Continuing the Fight Against Piracy.

I know I have a stronger anti-piracy stance than a lot of people. But I've also worked my entire professional life for commercial software companies as well. I don't wear a piracy badge as a medal of honor or for bragging rights. I actually am far more excited about finding, using and contributing towards free alternatives with less restrictions. I realize that this viewpoint likely doesn't match lots of other people...but it's my viewpoint and somewhat like it.

Frostmourne said:

10 years? I'll build a new PC within 2 to replace my gaming PC and for a desktop PC, 3 is enough.

Yes, but then again we are nerds and actually enjoy putting machines together. I usually just build a middle of the road rig every 2-3 years as well. Then upgrade everybody else in the family when i build a new box. While I think some people could go 10 years without needing a new machine...I think that might be pushing it a bit for many. But 5-6 years for lots of people is not abnormal.

Frostmourne said:

Agreed - although I would aim for the upper-middle, so to speak.

Yeah, me too. I'm running a Q9550 with a mild overclock, an Nvidia 9800GTX+ (I'm admitedly not a hard core gamer), I have an Antec P182 case with a Corsair Modular power supply and an Intel X25-M Gen 2 80GB SSD drive and a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black for storage. It's not too shappy of a box.

Frostmourne said:

Personally I'll wait to choose SSD's until I can raid 2 x 512GB SSD's in RAID 0 and drop HDD's entirely on a SATA 3 motherboard.

I didn't want to wait this long...why forgo fantastic performance and extremely low access times now? I always see people pushing off the move to SSD until they can RAID it and crank even more performance out of it. I just find it funny as often they are using 70MB/s mechanical drives and could jump to well over 200MB/s with an SSD drive...with almost non-existent access times. To me, the best of both worlds is a high performance high capacity mechanical drive for storage and an SSD for OS and Apps. Great performance, reasonable price. My total hard drive investment is about $389 for the SSD and the WD Caviar Black.

Edit: And really telling is the fact that of all the people who have upgraded to SSD...it's very rare to hear anybody that regrets it.

patio said:

I'm suprised the door hasn't been slammed shut on this unproductive debate...

It's a discussion about piracy, which isn't an open and a shut case. I see no reason why we would close this thread, people are just sharing their opinions, experiences and viewpoints.