Oh no, not at all. I blame Detroit troubles entirely on UAW decadence. Even today, it is impossible for the Big Three to retool plants for modern models without the exhorted cost of union hassles that make doing so unprofitable.

Or do you mean the car being girlie? I 'fess that is true, but then again it was given to me by my older sister. That car was a bright orange, flamboyant pumpkin that looked like it could have fallen out of George Clinton's hair. Possibly, the gayest thing on four wheels. 

if video card's busted, should rest of boot process be as normal or will it actually stop boot process? 

usually the mobo has some lights and it does some beeps during the boot process, you can decipher them with the mobo manual. No display card, no boot device are at least where it stops and shows some lights and beeps so many times.

But I dunno with the stuff nowadays, why would you need a display card for a box you can ssh to? 

disable the pci/agp slot mama and turn on the built-in video card if your motherboard has one (do they all have one?) and it should work. thats what i did when i killed my video card. :)

for me, pc froze before going into windows, but my brother told me i should turn off the pci-e slot, since i just had connected the monitor to the built-in video card, or something like that. i cant remember. :(

still, turning off the pci-e slot, made the problem go away.

i was saving for a new motherboard and a new video card, but i spent the money on ps2 and games for it :) 

I installed Vista as my main (and only) OS on my home desktop and I keep on finding some really nifty thing:

I was wondering why Vista took a very long time to shutdown, so I keep browsing Control Panel and I noticed the "Performance Information and Tools => Advanced Tools" part, when I opened it, it automatically highlighted an issue: "These programs are causing Windows to shutdown slowly: CTXFISPI.EXE, Vendor: Creative. Time Taken: 95,1 seconds". Whoa, nice. 

Sorry to come back to this whole PC dying thing, but here's an interview with Doug Lombardi that was posted on the shack earlier that was kind of interesting:
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=873

Obviously it's Valve, so you can't really be sure he's not slighly biased, as it'd be silly for him to claim pc gaming is dead, but it's still a nice read. 

Valve would never say that because of Steam. It would be be, frankly, retarded of them. :) 

bunch of the great hi-profile titles are made/published by "first party" - thats right - nintendo and sony themselves. And they stay exclusive and have zero chance of coming out on a PC

Lombardi tells how it is.
Miserable retail sales in USA (and consider no PC sales in Japan). And that means what? ~60-70% of the market would ignore your game by default if it comes out just on a PC.
Popcap and Blizzard enjoys great sales. And that means what?..

some1 find the sales numbers from steam 

Planning to get a video card soon to replace my dusty old 7900 GT. Lookin @ a 9600 or possibly 9800 or what not, up to $500.00 max, preferably less. Just wanted to know your guys' opinion(s). 

IMHO

But if you can manage a wee bit more then get a GX2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

� name, clockspeed - - - - - - - - value/ performance /price
01. 8800 GT 512MB, 600/1512/1800- 1351 1123 205
02. 9600 GT 512MB, 650/1625/1800- 1330 1041 180
03. 8800 GS 384MB, 680/1674/1600- 1151 964 193
04. 8800 GTS 512MB, 650/1620/1940 -1097 1194 279
05. HD 3870 512MB, 850/850/2380 -1089 1047 227
06. HD 3850 256MB, 670/670/1660 -1066 860 166
07. HD 3870 512MB, 775/775/2250 -976 989 226
08. HD 3850 512MB, 720/720/1800 -971 938 210
09. HD 3650 256MB, 725/725/1600 -714 513 95
10. HD 2600 XT 256MB, 800/800/1400 -713 484 86
11. 9800 GTX 512MB, 675/1688/2200 -706 1224 450
12. HD 2600 PRO 256MB, 700/700/1400 -695 455 75
13. 8600 GTS 256MB, 720/1440/2200 -691 597 132
14. HD 3870 X2 2x512MB, 825/825/1800 -689 1260 484
15. HD 2600 XT 256MB, 800/800/2200 -636 536 116
16. HD 2600 PRO 256MB, 600/700/1000 -636 420 65
17. 8600 GT 256MB, 560/1120/1560 -631 485 90
18. 8800 GTX 768MB, 575/1350/1800 -613 1197 495
19. 8500 GT 256MB, 450/900/800 -576 385 54
20. 9800 GX2 2x512MB, 600/1512/2000 -548 1382 757
21. HD 2400 XT 256MB, 700/700/1600 -545 348 50
22. 8800 Ultra 768MB, 612/1512/2160 -438 1260 757
23. HD 3870 X2 CF 4x512, 825/825/1800- 431 1505 968 

"pc games are doing well because popcap, valve, and id are going strong?"

that's like saying the economy must be doing well since david beckham has a good salary. 

