McPhee

If it turns out as good as it looks then i'm on the pre-order list I'd rather have something like this than carry a laptop and a smartphone around, it looks like it'll be more useful than both.

Not quite sure where this should go, but this ad is pretty ingenious. Got linked to it through Bitter Wallet; http://awardshome.com/cannes2009/pringles/can-hands.html Goes on for AGES though :/

Who's to say Microsoft would tie all franchises to the Xbox 360 exclusively? If they do buy EA (which i doubt they will, they were likely just expressing an interest) it'd make far more financial sense for them to retain all of these licenses by supporting Fifa, Madden, etc. on all platforms and just moving the majority of other games to the Xbox 360. This way they don't loose the valuable licenses and they still get to use EA's franchises to attract people to the Xbox and Games for Windows platforms. The number of franchises that this would put under Microsoft's belt is phenomenal though. I'm not so sure it would be a good thing, it's unlikely to add much benefit to the consumer. I'd rather see them pick up some smaller developers. They've never supported the PS3, EA took the PC version and ported it to the console. Valve have never been interested in doing it themselves simply because they're a PC developer. They've made it clear that the only reason the Xbox 360 is getting their games is because the port is so easy that they'd be stupid not to do it.

I'm really enjoying this. It took me a while to get the idea that you can't take on every enemy you see and still expect to complete the game though, i wound up with very little health and spent 10 minutes running around looking for a med-station before realising you can sneak past a lot of the enemies and ambush the patrols etc. Just past the point where you meet your first chieftan now, the difficulty seems to be creeping up. I've only got a single complaint - the checkpoints. The game saves far too often! It's fine when you're the Master Chief with your regenerating health but as the Rookie you really don't want to respawn with barely any health 5 feet from where you died. There was one section that took a good few attempts as a result because i had to take on 6 Brutes and a bunch on Grunts with about a single hit worth of health left.

The best way to choose between them is simply to go in to a store and try them out, most of the differences are cosmetic or down to the screen (resolution, size and matte/gloss) or battery. It's a bad time to buy any of them though, Windows 7 is due out next month and there's a load of new hardware launching on the run up to Christmas.

That looks really quite incredible! Full game or a mod of some sort?

I know it's not in-game but it certainly grabbed my attention. Phenomenal trailer! Quite excited about this game to be honest, looks like an MMO that's actually worth playing!

lol It's not really a problem, they're just not really worth installing. General rule of thumb for Windows these days, if it works without installing drivers then don't install the drivers. Windows has clean, simple drivers for most things built in so there's generally no point in the ones that come with products, they're usually bloated with useless features.

Another vote for not installing the drivers, they're a PITA and they add very little.

http://gamingweapons.com/choose-best-gaming-mouse/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqSGFQIcU_o The first two are a palm grip but with slightly different finger positions, the third is the claw/finger grip. Hope it's a help.

How do you hold a mouse? There's usually two types of grip, the full palm (where the mouse sits in your hand) and the finger grip (where the mouse tends to be gripped in, and moved by, your fingers). I can't remember where i read the explanation but it made sense and it's true. From this you can usually find the right mouse. Logitech tend to produce big mice that are suited to the palm grip, your whole hand can comfortably rest on the mouse. Razor usually pump out smaller mice that are more precise and easier to control with a finger grip but rather uncomfortable for those that like to use their whole hand. Personally i use a Logitech G5. It's near perfect for me, though as i have big hands it could do with being a little (10%?) longer and taller. EDIT: Oh, you're on glass. Glass desk? If it is then you might well need a mouse mat. Mechanical mice aren't really made any more, the technology was poop. However: http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=19839

Maybe he swings on Fridays? It happens, and well... who am I to judge? :p

I'm intrigued by this game. Not on my purchase list yet though, too short on monies at the moment. Only one i'm definitely buying is Assassin's Creed II (and Left4Dead 2 if i get my internets sorted). Guess i'll see what you lot think of it and decide from there.

Fair enough. The obvious answer is an iMac then, though I think you're barking mad either way. If you're desperate for more power than your existing Macbook then i don't think you'll really find it with either machine. I made the leap from a 1.9GHz Athlon X2 to a 2.5GHz Core2Duo this year. Well worth the money, but i only paid ~£30 for that extra performance. You're away to put down £hundreds (compared to just docking your Macbook) for a similar boost in power. I'm actually really surprised how crappy the spec of the iMacs are to be honest. Not wanting to start an argument here but you'd think that for £950 you'd at least get a bottom-end Core 2 Quad? What i'm really getting at with this is that they are so bad value for money that they're bound to get a pretty large upgrade fairly soon, playing the waiting game will pay off here i think.

Is the Macbook you've got a 1.83GHz Dual Core or a single? I doubt you'd see much of a performance bump between a 1.83GHz dual and a 2.16GHz dual but up to 2.66GHz would be quite a jump. Also, have you though about how much your existing Macbook could sell for? You might be able to sell that and use the money to get a higher spec'd Macbook or a seperate monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I'm interested in 3D PC gaming and 3D cinema. It just seems 'right' in those situations and for some reason a pair of glasses seems like less of an obstacle. For the rest i'm thinking it's a no. I don't want to be sprawled out on my bed with a pair of glasses uncomfortably sticking in to my face, it's one of the reasons i now ware contacts. Then there's the little issue of the 42" Plasma TV and Blu-Ray player i bought last year. I can't see me replacing either for a LONG time, they set me back well in excess of a grand!

