"Damn You Bill Gates! Damn You And Your Evil Creation!" or "LOTR 4 - To Linux And Back Again"

Hello again ATS!



Two or three years back I found myself sitting in front of a fairly outdated, underpowered second hand Dell Optiplex that I had been given as a gift. It was refurbished and purchased from some store on Ebay, as part of a total package ( keyboard, mouse, monitor, operating system, and computer ) for $199.99.



Not a bad deal at all.



At that point in time cheap or old PC's did not bother me at all anyway. I was a dedicated console gamer and had been, very literally, since my father brought home the very first, original "Pong" console game at some point in the early seventies. Over the course of my life I ran the gamut of console gaming systems. From Pong I moved onto the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Atari 7800, Nintendo, TurboGrafx16, Neo Geo ( returned in about two days to be replaced with a ) Sega Genisis, Playstation 1, Xbox ( three, they'd die and I'd run out and buy another and finally three Xbox 360's ( an ex kept one, and I burned through two that died ). The point is that PC's were not things I used for much more than web browsing, an infrequent music platform, word processing and watching the odd video here and there.



In 2007 as the economy tanked, so did my own life - I had a fairly new PC at that point, but the ex kept that as well, and I ended up with her old computer instead of "our" new one. It died fairly quickly leaving me with just an Xbox 360 that, as luck would have it, died shortly thereafter - leaving me with nothing.



That's when the $199.99 Dell Optiplex entered my world and began changing my thinking.



The reseller shipped it with Windows XP which was, IMO, the most stable of the early versions of Windows. I had purchased Win 95 on the day it was released and loved it, though it was buggy for a very long time. Then I upgraded to Windows 98 which seemed to me to be the NT version of Windows 95 and not much more.



In fact XP had the same feel and look as NT did ten years previously and I was starting to be very, very over staring at that same taskbar with that same start button, year after year.



Not only that but viruses were running rampant a few years back and one could scarcely surf the web for a day or two without catching something nasty in the wild. Being knowledgeable about software, I found myself spending more time editing my registry and creatively removing hidden executable files than I spent actually using the Internet.



As for gaming? Well I could not afford a console so I sated myself by playing really old strategy games, like Command and Conquer on the Optiplex - and even then that system could barely handle the graphics loads of those ancient games.



Then, one day, I discovered Linux. Actually to be honest, I had discovered Linux a decade earlier, but fate did not seem to want me to get to know Linux just yet. I was working for Best Buy and, on a whim, I purchased a book that came with an install CD for Linux. I was fairly curious and excited and it only took me about two weeks of absolute frustration to eventually discover that my Toshiba CD-Rom drive was the ONLY CD-Rom drive on the planet that Linux couldn't recognize. So that disk and book got thrown against a wall and I have no clue where it wound up. I only know I was about fifty dollars out of pocket for nothing.



This experience left me leery and bitter for quite awhile.



The Optiplex, with it's limitations and the absolute boredom with XP and the myriad of problems it was having all ran headlong into Linux at this point and changed my world. I downloaded and installed Ubuntu, then Mint, then Ubuntu again and finally settled into Ubuntu with a Gnome flashback session ( a 2D much less impressive version of the Gnome desktop. ).



Years spent becoming a Windows guru who could shame most Microsoft Certified people and there I was - a Linux noob without the first clue what I was doing. Over the years I had learned Windows from literally the ground up - as my first two PC's had monochromatic monitors and ran DOS as an operating system. I can say that I have hand configured a Winsock - many times over. These days there are not too many of us left - outside of networking professionals - who even know what a Winsock is - much less what it does.



I was there before plug and play. I came up in the days of plug and then spend weeks troubleshooting, tweaking, and usually being happy with partial functionality.



All that abandoned when I switched to Linux.



The Optiplex began to have issues after about a year and a good friend gave me his old PC, a ten year old AMD machine that had about five times more oomph than the Optiplex did. That allowed me to really embrace Linux in a major way. It let me really open up the graphics and performance potential that Linux is capable of. By this point I had learned enough about Linux that others were seeking me out to help them fix their issues and I was 100% positive that I would NEVER use Windows again. In fact I installed an evaluation copy of Windows 7 on the AMD machine and it bogged the machine down horribly. Why would I want that when Ubuntu Gnome was prettier, faster, more customizable, open source, easier to control AND freaking 100% free???



