The more versatile you want your system the more complex it becomes, which slows it down and adds a lot of things necessary for that versatility which means drag on your system. I think the GC is the most powerful of the big 3 right now, it definitely has the best graphics I've seen on any of the systems (Xbox is too grainy whenever I see it, GC is nice and clean.)

I'm gonna wait until GC is like $20 before I buy it. 

You are wrong actually. XBOX is using a 733 mhz CPU. When it comes to the current generation of consoles, PS2 has the weakest hardware, XBOX has the fastest and GC falls in-between. 

there's a game shop at the bus station where I walk by each day and they have big screens showing console games and demos all the time... they have driving and fight games and whatnot. They look really crap compared to pc stuff because the framerate is horribly low. That is most visible when stuff is moving quickly. Driving games suffer most from this. I don't know if it's the limitation of tv technology or the console hw/sw developers' choice. 

Has anyone noticed that WHATEVER the spec of their pc, windows never seems to run any faster. Since Win 95, Windows has always been about the same speed on my various pcs. p200 64mb (win95/98), athlon 700 512mb(win 98), athlonxp 1800 256mb (win 98/2k), intel fancy 2ghz laptop 512mb (win xp).

Obviously if I tried running all the stuff I run on my current pc on my first system, it would just fall on its arse, but the general speed of windows just seems constant.

Windows 95 - shit. Windows 98 - better, but shit, Windows 2k - a lot better, but still shit, Windows XP - not really noticebly better than 2k, but looks a bit prettier and gets more support. Still shit.

Grr, I wish they didn't have such a fucking huge monopoly, then maybe they would try and do something about Windows being shit.

I bet Linux, BeOS and all the others are just as shit. 

I mean Windows never FEELS like its running any faster. I still get long pauses when opening simple apps like windows explorer from time to time, there are still huge bugs with displaying folders (like when you delete one and it stays there, then you click on it and Windows says that it has been deleted and does nothing about it. refresh doesn't clear it either. WTF) and trying to connect to a network that isn't avilable pretty much hangs explorer for 5 minutes (at least it doesn't take windows with it these days).

Basically it's still a piece of shit. The improvements that have been made between the various verions feel so small to me. God knows how much money I have spent on this crap, but requisite software. It sucks. 

their graphical user interfaces are a bit slower... and don't even start about the mac, even the mouse lags there! 

Hi, resident Mac zealot (not) chiming in.

and don't even start about the mac, even the mouse lags there!

I think OS X is a bit over-the-top in the GUI but not so much. If you're witnessing mouse lag I'm guessing the comp is running OS X with less than optimal RAM. OS X 10.2.8 runs quite fine on 256 MB for me, but when several apps are open, CPU priority* gets fuzzy and things start to take longer. Haven't really experienced mouse problems, though.

*I've read of a UNIX command that will improve this by dedicating the CPU to whichever particular app is in focus, being used - rather than it tailoring to all the crap in the background unnecessarily. 

i partly disagree.
windows95 was good at the time. innovative and much better than 3.1.
windows98 was shit, indeed. always. nevertheless i used it for a long time (yeah, i know....).
now, they are just antiques that shouldn't be installed on any computer any more.
xp was the first operation system that i felt more or less comfortable with (once it was configured correctly) and compared to the others it really is (feels) faster imho.
i know what you mean, though, and i think the problem is not the os itself - at least not solely - but the additional software. hardware is constantly improved, operation systems can handle more and more stuff at once, so the software companies release programs that are hardly optimised for speed. good examples are the norton tools - they eat ressources like crazy and still don't offer better service than other programs.
and, naturally, the more of that non-optimised software runs simultaneously the slower everything becomes.

i think it's still a long way to an ultimately satisfying computer experience concerning the problems you mentioned... 