Not so sure myself, either a spambot or just an over enthusiastic newbie. Will leave it for now, it's not like he's doing any harm

With a week to go you're going to be better off buying a pre-built. Learning to build a PC in the space of a week, buying the correct parts, putting it all together etc. is possible but it doesn't leave a lot of time to solve any problems that pop up. Even companies like Dino-PC will struggle to assemble a PC and ship it to you for Friday/Saturday if you ordered it tomorrow (they'll do it, but they'll charge a lot extra for a fast build and then more for fast delivery). Having said that i've heard bad things about these Zoo Storm machines and it's difficult to find decent quality pre-built machines at a fair price so maybe it would be worthwhile trying to cram a build in to a single week? Not knowing what you want the machine for makes things difficult, but you can't really go wrong with the following for a base; AMD Phenom II X3 720 (~£90) Asus M4A785TD-V EVO (~£70) 4GB Corsair DDR3 RAM (~£65) 1TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 (~£50) All from Scan (and next day delivery is free for AVForums and Hexus.net members). Then get the case, PSU and GPU from eBuyer. 512MB ATi 4850 (~£75) Coolermaster 330 Case/CM eXtreme Power 460W PSU combo (~£60) Prices from those stores fluctuate daily (especially on Scan, see the "Today Only" page) which is why i've just popped ball park figures up. What course is it you're doing and are you looking to game on the PC?

It'll work once you have the right cables. The Xbox 360's VGA cable has 2 RCA cables (red + white) for sound. To hook these up to your speakers you need a female RCA to female 3.5mm headphone jack. You could also do with a female 3.5mm to 2x male 3.5mm cable so you don't have to keep swapping the speaker cable over between 360 and PC.

That's not what it says at all. It says that it will be US-only for the time being and that they are "looking at potential future hardware experiences for these markets, but do not have anything to announce right now.". That literally just says that at the moment it is US only and they currently have nothing to announce for other territories. What did Ars expect? An email back with dates about a roll-out? If it flops in the US we won't see it. If it does well I bet it's over here by next Christmas.

You're right, got my bits and my bites the wrong way round. 186kbps, which I still pretty poor. Speedtest.net has that as below average for domestic standards, never mind business.

That's what I thought. Then I looked on the Apple site and while the 8GB is only £150 there's now no 16GB and the 32GB is £230. To make it more annoying the 8GB doesn't have the new hardware. While it's nice to see a price drop i'm more than a little disappointed, £230 is that little bit too much but 8GB isn't enough storage and the faster hardware will always be a boon. I wonder if we'll get a date on the Zune HD any time soon? Buying a new touch is looking less likely

But most can do better than 25kbps, especially given this is corporate broadband rather than home. The pigeon winning was inevitable even on a decent connection. It shouldn't have won by such a distance though, the guy could have cycled there and done the whole lot himself in under the 10 hours it'd take that connection to upload the file

I never had a problem with Vista either really, I always thought the positives outweighed the negatives (after I got rid of my old laptop, which was a bit slow and had too little RAM to run Vista properly). Aside from the UI upgrades Windows 7 isn't a huge leap from Vista. All they really did was tweak the performance to make it run smoother, tie UAC back to a point where people will stop bitching about it and then add a few new features like native SSD support, Playto and Sendto. There's also better networking support in the form of Homegroups. As for Windows laptop suggestions, try the Dell Studio XPS 13 and Adamo, Sony TT and TZ and the Lenovo T400. Of those the two Dells are 13" models, the two Sonys are 11" models and the Lenovo is 14".

After the recent improvements in Vista and Windows 7 I wouldn't really say the worries you posted about Windows are all that relevant. They certainly aren't to me anyway, I don't have an AV running (i do a scan twice a year and haven't had any problems since moving from XP to Vista), I use Windows Firewall, I've not defragged my hard drives in ages (just done a scan and I'm up to 18% fragmentation which is no big deal) and I've not had a crash caused by Windows in a long time (I've caused plenty myself though from fiddling with BIOS settings and hardware). Microsoft do have a bit of work to do on the adware front though. I've not had any harmful adware infect my computer since I left XP but Spybot does still pick up the odd thing here and there. From a stability and maintenance point of view I can't really see much in it. Both operating systems are perfectly capable of surviving alone without any 3rd party software installed. If anything OS X probably copes a little better, counterbalanced by better 3rd party software support on Windows. Even Apple's old ace in the hole, iLife, isn't as much of a selling point as it used to be. Microsoft have their own very similar package in Windows Live Essentials, the only thing missing is a Garage Band alternative. The Macbook Pro is a cracking choice of laptop but personally I think it has far better plus points than the fact it runs OS X, it's an alternative OS these days rather than a superior one. You can do that. If I open (for example) Live Picture Gallery and grab a photo i can drag it in to Paint, Word or any number of other programs. I can even do it without the program being open, just drag it on to the icon. Not being able to do it from a browser is just down to that browser lacking that feature. I'm using Chrome at the moment which won't do it. Which critics do those be then? I'd honestly like to know, it's always good to get a bit more perspective and some times people notice things that others don't. Most reviews I've been reading on Snow Leopard and Windows 7 put them both at an even level (which from my experiences with Leopard and Windows 7 I can definitely believe). It's less a case of which one is better and more a case of which one you prefer. I know that I feel lost in OS X and I find my productivity falls due to the keyboard shortcuts being different. From my own experiences I know I could likely learn to love OS X (and I certainly wouldn't mind running it on my own machines so I could get more used to it) but I don't really think I have any need to when I already get on fine with Windows.