PookeyMaster

I actually completely agree with you on the laptops. I blame Apple for the laptops not working properly after 12 months (I'm not anti-Apple, I just think this was caused by them). Ever since the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro started becoming more popular, along with the iPhone, consumers have clamoured for 'sexy' designs and good quality workmanship/displays. Basically, what they can see. Apple has convinced many people not to care what is inside a device and to judge it by the exterior. These high quality, high resolution displays and aluminium casings, etc. cost a lot more than what Dell/HP/Lenovo used to spend on their displays and casings. Obviously people don't want to pay more for this stuff so its forced them to compromise on the internals of laptops. The end result is that they stick budget graphics cards and processors in (as another problem is that everyone wants 100 USB ports, VGA, HDMI, eSATA, Ethernet, Card Readers, etc in their laptop) and they are desperately struggling after 6-12 months. Every Laptop/PC used to be sold based on its specs (higher is better) where they're now sold on their looks and 'features' (biometric fingerprint scanning and other rubbish I never use on mine for example). As an example, our Desktop PC dad bought 7 years ago is a Pentium 4 machine. Its had its graphics card upgraded twice (after 2 and 4 years) and it can still play any game designed for XP on Consolish settings, even Crysis. The one I have now is ~18 months old or something and plays BF3 on second highest settings (I can do the highest but it glitches up a little in heavy scenes). As per the old machine, I'll probably get a new Graphics card (if I don't move to the new X79 platform) sometime in the middle of next year. The old machine was ~$2,500 I think (plus the new graphics every 2 years) and my current one was about $2,250. Unfortunately, to get that sort of power in a laptop, you're looking at double the cost. My mid-$2K budget is at the lower end of the real serious (like Stainless) who spend probably double on their machines. His 3 screens alone are ~$700 each plus $500 for each of his two graphics cards is $3,000 and that's at todays prices. Compared to my mid-$2K for a whole machine, screen and all.

I've always been in to PC's and I've never owned a Console. I do appreciate that they're good for more casual gamers and those who don't have mounds of dough to burn. I guess the reason I've avoided Consoles is because (rightly or wrongly) I think PC is the superior platform and I'm not going to funnel money in to the 'enemy', haha. I'd rather give the PC devs my money to make better PC games although it's taken until Crysis, BF3, Portal, etc. for them to actually make really good PC games (not really Portal) that take advantage of the PC's power.

That sounds like a good idea, hehe I'm not that bad. I can keep it in the air fine, my problem (as I have in Flight Simulator) is getting the darn things under control enough to shoot people (fly through targets in FS). It takes me ages to go from moving to hovering, probably 10 secs and that means I become a sitting duck to be shotdown, lol I find I came under heavy attack from enemy trees when flying the jet... Yeah, there's a few of them as well. Not nearly as agressive as those trees though I think I had about 2 dozen ground collisions as I learnt how to fly the jets in BF3, lol. The first few were when I was setting up the control bindings and I'd go to do something and it would do some other random action.

Well, I know the whole "you play, you pay" saying but I'm still sympathetic to the poor guys bad luck. Do you know what he's planning to do about it? Get a new forged bottom end or doesn't he have the cash to do anything with it?

See now that is just bad luck having a collapsed cat. Not much you can do other than get Ford to replace it all and move on... And that's almost a whole page of thread hijack, lol.

Yeah, it's just you Mines ~18 months old and it still plays everything fine.

I don't think he's been banned or anything though... The Expansion should be good, I'm looking forward to it (although I haven't pulled any sticks off over it, lol). On another note, I managed to finish two games with a higher K/D ratio than 1. One was 7/6 and the other was 13/7 (think the second had a few newbies or idlers though...)

For your benfit Dillz... Yeah, that's a good start I'm pretty sure you know what Windows is, if not, make sure you google that and read up on it first, lol :sungum: For the processor, pretty much all mainstream processors are quad core these days. For intel, you'll want an i5 or i7. The 4GB of RAM is the minimum standard these days and its normally sold in 4GB 'kits' anyway, doesn't really matter what brand. Get whatever HDD, the bigger the better. If you have spared cash, you can get an SSD, heaps faster than a normal HDD but more expensive and not as much storage space. For the graphics card, you want either a nVidia GeForce GTX 550, 560, 570, 580 or a ATI Radeon 6830, 6850, 6870, 6970. Basically, the higher the number, the better it is but also the more expensive. A 580 or 6970 are both $500+ whereas a 550 or 6850 are <$250. Don't worry about the sound card, all motherboards these days have that built in. Steam is a digital distribution platform if you were wondering why it requires 'Steam' for activation. If you give us a budget then we can tell you what to get. As I wrote for the graphics cards, prices vary heaps and a gaming machine can vary from a <$1000 super budget thing to a >$5000 beast like what Stainless or Headsex has got with screens and graphics cards galore.

Sounds like what was happening to my car. It had been 'ticking' for maybe a week with the exact same symptoms you just described when the oil light came on one day. My engine kept running for the ~500m it took to get home. After checking and then filling it up with oil (stupid mechanic didn't finish filling it in the service two weeks prior) the ticking disappeared and everything was fine. It looks like you may not have been as lucky as I was (I had to put in 3.2litres out of 5.5 litres capacity so it was pretty low).

I'm not going to get too involved in the argument cause I have no idea what is right or wrong here but my understanding from reading up at the ACCC website on car warranties is that if you modify your suspension that doesn't invalidate the warranty on your ICC and if you modify your battery (move it or whatever) that also won't invalidate your diff warranty. My personal opinion is that they will decline warranty for the Diff because of the CAI (as XR09 said) but if it was taken to court you would win as it would be easy to show there was no relationship between the parts to cause such significant failure (as CBXRT said).

