it rather redundant after a while. Left for Dead and Left for Dead 2 are ridiculously fun games in co-op mode. And like four other peoples have stated: BORDERLANDS!!! (<-- Darkwarrior's favorite FPS)

In my opinion, Morrowind is a better game than Oblivion, especially with good mods. I remember at one time I had maybe 200 mods installed on my install on an old p4 machine with a geforce 3; how the poor machine survived that and oblivion I do not know. Just do not blow off a game because of its graphics; some of the best games ever made have some of the crappiest graphics, but yet I still play them because they are so darn good. Examples are Final fantasy 3 (the one mislabeled as 6), final fantasy 7, Crono Trigger, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Wizardry 8 and of course Morrowind. Oblivion also has it's own mods as well, and some very good ones as well. The mod Tears of the Fiend is an exremely good story/companion based mod for Oblivion, and it's on my recommend list.

These rumors have been out for a long while. When Oblivion came out there was the ruckus that Tes V would be a MMO, a rumor that was rather rampant till the time I started engineering school a couple years back. Back in 2008 Bethesda had on the official forums a thread for ideas for Tes V, a signal that early concept work was in the works. Zenimax also a couple years back hired a producer who was rather well established in the MMO business, thus leading to more MMO Tes V rumors. Now let's face reality. Bethesda has completed neglected Oblivion for the last couple of years because of the Fallout 3 franchise. We've had Fallout 3 followed by Fallout New Vegas, plus Beth has released titles such as the miserable failure they call "Wet." Me personally, I don't see development on Tes V happening until New Vegas is in Beth's terms a finished project, that if they decide to put it into development. I would not be surprised if there's a design document on Tes V right now, but I would bet that if they're developing it, then it's just now getting off the ground. And if Wet is a sign of the times, I wouldn't put much hope on it.

An Apple iPad has a 1 GHz processor that is a system on a chip, that is it has 256 MB of RAM and a decent GPU to boot powerful enough to play games. While I doubt the PSP2 will be able to match the xbox's 3.2 GHz triple core, it is very believable that it will have twice the ram (and btw, the xbox cpu, the IBM Xenon, is a triple core RISC processor with multiple threads; it has six processing threads). Long story short: Rival the xbox in processing power? bullcrap Have 1GB of ram, believable. No UMD support: smart move on Sony's part.

Nope. A laptop drive will work on a ps3 though; I'm about to drop a 500gb into my ps3 slim *hint hint*.

People are not going to stop pirates from pirating stuff, just like no security system is breach-proof. But you can reduce it. Stardock did something interesting with their title Galactic Civilizations; they actually permitted you to copy and distribute to other people, but you could not download updates or play online unless your installation was registered, and they knew if more than one person had registered a game because the cd key involved with the registration was permanently tied to your account and name. If more than one person registered the same cd key, they banned that cd key. Either way, I like Steam. It enables me to have access to the indie games, games that do not have the resources to publish millions of hard copies and then distribute them. Basically, you make a game and you publish via steam. Easy. In fact, I would not be surprised if hard copies disappeared all together. I really do not see what all the ruckus is about people not liking Steam. As for people wanting a physical copy: they're called DVD-Rs. They're cheap. The Stables where I'm at sells them $20 for a 25 pack. A cd label maker will make them pretty for you too. Plus, I believe you can re-download a game, in the event you get a new computer or need to reinstall windows. And btw, some pirates release games as a trial basis; they provide the full version of the game, and then say that you need to buy the actual game if you like what you played. This is just some of them, and not all of them. Others are what Vagrant described. Basically every pirate has his/her own agenda in the reasoning why they're pirating games and you cannot stick one label/reason on the entire underground. I'm not going into any further details on the working of the pirates and the details on games being illegally distributed because I could be (and most likely will be) risking breaking forum rules and Vagrant has already done a good enough job explaining it. Also, when you deal with pirated software you are dealing with the world's most technologically advanced criminal underground. Tread softly.

Agreed. It is not needed, as SSDs are to my knowledge random access; you can instantly get to any addressable memory space within a single memory access. The reason why we need to defrag mechanical drives is because they are not random access, they are linear; meaning that it has to spin a physical disk and move a physical head in order to access any memory space. When you defrag a mechanical disk, it means that a group of data is all together on one part of the disk, thus reducing seek times. This is the reason why SSDs have ridiculous read times over traditional, magnetic disk drives. On another note, is there any word on the performance of a SSD versus SAS drives? Traditionally, SAS drives in RAID 0/5 have been the fastest thing around. I'm just curious as how the SSDs compare to a SAS drive?