Well recently my world began to come back together and I found myself in a position to be able to get a bit of gaming back into my life. Only the tech industry had changed during my 7 or 8 years of Spartan living. Back in the day I could buy an Xbox for something like $199.99 and even low end PC's were selling for $700 dollars or more. Add to that the fact that PC's could not hold a candle to consoles for graphics quality ( at least not a PC that a blue collar person could afford or justify buying to his wife ). But now? Now consoles are insanely overpriced. The games are as well. It is also the consoles that seem to be having most of the issues with malware and black hat hackers. Additionally PC graphics have not only caught up to consoles. PC graphics have reached a point where mid range and fairly priced parts can buy a machine that will outperform and out benchmark the consoles.



So it was a no-brainer in my book that PC was the way to go. Only my world being better didn't mean I had bottomless pockets. So I began a three month long ordeal of pricing out every concept that one could conceive of. I priced name brand PC's. I priced vanity builders. I daily priced DIY kits and parts on several sites like Newegg and Tigerdirect. Given my budget and the previous PC I had been using I felt like AMD was the way to go. The top of the line AMD CPU is extremely affordable and has some impressive stats - like an ability to overclock it to above 5 gigahertz - the first CPU ever to achieve that feat. The fastest commercial processor in the world AND it fit my $1,000 self-imposed budget for a PC? Seemed to fit perfectly.

But then I began checking benchmarking sites just to make sure that the parts I was considering were compatible and performed well. Through this I discovered that even mid level Intel CPU's were getting higher performace benchmarks than that flagship AMD CPU - in many cases substantially higher. Also, the AMD 9590 ( the CPU we're discussing ) generates so much heat that it has to be water cooled AND it uses electricity as liberally as Kardashians use the NBA as a dating pool. In comparison even the high consumer end Intel CPU's are amazingly energy efficient. In real world applications the electricity issue would only amount to maybe ten or twenty bucks a year ( or so the experts say )... But the heat issue really bothered me. Anything that gets that hot that often surely cannot have a long life expectancy. And since I am making a long term decision here, life expectancy is as much of a consideration as performance.



To simplify it all, I was stymied - utterly stymied.



This led to about two weeks worth of indecisiveness and erratic decisions that surely left me looking like a loon. I must have filled carts on Newegg, TigerDirect, Amazon - and other sites - dozens and dozens of times only to bail out on the purchase at the very last step of placing an order. I consulted friends who are experts and then tried to blend their advice in with my own thoughts. But the fact of the matter was that I kept coming in over budget and very worried about the heating issues, quality of components ( my budget forced me to hedge into some questionable brands on a number of items in my prospective build ) and a general fear that I would order everything, put it together and find that I had come across some rare conflict that had no answer ( Shades of that damned Toshiba CD-Rom and that Linux install disc ). And all of this still did not address gaming directly - as most games are Windows based and Windows is NOT a cheap product.



In disgust I panicked and placed an order with a "vanity builder" - a company that will let you pick a "base model" of a machine and then customize it step by step - then they put it all together. I opted for this because their selection menu was promised to prevent one from choosing incompatible parts. It actually busted my budget worse than a self build would have - but I was at my wits end. I selected a base model, threw in the highest end AMD CPU, and then went down the list. The upside to this, in my mind, was that I would get Windows essentially for free - or looking at it another way, for the same price I would have paid to build it myself and buy Windows ( Yes, I know that everyone who is into computers will want to type the words "People pay for Windows???" Which would technically violate T&C - so please don't. But, yes, I would have paid for Windows - even if I took a gray area approach and bought a key from a source that was selling them through legal loopholes that may or may not close at any given time ).



This time, at the end of all of my button pushing and cart filling I actually did commit and push the "finalize order" button. Then I sat in terror as I stared at the price on my monitor. It was quite a bit higher than my budget and I was already thinking "OK... OK... I can live on Ramen for a few months. I've done it before..."



