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Thanks for your replies so far! I'm somewhat limited on options for the case, and of the ones I've seen I do like the Antec ISK600 the best (brushed aluminium, given the choice), so as long as there's not any reason to avoid that case I think I'm going to go with it. I guess I'm aiming for...

1. What will you be doing with this PC? Relatively casual gaming (mostly WoW and Starcraft) and streaming. For the size, I might want to move it occasionally (maybe once a few months) but don't need carrying handles or anything. It doesn't need to be silent, though obviously less noise is...

I think we are. This is what I'm thinking of: Have to admit, planes of Oblivion look pretty crappy in all TES games if you ignore the fire effects.

To be fair, both of those screenshots look on par with unmodded Oblivion, and that game is 7 years old now. I can understand why they cut down on character model poly counts for an engine that might have to display hundreds of characters instead of a handful, but would have still liked them...

I've never had problems with Steam's offline mode - it's pretty up front that it wants you to connect once a month to verify that you're not just giving your account out to all your mates, and I've never hit that limit anyway. GOG isn't actually competing with modern DRM systems in any way as...

I'd double check that before going ahead with anything - the Vaio S in the OP is the refresh of the SA, whereas the one you linked to is the older S series. To be honest I'd be surprised if it's socketed as it's quite a thin 13" laptop. To the OP - even if it's a socketed CPU, I'd be very...

Thanks for posting this! I feel like I'm the only one who thinks this, but this guide really didn't seem as biased as I was expecting. No bullying, no veiled threats. It's not impartial by any stretch of the imagination, but that's the reviewer's job, not nVidia's. It goes as far as "this...

Well I've seen an iPad 3 and the screen does look absolutely amazing. But from my (very limited) use of friends' iPad 2s, I've never really seen a need for it - the iPad 2 was fine for reading lecture notes (even with diagrams), and I would imagine that any word small enough that the iPad 2...

The Dell Vostro 3550 is on the upper end of your size limit but comes with a choice of i3-i7 and HD6630M (think it's switchable). Only 1366x768 though. The Vaio SA has a similar loadout (i5-i7 with switchable HD6630M) but worth reading some reviews of first to see if you can cope with the...

Not really an answer to your question I'm afraid, but I eventually bought into the 16:9 aspect ratio by moving my taskbar to the left instead of the bottom. Gives similar screen estate to 16:10.

Really happy with mine, though I knew what the downsides were to begin with and they were not a big deal for me. They might be for other people I guess. First, be prepared to spend a bit of time and money on it, because as many reviews have pointed out, the out-of-the-box experience is...

I tried to update my M4 firmware to 0309 a couple of weeks ago. However, my laptop BIOS clearly didn't like IDE mode, and although the firmware update started, it hung almost immediately. About 3 hours later, I gave up and had no choice but to hard reset. Back in Windows, I did a full disk...

I like the angular design of the Vaio SA/SB series - not a fan of curves on laptops. And as someone else says, it seems to be the last of a dying breed of actually powerful subnotebooks. The engineer in me is amazed that they manage to dissipate the heat in a 13" chassis, but the price you...

Backing this up as an option - I got a Vaio SA for the same kind of usage (without a sheet battery, but on a clean install), and I get ~7 hours out of it when word processing and ~5-6 hours web surfing. I expect a sheet battery would nearly double that. Other options are marginally thinner...

Sounds like just the thing I need - thanks!

I have a Sony Vaio SB (VPCSB1H7E) which has a 6630M graphics card plus onboard HD3000, using Sony's proprietary manual graphics switching. I'm trying to optimise it for both performance and battery life and I'm looking for suggestions. From the performance side, I'm currently using Sony's...

I don't get why there's so much speculation on whether Kyle should have named D&H. I mean D&H are a company and companies really like money. If there was anything wrong with the way Kyle handled this then I'm pretty sure D&H would take him to court for defamation. If it turns out that D&H...

The problem isn't that they're moving to SATA3 - that's great and to be expected from a leading HD manufacturer. What's not OK is that they're marketing this in such a deliberately deceptive way and intentionally trying to mislead consumers. That's just low.

Scan lists it as still being in stock (though I'm not 100% sure if their stock counter updates over weekends): http://www.scan.co.uk/Index.aspx?NT=1-0-18-605-0 You could also try overclockers.co.uk - they have very reasonable prices too.

