Bioshock Infinite (Any Gamers?)

Our computer can't do games very well. With the exception of Torchlight 2 we don't use our computer for gaming, it doesn't like to run them. Doesn't help that the disk drive stopped working, so anything disk based is completely out of the question. Someday I'd like a system that plays Sims 3, we have it and a few expansions but they're all pretty much unplayed. I'd love to play the stuff my husband got from the Good Old Games website, but not even those like to run on our system. *sad face*

 

That's to be expected, but at least it sounds like you got a more powerful laptop than mine. I'm actually in need of a new external hard drive at the moment because one of mine (a 500gb) decided to commit seppuku or whatever it is old drives do, and wow the price of 2 and 3 TB drives is rivaling that of 1 TB drives less than a year ago?? Maybe I'm wrong but it seems like the price dropped on those really quick. I'm usually pretty good at catching a drive before it completely goes even though this one never had SMART data that I can remember, so I was able to back up all my stuff as the drive cut off and on at random scaring the crap out of me. So now those files are irritatingly scattered across 2 smaller hard drives and a 64gb flash drive, lol.

 

You think a lot like me Chris. I try to keep redundant backups too, but with so much crap I have to store these days it's hard to pull it off without hurting my bank account. As it stands I go by priority and keep my most important information in a minimum of two places: Old pictures (mine plus family and friends who ask for a backup) and personal videos stay on a 320gb Seagate that's seen a fraction of the uptime, use, and abuse of the Hitachi that is crashing, and my pictures also get backed up to a flash drive in case that drive suddenly starts acting up. My old journal files and things like that have dated backups scattered across this computer, a couple flash drives, and the Seagate. I'm so paranoid about losing things like that, a lot of it is data I've been somehow hanging onto for over 10 years. Anyway, I will be getting that 3TB drive I linked to probably as soon as my check comes this week. IMO Western Digital > Seagate > pretty much everything else. I've been screwing with computers for a long time and I've never (knock on wood) had a WD drive catastrophically fail. Not to say they didn't screw up and have to be replaced, but with a little patience I was always able to get the data backed up before it completely fried itself.

That laptop sounds pretty nice. The one you "need" is never the one you can "afford" when it comes to technology, it seems. One day I'll be looking for another one and will probably go for a touchscreen as well. Actually to be honest (I'm a little ashamed) I was pretty impressed with the Microsoft Surface Pro. Sure it's no match for a gaming rig or most laptops that are already out there speed-wise, but as far as tablet technology I think it's a big step forward in making "regular computers" a thing of the past. I already have a tablet (32gb HP Touchpad running Schizoid) but if I could get my hands on a non-ARM based fully functional Windows tablet and a few accessories like a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo, my laptop would never leave the house again.

I had to giggle at your comment about a combined storage space of 25gb. Reminds me of the old days, that old stuff was build to last though. Every now and then one of my friends will still bring me a computer that "something is wrong with" and I'm like how does this thing turn on, it should be in the bottom of a lake somewhere lol. I can't say anything though, a few years ago I was running this huge old IBM server in my living room hooked to my TV or sometimes VNC access only with Win 2k (God I'm sure it originally ran NT4 or something), 3 x 9gb hard drives in it, dual Pentium IIs and 256mb of RAM, but I was kind of doing it ironically Friggin thing sounded like an airplane taking off... Great conversation piece, but basically useless.

 

I'm not very good at pruning data. I'm kind of a pack rat in real life, holding on to things I'll probably never use because I might one day use it, and it carries over into the digital world a bit. I have basically everything I've ever downloaded (images, videos, web pages, music, quotes, installer files, etc) from most of my computers going back to about 2001 and I have no idea why. A lot of that stuff got left behind on my old 3.5" IDE drives and never made it to the external USB ones but it's still around. I'm not so paranoid about "running out" of space (I'm out of space right now pretty much) but I'm extremely paranoid about losing irreplaceable data. When I get this new drive I might finally start doing full system backups. I've set them up using Ghost or True Image and it's easier to manage than I thought, especially with True Image. The only thing that has held me back is, well, situations like this computer: It's got a 450gb hard drive that's almost full not counting the 50gb Linux partition, and most of the important stuff is already backed up so why waste 275gb of space (conservatively, after compression) just because I can? But I have to admit it's extremely useful to have that backup, because then when something bad does happen I don't have to go through the entire process of setting up the system just the way I like it and reinstalling all my programs.

You know I haven't had a problem out of a Seagate in years that wasn't in a Vista machine, they really aren't bad drives at all. My external that's in the process of failing right now is a Hitachi, it was given to me. The main reason I go with WD when I have a choice is because of the sheer volume of ancient WD drives I've seen still in use, some of which are obviously falling apart from the inside out (flip it over and hear parts clanking around), but still chugging along like nothing is wrong.

Yeah, I like Windows 8 too. It takes a little getting used to but it's a great idea for touchscreens. And if you really want the old start menu back there are several third party applications that will put it back just like it was, no harm done. But personally why bother? I thought the start screen was a pretty good idea, mainly because it allows a widget-like live display for email, facebook, etc and I think that sort of feature is long overdue. I actually wrote up a pretty substantial rant a while back about how those types of people (who are complaining about all the "change") are holding back new technology and making companies scared to come out with their more advanced stuff. I like Android tablets for the most part, especially ICS and newer. But they do seem a little hollow I guess, after you use them for a while. The Surface Pro I think is a good for being able to run standard Windows applications instead of just the ones in their "app store" that are optimized for ARM platforms like the RT. I hear there's a team working on a WINE-like framework for Android, but I don't think that's going to do so well. Then again I've been wrong before.