But a funny thing happened on the way to horrible decisions and potential financial ruin and homelessness ( again ). I discovered that their little "it won't let you make mistakes" point and click ordering system had, indeed, allowed me to make a mistake. A rather large one. The AMD website clearly stated ( by clearly I mean somewhere in the eighteen thousand words I ended up reading through ) that their flagship CPU had to have a power supply that was substantially higher in wattage than the one the vanity builders system had suggested I choose. So I instantly emailed the vanity builder to inform them of this faux paus and to ask what needed to happen for me to upgrade the power supply in MY ordered computer to comply with the manufacturers recommendations.



As I waited for a reply I began web searching this particular vanity builder - and the panic sunk in deep. I had done my homework already and web searched the company name - which yielded never ending glowing reviews of their products and services. BUT... adding in the single word "problem" with the company name in a search opened up a hidden universe of truth. Sometimes I forget that we live in a world where a great number of people make a living doing nothing BUT manipulating search engines to spit out glowing ( and totally fake ) reviews just so sucker folks in. Given the frustration and general "This is not nearly as exciting and fun as I thought it would be" state of mind I was in at that time - it didn't even occur to me to double check for evidence of search manipulation. Yet I found it anyway - and it was ugly. I read horror story after horror story about PC's that never worked, or died after very short periods of time. Stories about customer service numbers that would ring off the hook, only to direct to full voice message inboxes. Tale after tale from people discussing their two thousand dollar paper weights and their sheer and utter anger about being nearly powerless to get any resolution.



It was at this point that the email popped in. If I wanted to change the power supply, easy-peasy... I'd just have to cancel my order and re-enter it with the power supply I wanted. A few back and forths later confirmed that my debit card had, indeed, been cleared of the order.



I WAS FREE!!!!!



But I was also back to square one. Wanting a good computer at a fair price that would do the things I desired it to do. As far as gaming goes? Sure super enthusiasts demand 100 frames per second on the highest settings that every single game has. They also pay a LOT of money for graphics cards and systems that perform at that level. Personally I'm happy with a step or two down from the absolute best. I don't need 8 times antialiasing when I'm wandering through Skyrim with some insane resolution that only 4k monitors can achieve. I just want a PC that will give me a similar experience to what a console would.



And that just was not working out for me.



Then fate came along and kicked me in the ass yet again. This happens a lot in my life. You see I despise pop-ups. I mean we all dislike them, but I will literally cuss them out, verbally, as I close them. I refuse to read them. I scream at them and click the X with a vengeance. I HATE POP-UPS!!!! So it's odd that a pop-up became my salvation. About a week ago, as I was, yet again, surfing a parts wholesale site, a pop-up opened. I began cussing and moving my cursor towards the X when I just happened to see the words "Today only - $300.00 off of any Dell computer. Clearance and sale items included".



I had owned a Dell before ( the aforementioned $199.99 refurbished OptiPlex ) and, all things considered, it was a decent machine. The one I had was old, outdated by a generation or three, and was made for office work, not gaming and more flexible use. But it was a good computer that I still actually possess. In fact I could plug it in and turn it on right now and it would boot. So I decided to go to the Dell website and check things out.

I often post about how if it were not for bad luck, I would have no luck at all. Well this particular day happened to be the exception to that rule. As the Dell site opened I immediately saw a banner extolling that they were having a one day only March Madness event. Drastic price cuts across the board. And they were NOT lying. I've already been absurdly verbose and will try to keep things here minimalistic - but suffice it to say that between their sale and the coupon code from the pop-up I managed to get a $1,299.99 Intel i7 4790 computer for more than 50% off. Lock, stock, taxes, shipping, and all. Not a refurbished model. Not a scratch and dent. An actual built to my specifications - check the build progress online eighty times per day - custom built machine. First quality. To make it even more glorious, FedEx messed around and delivered a day late - leading Dell to also give me a $50 instant rebate to my debit card.



Just for fun I went to ALL of the do it yourself websites and tried to build the exact same machine for the price I paid for it. It simply could not be done. By the time I got the same motherboard, RAM, CPU, and power supply I was already over what Dell charged me for an entire XPS 8700 system. (It's so purty)



It arrived this morning and THAT brings me to the title of this thread. You see, the one thing I thought I was going to hate about this machine is that it came with Windows 8.1 preinstalled. Now I was sick to death of Windows already and I have heard nothing but hate about the 8 series. If Windows fanboi's hate it, what are the odds that I would even be able to tolerate it at all? Though overjoyed about my new computer - this one thing remained, eating away at my soul. But, no biggie, Ubuntu Gnome exists and I can always keep a small gaming partition with Windows and devote the other 3 Tb I have to Linux goodness.