Yeah, that sounds about right - however, over here we don't seem to be suffering from the same insane stock shortages so the lack of price gouging makes up for the standard high UK prices :)

After umming and ahhing over whether to get one of these I finally ordered the G2 160GB OEM for £346 including postage. It's nice not feeling like I'm being ripped off for living in the UK for a change :-)

This can't be a good sign for AMD. Looks like Kyle's review might have been a lot closer to the truth than most other sites would like to admit if they're slashing prices this much already.

I am as grateful for the incoming price cuts as anyone, but the problem is that while these are good for the consumer, they are no good for AMD. I mean the price cuts will be on the mature C2Q processors, where Intel previous could run rampant thanks to their virtual monopoly. Intel is not...

I'm no car enthusiast so I have no idea about pricing, but if the two year old Corvette was also about the same price and about to receive a price cut to to cement its price/performance advantage, then.. uh... yeah, apart from Nissan enthusiasts and stupid people, who on earth would buy the...

The point I'm making is that as soon as you bring C2Q or C2Ds into the equation, the current version of the PII will immediately become obselete as far as building a new system goes. There's no point even comparing them because apart from the AMD branding, there's just no real reason to go for...

I meant i7, since I'm not convinced PII will actually be a viable alternative to Core2 for home users. Being quad core, Core2 Duos will outperform it (for price) on most applications as is, and since Intel are bound to cut prices on C2Q if PII becomes a threat I think C2Q will end up...

Why are people so angry that the HardOCP review has different testing methodology and conclusions to other websites? First of all, if Kyle's review was the same as everyone else's then it would tell us anything we don't already know from elsewhere, making it worthless. Secondly, if you...

What the hell Mr Kooltime? If I take a QX9770 and run the same benchmark twice, I will see "small differences" between the results. I guess that means QX9770 does not = QX9770 to you? Dan, having browsed most of this thread I am utterly amazed at how patient you've been. Do you have small...

This is probably not what you meant, but I think it would be absolutely awesome if Kyle's review actually made someone buy the P2 just to spite him for that review :D Also I find it interesting how we seem to have separated into two camps, one of whom is arguing based on comparing the prices...

Sure MS are still losing money on 360s? I thought they were making some very small amount of money on each 360 they sold now, though that may have disappeared into price cuts for the 360. And yes, I did grasp what the article was about but I was curious what the (much more interesting) big...

When I read the title I thought it meant "Sony could break even on the entire PS3 investment by 2009 counting all hardware and software sales", which would have been big news.. though it's still good that they're finally getting near to breaking even on each console sold. How long did the 360...

You mean for Wrath of the Lich King? I don't think that adds much CPU load so if you weren't CPU bound before, you shouldn't be now. You could always trying turning down resolution + all graphical settings. If your framerate goes up, you're not CPU bound. But I have to ask.. how did you...

I was always planning on sticking with some kind of boxed set - not only do I not have the immediate budget for a better sound system but I also want to avoid anything that's a major power-guzzler - no 200+W sound systems for me. For what's available.. we're not so very backward here in the...

Hi, I know almost nothing when it comes to computer audio. My old set of speakers (budget Logitech 2.1 set) has just died, and I'm going to buy some new ones that are a little less cheap and crap, but nothing amazing. They will be about 50/50 for music and gaming. I am currently using the...

I would check the temps of everything but especially those GTXs - ideally writing the temp logs to file so you can see what the temp was when your comp dies. I had this problem in a poorly ventilated case with a single 8800GTX and it turned out it was just the video card overheating. The...

An 8800 GTX with Thermalright HR-03 Plus can actually work passively cooled if (and this is a big if) you have very good airflow around it, which may not be possible in a shuttle. I don't know if the HR-03 fits the 9800 GTX but if it does I would imagine that runs a bit cooler than the 8800...

Apparently the size and weight are: 3.5Lbs 10.8"x7.6"x1.2"-1.4" Maybe it's just me but for that size and weight I have no problems at all comparing it to small notebooks rather than netbooks, and it just ends up looking like a malnourished, low priced notebook rather than a netbook. It...

That has to be the most absurd definition of "gaming" I've ever seen. How can they market it as that when there are business laptops (not netbooks, granted) that will run games better?

I think there's a program called Driver Cleaner that will get rid of any possible trace of old drivers - try googling for it.

I would start by making absolute certain that the graphics card is not soldered onto the motherboard, because you'll feel very silly if it is. I'm not an expert on this but from what I've read laptop video cards, even if you can swap the ones in question, have obscure incompatibilities that...