The headset I couldn't say; I think the xbox headsets are proprietary but I wouldn't know because I've never used them. Yes, that is the one.

Safe mode boots only system required files and programs. Think of it as windows without any clothes. Run rkill while in safe mode and then run malwarebytes, ad-aware, and/or spybot (preferably all three). If you do choose to reinstall windows, then you will need to back up your files to something else, such as an external hard drive or another computer. And if you do choose to reinstall windows, and you've never done it before, then it's probably best to have someone help you. This is a pain in the rear initially, but it's really better in the long run.

I would go with the newer 250 gig; spend the extra money. And here's the reason why. The other one, the refurb, is one of the older model xbox 360s that had repeated problems with the red ring of death (GPU overheats and melts basically). The elite model had an extra heatsink that helped, but still suffered from heating problem. I have a 120gb elite collecting dust on it because it peed then died like a dog because of overheating. The fact it's a refurb means it probably overheated in the past. The newer xbox360s, like the newer 250gig model, has considerably better cooling, and I would be more inclined to buy that one as it's not going to kick the bucket during the middle of a slugfest in Halo Reach. But of course, my two cents worth says skip the 360 and go get a ps3.

Reading through the thread, it sounds like you've landed with a variant of smitfraud. Where I work at we use the name smitfraud to refer to any virus or trojan horse that poses as a legitimate anti-virus/spyware program, such as the one in your case. Smitfraud WILL take down and disable your antivirus, and it WILL keep some programs, such as malwarebytes and ad-aware from running. It's purpose is to sucker you into providing some kind of sensitive information, such as a credit card number, to ID thieves. Long story short, you're dealing with some funky stuff. The first you need to do is boot Windows 7 in safe mode (and btw, I sure hope you're running 32 bit). You start win 7 in safe mode by mashing down the f8 key while the machine is booting up. Download and run this: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic308364.html. This is rkill, it will kill an malicious programs running and knock them off the windows process list. Now, if you're running 32 bit win7, then download and run this: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/anti-virus/combofix This is combofix, I call it a virus killer. Some anti viruses will mark combofix as the artemis trojan, this can be safely ignored; it's not a virus. If you're running 64 bit, run rkill and then run whatever else you got at it while booted in safe mode. Either way, the key is getting into safe mode and killing the malicious processes. And you're probably looking at reinstalling windows, just to warn you.

I disagree slightly. I believe that FF-X was the last, as it was in my opinion a great game. Right now, from what I've played, FF-6 (labeled FF-3 on the cartridge) and FF-X have been my two favorites thus far. Can say anything either way about FF-7, as I've been a bad boy and haven't played it yet, but from I've heard, I'm by no means am going to be disappointed by FF-7 when I do pick it up this summer. FF-12 was ok, in it's own right it was a great game. But it didn't hold up to the other FF games, and it showed the direction that the series is heading in; downhill. This is supported by the fact that Zero Punctuation now has a review for FF-13, of which didn't speak well of it. FF X-2 was an absolute embarrassment. . Just my two cents worth Me personally, I think the series has turned more into a cash cow for Square-Enix. Ever since the merge it's been more about the money, instead of it being about making a game.

ATi vs nVidia is a personal choice really. nVidia in my opinion has the better single card configurations, but ATi has better multi-gpu configurations because it's more efficient. It's about as broad as it is wide. I prefer nVidia because I do not use multi-card configs, and I don't want to put up with ATi's poor drivers. Plus I'm a bit biased towards nVidia. As for the OT, if you don't know that much about different hardware configs, then invest into a good gaming system from either Alienware or Ibuypower. Or pay a reputable tech/engineer/computer geek to custom build you one. Be sure to get at least 8 GB of RAM, and for that price (I'm assuming 2500 euros is about 3200 american dollars) I would get the newer nVidia 480 card if you can. Get two hard drives at least, and request a raid 0 config (raid 0 makes two drives act as one, gives some performance boost). This is my two cents worth, and a lot is based on personal preference. I actually just configured an Alienware Aurora with 24 GB RAM, Geforce 295, 2.66 GHz i7, dual 1 TB hard drives for about 2100 euros (2800 american dollars). You can probably find the same system cheaper, as with Alienware you tend to pay more for the name than anything else.