Only so far I actually like Windows 8.1. I like it a lot. A few minor tweaks to the color scheme, the default desktop, and those square Metro panes and I find myself being highly reminded of the same experience that Gnome offers. It's different but with a LOT of similar features. I have spent half my day running this machine through benchmark torture tests and it has amazed me with how well it performs. Windows performance included.



I am not even sure if I want to go through the process of installing Linux onto this machine now. Though I love Linux with a passion, honestly this version of Windows is amazingly equitable to me and to all the things I love about Linux.



Microsoft may have finally gotten something right. Which would be funny because of all the negative press they've gotten over it. What I do know is that I am happy with it - more than I would have ever thought possible.



So damn you Bill Gates. Why couldn't you have done something this dynamic, stable, and resource considerate about ten years ago? Huh? You might have saved me and a LOT of other people a boatload of grief.



And, yes ATS, I know that I need a freaking blog. But this is general chit chat and I am trying to reignite my interest in writing threads. So this is a step. Still, thanks for reading and I hope you got a chuckle or two from it. As always, comment freely and bonus stars to the first Conservative who can twist this into a reason to call me a liberal hippie commie.

Whoa whoa lemme state this here that pc gaming has superior and always have been to console gaming even to this day...you may have to pay a pretty penny but it is worth it..this generation of consoles are bad being plagued with laziness and being nicked and dimed for every little thing it's ridiculous...

a reply to: Leprekon

As a person who at one time owned a TRS-80 and either an Atari 2600 or a ColecoVision at the same time ( it's hard to remember specifics that far back ) the consoles back then were far superior to the monochromatic PC's.

Even at the millennium I would argue that, dollar for dollar, an Xbox was a much better platform for gaming than a PC with the same level of graphics. I know that, in that period, I purchased a PC that could not keep up with my Xbox and I paid somewhere in the $1,500 range for it. It was close to top of the line. Only with the advent of affordable discreet graphics cards has the paradigm shifted.

Well, well done.

Sometimes Karma comes at you just when you need it and gives you a nice boost.

Nice buy, I think you were meant to have it. Nice processor too.

So .... what are the specs. Come on mate ... the specs!

Lol

P

a reply to: Hefficide

I'm a youngin compared to you so no offense...maybe back in the early days like the eighties consoles back then were probably better until the nineties...when doom came out with not really the first first person shooter but first well known successful first person shooter With its 2.5 d engine changing everything...then consoles followed suit..but I completely disagree that the Xbox is as good as a pc...any games that were ported to the consoles had chunks removed due to limitations a good example would be doom 3 and half life two amazing on the pc but awful on the consoles...since you have a nice pc now I recommend trying crysis doom 3 and half life 2 and fear all Xbox generation games and then tell me how you feel about it...I've had an Xbox and my father had a custom built pc ...his gpu was so powerful his power supply couldn't handle it and went out...had to get a better one

a reply to: pheonix358

Speccy specs as requested! - but those are literally going to be different tomorrow. Since I got this machine so cheap I was able to order a better graphics card ( GeForce 960 OC ) and a mSATA drive for the motherboard.

In short, that should boost my specs, particularly in read speed and graphics quite a bit - and both of those items will arrive UPS tomorrow

a reply to: Hefficide

But this is general chit chat and I am trying to reignite my interest in writing threads.

Heff you certainly have a talent for writing and the fact i made it to the bottom is testament to that . Funny how our financial situation decides our choices . A while back when things weren't so rosy i bought a refurbished Lenovo laptop of eBay . It has been just the greatest little computer and i have no intention of trading , it aint broke so to speak . As for operating systems i have windows 7 and see no need to change as i can pretty much find my way around . I had heard that 8.0 was really bad but maybe they got the bugs out now .

And just think.. Windows 10 is coming soon.

Hopefully the rumors of a free upgrade from 7/8 to 10 are true..

Congrats on the new system, I've never bought a pre-built system, except for laptops. So I could empathize with you quite well.