The X-cal will have your stock tune plus up to 3 custom tunes on it.

I don't know why they scrapped the wagon in the first place. It seemed to sell more than enough units to make it profitable...

Nah, it was on a flat piece of road in our col-de-sac. Dad taught me what happens when you test it on a hill when I was 12 or 13

Yeah, it was kinda a WTF? moment. That's the first time I've ever seen Heli's in there, lol. And it didn't help that I dont have the Stinger to shoot you down with, hehe. You'd have to be one of the best chopper flyers I've seen though.

Lol, Duh My problem is that they're not too good for shooting stuff on the ground other than tanks and by the time I get a shot on a helicopter or jet, I'm shot down cause I don't have flares and my dodging skills need improving I know how to fly from the mountain of hours I've done on Flight Simulator, I just need to get kills, lol. I've got 3 kill assists where someone else finished the guy off which was frustrating to say the least.

OK, so, how the F*ck do you actually get points with the Jets in BF3? I can fly the things once I fixed up all the key bindings (I kept suiciding heaps at first, lol) and the Joystick works well. Problem is, I can't seem to manage to score points with the thing before I end up shot down (got plenty of practice trying to dodge missiles, lol). At least in Helicopters I can slowly get points...

Hey Headsex, what model are your monitors?

Their stupid generations just serve to confuse people, makes it really hard when people say "but the guy in Harvey Norman said they're both Gen 2"... The only good thing about the new socket is that it will support the next generation of 22nm performance Ivy Bridge processors when they're released (at least this is what Intel are saying at the moment but they've done people over in the past). I want to get X79 as well, but I'm kind of put off by the prices of even 3930K's and motherboards. I guess it's like the X58 platform; I ended up getting my i7-950 for less than what the i7-920 was 6 months after release. The other thing is HDD's. I got my most recent WD 1 TB for ~$109 in 2010 and they're now about $180 and climbing all because of the tsunami's and flooding...

The reason i7-2xxx only uses dual channel is because it is the mainstream Z68 chipset and Intel doesn't want to piss off its "enthusiast" crowd by making the mainstream product more powerful. X58 was the previous performance platform and X79 is the new enthusiast performance platform and alot of people spend huge dollars on Intel for these platforms. Notice that all performance oriented parts use 'X' (X58, X79, i7-990X, i7-3360X, etc.). The next chipset will be a mainstream product and likely have triple channel ram and be faster than X58 but still deliberately slower than X79. As many people say, the i7-2XXX processors are superior to the i7-9XX processors clock-for-clock but they are held back by less memory channels, slower processor speeds, less GFX card lanes, etc. which makes X58 still look like the superior product. In my opinion, i7-9xx is far better bang for buck as you would be unable to tell the difference RAM wise with an i7-3xxx and the CPU itself is only ~10-15% faster which most people won't notice. Also, in real life, you are never going to put even 24 GB/s through your processor (that the i7-9XX RAM is capable of) so the i7-9xx should be fine That doesn't mean I don't want some i7-3xxx goodness though... Continuing on comparisons for freeze_dk, i7-9xx: Will run two GFX cards at full speed and 3 at slightly reduced speed (but overall still faster than two) i7-2xxx: Will run one GFX card at full speed and two at reduced speed. Barely any boards will even let you add a third card and if they do, it's at a much slower speed. i7-3xxx: Will run three GFX cards at full speed and 4 at slightly reduced speed, although at this stage, you will be looking at a $3,500 system if you're running that many cards. Also has support for PCI-e Express 3 when cards become available. Basically, each GFX card you have can run up to 16 'lanes' of data. Each motherboard has a set amount of 'lanes' to run. So, most i7-9xx boards have 36 or 40 lanes which will run two cards at full speed and one at half in 16+16+4 or 16+16+8, etc. The difference between 8 and 16 lanes is generally about 10% performance hit though, so you don't need to worry too much (unless you have top end cards like the 580 which can max out the lanes). Have a look at these for picking a SSD: http://techreport.com/articles.x/21672 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-nand-reliability,3021.html

Bahaha, lol

See if he'll give you the tune file as well, then you can go somewhere else from now on. You'll need the tune file as other tuners can't extract the tunes from the xCal (this is my understanding anyway) and would need to do a complete re-tune again.

It's got a little over 215,000 km's and she's had a pretty hard life. It was the main car mum used to ferry us to school and go to the local shops so there were lots of short stop/start journeys. We've also done plenty of towing with it (I've done probably 3,000 km's in the last 18 months) over the years.

I checked it the first time maybe ten minutes after I'd got home. By the time I did the second reading though, at least 30 mins would have passed by the time I got the oil from the servo and got back home. I also left it 15 mins between each litre to let it run down through the engine before re-measuring.

I was thinking 5w30 was a bit low. Yeah, I always stick 20w50 into it which is what Dad has used for the last X years. There's no smoke or anything coming out. My fuel usage has gone up from ~14.3L average to ~15.4L average over the last couple of weeks but I've also had the air con on so I dunno whether the extra fuel use is from the low oil or using the air con now its getting warmer. I gave them a call and apparently they put 20w40 in to it at the last service.

Mentioning the Xcal is important $2000 for the xCal 3 and a custom tune is fine, nothing out of the ordinary there. If it was $2000 for the tune and no xCal then that would be a rip off