Microsoft predicts another cruel quarter for PCs

Britton30 said:

The full retail version do have both 32 and 64 bit but only one can be activated with the included key.

The last two I bought did come with both,
Oddly TigerDirect showed two separate listing64 bit being 1.00 less lol ?
GFC-02050

Windows 7, Windows 7 Home, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate at TigerDirect.com

Yup. OEM versions are separate.

Layback Bear said:

I wonder if anybody is pirating Windows 8.

Yes, it's being pirated. Although mostly for kicks or to try it, not being necessary to play latest games means the bulk of userbase won't waste time on it and just reinstalls/repirates their Ultimate 64-bit if needed.

ThrashZone said:

LOL I wouldn't think so at 39.99,
I suppose free is free but even Pirates need revenue,

Crackers (people designing workarounds and cracks and removing restrictions) do it for fun, distribution-oriented sites like say the infamous PirateBay get their revenue from ads. Tons of ads.

And there are pirated OSX isos around too. (OSX disks and genuine licenses cost around 30$)

It's more like a habit.

Diosoth said:

Part of the reason the PC market is slowing is because PC gaming is a joke. Everyone's switching to consoles because used games still matter on consoles.

I strongly disagree.

Afaik Steam is the main reason (legit) PC gaming hasn't been killed by idiotic DRM. It's still idiotic mind me, but less than buying a physical game. Apart from some specific titles, you can go in offline mode for a while (up to one month I think), you can do backups (useful to move games to another PC you have a client on), and being Steam, a lot of games have less DRMs than their non-steam counterpart.
It has all that "community" thing that a lot of people like.

Still, my main point is that console games are too damn dumb (some even insultingly so) on average for a significant amount of userbase and for a lot of titles they would be so friggin buggy and unfinished to be barely playable (Fallout 3 and NeW Vegas, the X2-X3R-X3TC series, the Gothic series, Supreme Commander) while still having a significant potential that with a good modding community is fulfilled well beyond what any game (let alone console games) could realistically do without unlimited dev budget.

So yeah, consoles willl always outnumber PC gaming, but I really really doubt that it will ever die (different userbase), barring stupid things done by MS (why Steam is investing in its Linux client and porting games there).

I like buying from gog.com because there's no DRM, no silly requirements and I can burn my installer to disc and use it as I please.

Yeah but at least admit that game selection on gog.com is a bit crappy. I have most of those games (the ones I care about anyway) in physical copies already.

SuperTweaker said:

Absolutely a good idea to buy a Windows 7 64 Bit Home Premium full version disk.

The most important part is the activation key. Fetching a genuine windows 7 iso for free is trivial, but not an activation key.

I said it mainly because I don't trust them to keep the activation key safe in the account. Y'know, shutting down technet subscriptions... halt the sale of win7 licenses to try to convince people to get W8... I would not be surprised if they suddenly "forgot" your non-windows-8 purchases.

Your work bob?

That CG animation wins the spooky medal for sure.
What makes you think it is? I'm italian, my spoken english sucks.

On a tangent, for a moment I thought you found one of the "funny" videos I made about Harry Potter, ("funny" is a subjective term, I have since changed my mind). Thankfully they were all removed ages ago due to alleged copyright infringement by youtube.