And for the record... They've ALL been AMD systems.. (ATI video cards, as well, before AMD and ATI merged).

winsocks.. /shudder

a reply to: Hefficide

Advertised here for $AU1500.00

Nice buy!

P

a reply to: Cygnis

The upgrade rumors are verified... but the current caveat is that the upgrade is only a one year license. After that you have to purchase Windows 10.

I honestly think that, given all the bad press, Windows will back off from this as fast as they backed off of the Xbox One issues once the new gen console wars started.

originally posted by: Hefficide
a reply to: Cygnis

The upgrade rumors are verified... but the current caveat is that the upgrade is only a one year license. After that you have to purchase Windows 10.

I honestly think that, given all the bad press, Windows will back off from this as fast as they backed off of the Xbox One issues once the new gen console wars started.

One would hope so, considering Microsoft is losing more and more of the OS pie to Linux flavors. Even Apple's OSes are inexpensive, and come on USB media.

So, time will tell.

Consols didnt exist in the 80s bro. Sega gensis was the first thing to hit the shelvs along with Nintendo which came out in 1989.

Im a 1991 kid so i was literally born in the thick of the consol action. Everything else before Sega and Nintendo is MOOT.
MOOT i say.

I was 3 years old when i got a sega and it was out for like 4 years or something lol.

I had both nintendo and Sega and i rocked out on lots of hilarious sega games. Before N64 came out. Sega had a cartridge that would enhance the graphics into 3D. So yes consols were better than PCs for a while.

It was call SegaSX and it was awesome. It only had a couple titles to come out but those titles were badass.

I literally crapped my pants playing this back in what? 95 or something? STARS WARS HAD A 3D GAME ON SEGA it was nutty. Computer games had like.... minecraft 3D graphics only the boxes were not colored in so it wasn't really 3D and more like optical illusions from a 2.5D perspective.

There was this PC game which some tank like spaceship with boxlike enemy ships and i tecked that game A LOT on old school IBM lol that didn't even have Windows 95. Since it wasn't even 1995 yet.

I was a smart kid. I went to my moms university and i still remeber what this professor guy was saying. He was talking about RAM and literally telling me what a computer was and hes like how old is this kid? 3? Seriosly? Get him a computer.

xD so my mom got me one lol and i TECHed on it. But got carried away by outside activities and never really learned the coding langauge like the guy expected me to. Oh well lol.

some years later Supernes came out and we got it pretty much when it released. At the time, i didn't realize my parents were shelling out incredible ammounts of cash for our games but we used them for all the money they were worth lol. I would have a lot of stuff if we didn't blow all our money on toys and games. But i had an awesome childhood.

After super nes we got sega CD. It sucked. It actually needed a recall. Because the thing worked for a bit but then one day it just stopped working. We brought it back and that's when we found out other people were returning them as well. All Sega CDs were recalled because they were faulty.

That's around the time the Internet came out. Well technically the internet came out in 1989. I was playing with the search results well at the university with my mom, all the computers had green text lol and was DOS i think? There was not www.genericwebpage.com Because it was just like library and work papers published to a data base. So i didn't understand everything because a lot of words were still new to me. I could Read but couldn't read effeciently lol in that i didn't know proper grammar or what was close to it until i went to elementary school. I did pre-school and stuff when i was 2 and 3. Anyways. We got a computer with the internet in 1997. 1997 We had gotten an N64 which was badass. Then something magically happened. BTW Even in 1997 the *Real* internet was like 95 or something? When HTML came out and windows 95 really unleashed the power of Web-brousing and creating.

Again i was like... 6 years old or something at that point in time? I was Teching command and conquer, Red Alert and DUNE on that thing and mannnnnn THOSE GAMES WERE AWESOME. Best computer games in it's time.
My uncle introduced me to them, he had ALL of westwoods RTS games. And i would play them well i was over there.

