Well, while I'm not the best person to respond to this one, as I'm not really a big fan of most racing games, console or no, I've been enjoying the heck out of Test Drive: Unlimited. It's fun, and really managed to feel open, which I felt that the latest Need For Speed's hadn't been doing all...
Laziness has had me using Visual Studio Express Edition, as it has similarities to what my school uses. But as was previously mentioned, these are IDE's, not compilers. Notepad++ and the Intel compiler or GCC or whatever would probably work just as well for my purposes, to be honest.
In a linux...
Well, since I decided (wisely it seems) to get a really nice laptop to begin with, I haven't used my desktop at all. Haven't even turned it on, other than to grab some mp3s from it early on.
I do agree, though, that college makes the desktop a lot less useful.
If I'm understanding correctly, some form of traditional style component in would work, ala the type available on a few TV Tuner cards, right? Like this [Newegg] one.
I used a generic for a while, but for the last few years I've been using a Memorex MX3300 (back of the keyboard told me that much) and surprisingly, I like it a lot. It's keys aren't attached as well as some keyboards I've had, but it's of surprisingly good quality considering they were probably...