Apple II, nice. I haven't seen one of those in ages, probably since elementary school... Not to start a pissing contest or anything but I have a working Commodore 64 put up at my dad's house. I love old things like that. Sadly though my IBM server bit the dust. It stayed in storage a little too long and my best guess is the motherboard absorbed moisture because it didn't look right, last time I tried to fire it up about 4 months ago all the fans and two of the drives turned over but all I got was a black screen, some beeping, and flashing diagnostic lights. I tinkered with it for about 45 minutes but it was no use, and I had to do the humane thing and pull the plug. It's still here though, just put up.

 

Ouch, that's expensive data recovery. Is it the drive itself or the control board? I've read a lot about these two drives I was looking at (WD and Seagate, both 3tb) and a lot of people were saying the WD "failed" but apparently the some of the control boards in those drives are a little flaky and aren't that difficult to replace if you find one of the same model. I still went with the WD because it seemed like the Seagates while having less complaints in general, the ones they did have were more catastrophic. Just ordered it a few hours ago and they promise it will be here before the 27th, hooray for free shipping!

I have more to respond to you with but I'm on my phone and its kind of a pain to do this. Lol

 

Anyway, I hope for the sake of your wallet its something simpler. They say the symptoms were along the lines of the drive spinning up and sounding normal and may show up in the drive manager but it's not accessible. But you've probably checked that or ruled it out though so I don't mean to ask dumb questions, just being optimistic. Apparently tech support isn't too fond of telling people that possibility, and its the weak point of this model/generation of My Books.. For me it was the lesser of two evils, they're all eventually going to fail somehow and I'd prefer the way that let's me get my data back for 20 bucks and a screwdriver rather than not at all, or just get the same drive because I'm crazy enough to try a platter swap And I emphasize try.

I was hesitant to use Windows 8 too, but then I realized I have been hesitant about every new version that's ever been released and that pretty soon it'd be everywhere so I'd better just deal with it. Once I gave it a chance I was actually kind of impressed. I understand your argument about the Xbox One, but some of that was just ridiculous and people were right to complain. Personally I think at this point there should be Windows and then Windows "retro" or something that keeps the look and feel of 7 but has all the same stuff under the hood as the current release to make everyone happy. If Linux can have gnome, kde, lxde, xfce, and mate then why can't Windows have just two distinct flavors if it makes people happy?

I don't think Android devices will ever reliably run those programs, at least not on current hardware. From what I hear its absolutely horrible and sluggish, but of course its still in its infancy. Of course, cpu architecture is the main setback.

Finally someone else who appreciates the C64 (or at least knows what it is, haha). It was pretty amazing for its time. Remember GEOS? Almost as good as Win 3.1... And it did have a lot of cool games. One of my favorites was Space Taxi. I like how the manual taught how to program in BASIC. I was never very good at it, but I probably never would have tried VB.Net all those years later if it wasn't for that. Not that I'm good at that either, but its fun to play around with.

 

Ohh, okay. That's pretty much what my Hitachi is doing. When I first plug up it takes 1-2 minutes of the drive light being on before it will let me access anything (used to be as soon as it spun up) and then if I start copying files to/from it I get about a 5-7 minute window before it mysteriously disconnects without being touched, then 9 times out of 10 reconnect by itself and start the process over again. Luckily I was using Teracopy to grab all my data so it would just resume when the drive did. I found that if I throttled the copy speed down to ~10-15 mb/s with a different copy program I can't seem to remember the name of, it was a lot less likely to disconnect but no clue why.

True, all it would really take is a skin. The sad truth of the matter is that basic settings and operations haven't really changed since '95 except what the interface looks like, and not even that drastically up until Windows 8 showed up and confused everyone who hasn't even bothered to try it yet, lol. Maybe the real problem is Microsoft made us lazy by keeping the changes so gradual over the years!

The emulators for C64 aren't bad, but it's just not quite the same as typing on a clunky keyboard and staring blankly at a clock while the ol' 5 1/4 inch disk drive makes the nastiest sound ever... I was always impressed by the size and weight of that disk drive too, you could probably stand on the damn thing and not hurt it.

 

I read this part and had to laugh. My dad owned one back in the day and I would spend hours playing his copy of Below the Root, which took five minutes to load and made the sound you described, lol.

 

Haha. I never understood why it was so noisy. If a drive these days made those kinds of noises you'd have to promptly throw it out the window or try to spray it with holy water. Never played that game before though. I need to go through all mine and make sure everything still works; I imagine those disks have some sort of shelf life... I was out at my dad's earlier and didn't even think about setting it up.

 

It was a fun game. It was based on a book, and according to wikipedia came about to explain something that happened in the book that was somehow never resolved. The bulk of the game takes place in the trees, and you have to go around collecting things like the everburning lantern and talking to certain people to gain spirit point before going underground to save someone. In the course of things you could get kidnapped, and you could kill people too. Though if you killed anyone you lost all your spirit points and could not beat the game. It's also the source of the only recurring nightmare I've ever had, which was caused by hearing my dad say, "My god this game is haunting me!" when I was three, lol. But yeah, it was a pretty awesome game.

 

Sounds interesting, might have to try tracking that down some time.