In my opinion, there is no question that XP was/is a significant improvement over previous windows builds. 

how is xp better than 2k?
except maybe more security patches and better compatibility
differences in gui are just annoying

lies about win not getting better/faster
win runs really faster on more ram and better hdd
It was serious improvemnt going from 5400 to 7200 rpm hdd and going from 48 to 192 ram etc

Now the only slowdowns(pauses actually) there are left - when a programm spins up dvd/cd
and thats all, I dont feel like anything is not fast enough in the normal system work
(ofcourse it gets slow if you are doing whatever task that operates huge data chunks and takes 100% CPU)

Need to note, that I almost dont use windows-included software
win commander (now total commander) for any filemanagement, Opera for inet etc
and Im not running any extra progs in background
than seems to be on crack btw :) 

it's not the windows versions don't work faster, they do, which in turn lets you do more stuff at the same time.

ie: Have mozilla, msn, doomedit and photoshop on atm, and listening to music.

i remember in win 3.1 just listening to music would slow down the machine by about half.

also, re: pauses for explorer windows to open, i think that's usually attributed to your HDD being in standby mode and not spinning, so windows has to wait for the HDD to start going again before it can find files. 

NT was more stable than 9X. 2K was more compatible than NT. XP isn't really any different from 2K, as far as i can tell. So to me, 2K was the peak. 

I agree that all software, ever, sucks.

I'm not being sarcastic. 

I agree that all software, ever, sucks.

Even Fitzquake?

BTW, curious - have you tinkered with implementing screenshots-named-after-maps yet? 

You can't say "in windows 3.1 half of the processor went to music listening". The mp3 has to be decoded, and that takes a certain amount of mathematical calculations that just have to be made. Older, slower computers had less resources to allocate from so they had to use a more significant percentage of them.

Both the hardware and the software changes, it's not easy to directly compare stuff.

I use linux often at school. It's pretty good when someone else does the computer support for it. Too bad the firefox middleclick is bugged in it and whatnot and the gui doesn't have (don't know whose fault this is) some of the finesses of windows like a usable graphical file manager or programs really opening when you double-click a file... I always have to do a lot of the stuff myself at the command prompt... And the middle-click copy-paste annoys the hell out of me because i can't paint an url in irssi, then paint the current url in firefox to erase it, and when i paste, it turns out it copied the current window's url when i painted it... gahh. :)
The x windows window handling is ok, in some ways it's easier to handle multiple open windows than in windows(where I always maximize everything). And stuff like emacs, pico, pine, tin and irssi are pretty good programs. Mplayer, xv, gimp work too. I wish firefox for linux had less bugs - or then they're slow to update for some reason or the other.

I use win2k at home. I don't like all the new "easy to use but gets in the way" thing of XP. win2k looks just like win98 which is ok, but is actually stabler and you can kill programs etc. 

did you ever get my email ?

sent ot the email addy in your func profile 

If you could include these lines in the sm110 announcement:

'Also available for download are a pair of maps from the lost episode, sm108, by Bambuz and Neg!ke.

http://www.quaddicted.com/filebase/sm108_neg!ke.zip

http://www.quaddicted.com/filebase/sm108_bam.zip

---moderator---
done...

You could save me a lot of trouble. Thank you. 

any1 knows progs for easy ripping sound from dvd and adding it to avi(divx/xvid)

w/o avi video re-encoding

something like gordian knot, that would take care of all 

I am in a desperate need of a new monitor since my old 17" CRT is dying a slow and painful death and I figured I'd make the jump onto the LCD bandwagon and get myself a 17" LCD. I have a rather limited budget, so price is a very important factor. What brands/models would you suggest? What kind of things should I pay close attention to (besides the responce time)? 

forget the lcd and buy a big used sony trinitron. They're quality work and cheap!

The picture is pretty good. (Not as sharp as lcd but the contrast and color are better)
You get pretty high refresh rates.
It's overall better for games than lcd, and better in map editing because of the bigger size. 

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=168#more-168 

"Hufu." Awesome. 

dont buy used, unless you plan to throw it away in ~2 years

and u know yourself about ugly scaling of lcd
so with money shortage you might be better looking at 19" crt 

http://www.deceiveguild.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=562&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 

Thanks for that one.