Then why are those 3 companies also producing console titles? :) 

Because they can make additional money like that. I'm not disputing that console games sell better at this time, but suppose that the markets were equally profitable. Then it would still make sense to market products to both industries because it's almost certainly cheaper to port something from one to the other than to develop something from scratch. So it's unfair to try and claim that them developing for both is evidence they couldn't survive without the console market. 

Oh, I'm not saying they couldn't survive without consoles. That wouldn't be truthful at all. But I am saying that even the big PC players have a keen eye on the console market and that's telling, IMO. Once you've tasted a piracy free environment with a black box approach to hardware (everyone has the exact same machine), it's hard to forget that rush as a game developer. 

Is it really that big of a problem? I mean do sales numbers decrease?
Or is it just the usual "OH MY GOD 1000000 PEOPLE DOWNLOADED OUR STUFF WE LOST A GAZILLION FANTASYDOLLARS"? 

ThePirateBay just entered the top 100 sites on the Alexa list. It's a real problem. It joins it's good friend RapidShare which was already there. 

That is exactly not what I asked for. Exactly what the industry wants you to believe (tinfoil ahead!). Surely more people are pirating but also more people are buying as the market grows wider. Just like music, the industry whines crododile's tears yet their profits increase from year to year. Movies, same, records are broken.

When I had my first PC I only had copies. My first original was , I don't even remember, but it took years until I bought my first full-priced game (bought a couple of games on garage sales earlier) and until today I haven't bought more than maybe 4 fullpriced games. One of them was STALKER (radiation pack even) because I had good expectations and wanted to support the developers, I sold it 2 weeks later as it felt like wasted money to me.
I've grown up with copies, let it be games or music, later movies. In school one person bought or downloaded something and then it spread.
My dad's Apple ][ had nothing but copied games, same for all later PCs. And whereever I looked it was the same (the exception being stupid educational games that friends got as gifts from their parents and some mainstream music maybe).

You cannot blame piracy if people are not buying your stuff. You can only blame yourself for creating something the market does not want. For bad sales I think the review magazines and websites are much more to blame if they falsely underrate your work. I guess most people use those to decide what they get (apart from your marketing of course). 

with a 9800GTx, looking forward to actually playing some games I've had for ages on max. 

what is your OS? Crysis is meant to look fantastic on Vista under DX10 - i recon there will be some difference between the DX9 "very high hack" and true DX10 - benchmarks for Crysis on your card = "Really fucking good!"

It chugs a bit with any more than 2xAA on tho ;-)

ANY OTHER GAME = MAX :-) 

"You cannot blame piracy if people are not buying your stuff. You can only blame yourself for creating something the market does not want. "

True for some cases. However, I have observed that games released on console make way more money than games released on PC. That's my experience, in real life. You can write that off as crocodile tears or what-have-you, but that's reality. 

And by that example, I mean the same game released on both platforms. Apples to apples. 

Console market = Different market = Not copying to blame if PC sells less. I doubt that console games would sell much less if they were easier to copy. 

eliminate the piracy completely (how about using the latest starforce, wich is virtually uncrackable? and online activation and what-not) and your PC games still wont sell in USA

And Im back with my UT3 example - which is primary a multiplayer game and has to be used with a legitimate cd-key to be played online. Didnt help either.

Sins of Solar Empire - top 10 pirated game on the same piratebay and mininova - still sells great (been in top 10, bight below the Sims, WoWs and Cod4)

console is not piracy-free btw (see the torrents of x360 games)

Everyone blaming piracy as the main reason for low sales of the PC games is wrong. It is just a part of the problem. I read some research that claimed when counting all who buy after pirating (if they like it) and those who`d never buy it leaves about 20% real loss. (Cant find the source now sry) 

I dont have most the newer stuff, I meant some of the older stuff on max which I couldnt do before.