N64 was badass but in an infant state. There wasn't many games besides mario 64 out it wasn't till months churned by and all these games started pumping from the abyss. The weird thing is. 64 lasted a looooong time as a consol. Same thing with Play Station, Which i owned later in life because at the time it was 1000$ and sold out almost everywhere * DAMN YOU SONYYYYYY*
Anyways the real magical thing that happened was pokemon. 1998. Red and blue came out. I had actually played pokemon prior to those being released it was a pirated version of i think Red but it had a Gengar on the cover in a black cartridge that said Pocket monsters and then Japanese writing. The game wasn't even english. I was staying at a foster home for a month well the house was being renovated on the interior, I would of stayed at relatives place but Social services got involved. Anyways Pokemon came out and that's just where it all went uphill from there. Then Tiberium Sun came out. I put down pokemon to sesh that game for a while lol. Picked up pokemon again, the fad got huuugee everyone at my school had pokemon cards, gameboys holy crap. It was the most awesome thing ever. And internet was still pretty crap at the time. I think Google JUST got released at that point and people were watching youtube and stuff but i didn't pay attention to the * you tube* thing because i didn't seem interested in it lol i thought the name was stupid xD.

Wow looks like im the one basically writing a thread here. I played Zelda a link to the passed, Followed by majoras mask 2 years after pokemanz came out. Pokemon the movie came out near the millenium which was insain. i remember my teacher preaching that y2k was going to destroy us all and nukes would go flying. It was entertaining. I thought it was all stupid tho, 2000 digit screwing up all the electronics? Like people couldn't think ahead like. 30-20-10 years into the future and predict a millenium? Really?

So yeah it's interesting witnessing all that crazyness. I was born right on the brink of the destruction of the old world into the new world we have today. I was there when kids actually played outside and then began to get sucked into doors by *social networking* lol. I was there when the Internet actually became a thing instead of just some universities catalogue book. and i was there when people dropped the ball on 2000 lol. I was partying it up even if i was kid. We played Donkey kong 64, well listening to the pokemon mixtape. Backstreet boys and spice girls -_- cuz i was at some fancy party and there were kids there and these girls were forcing the guys to listen to all *Their* music. The only thing i liked was the pokemon movie themed CD.

And then all those dang 24k coated pokeballs burgerking was scamming people with that are now worth ALOT more i think. We moved from Ontario to BC so i lost all that valuable stuff.... HAd to move because owning a house is better than living in a townhouse where drug addicts surrounded me and being a kid having no idea until much later in life...

The story dosn't end there it's just i'v already typed so much. To sum it up. I am a vetern gamer. In every sense of the word lol.

I'm ranting quite a bit lol

a reply to: AnuTyr

Are you kidding me? Would you like to explain what the gaming crash of the 80 was? Sega didn't release a system till the nineties..

a reply to: Leprekon

All systems previous to Sega were MOOT. I played Atarri. It wasn't that great. The joystick was annoying.

And there was some other weird cartridge gaming system with like 20 circular buttons on it that had worse graphics that Sega and played mostly sports games.

ANd required a monitor to watch it as it wouldn't connect to a TV.

lol. I'm sure hefficide will remeber that consol i'm referring to but i was so young.

And sega came out in 1989. So by the time i got it, It was a 4 year old system and had a way more complete gaming library. Iwasn't alive previous to 1991 however. i got the Sega in 1994.

DO you mean when sega died and stopped making consols?

I think Sega Dreamcast was their last consol they created. It barely sold, And they lost everything on it. Dreamcast was a cool system too it came out around the time of sony playstation, N64 ect. But after Dreamcast Sega went bankrupt and the company no longer makes consols. But The company has been revived to a degree and is now a game making company that sells games for Xbox, Sony and nintendo.

In the history books tho, Sega has risen and fallen a couple times. Ur right about the 80s thing. I just wasn't alive during that time and beides sega wasn't really dessolved as much as a consol game till after Game gear came out. Both Dreamcast and game gear were flop. Which caused sega to crash

theclassicgamer.com... I just found this link, havn't read through the whole thing but im gunna now. More info about the Sega maket crash.

a reply to: AnuTyr

Yea well your post is all out of whack but I'm not gonna argue on dudes thread and you call yourself a veteran gamer? You should be disgraced with yourself for real...

a reply to: Leprekon

lol, you have that little kid mentality for sure xD You described the Youngin pretty well. Sucks im getting older now.

Yep I sure do have a child like personality and I'm cool with that and I was born 93 but at least I don't come spewing some half arsed facts and then claim to be something that I'm not lol

a reply to: Leprekon

No, but your the one who started insulting around here.

And you havn't written enough content in this thread to be scrutinized.

Your very first comment was bitching. What do you want? An award for smart-assery?