tmcd35

What are you waiting for? Go buy it, NOW. Go on, NOW I say! GTA:IV had put me off, but I'm very pleased to say (from what little I've played) it's a lot closer to Red Dead Redemption than GTA:IV. In terms of the car physics (remains my biggest gripe with these games) it just means I have to ignore the racing side missions. Not by a very wide margin! Usual GTA humour and cartoonesque character animations. Personally, I'd like reality to more like the game In terms of 3D open world graphics fedlity, as a gamer I've waited a long time for this. I remember playing Flashback on the Amiga and being captivated by the fluid character animation and the openness of the space port. It's taken a long time for games to get to this point where we have such a huge open playfied. I'd say it's only really been the past 2-3 years that these games have matured to this level. Looks good for Watch_Dogs and AC:IV next gen. One thing that is especially notible in GTA:V is how fluid the transition is between cut scenes and games. They are now one and the same - indestinguishable. In fact I've been coming out of cut scenes not realising I had to start controlling the character I've finally found a genre (other than Civilization) that I can happily waste hours of my life playing (read "exploring").

Well got a couple of hours in last night, didn't get too far. Just upto Chomp enjoying himself with another dog (see @EduTech's post above). Some thoughts... Most important thing is both the story and the characters engage and captivate from the start. As I said above, I played an hour of GTA:IV where the story didn't begin and the main character turned me off. Already it's a game I want to play for 30+ hours. Not sure if the auto-aim makes it too easy or not? I think I need to get into another couple of gunfights and perhaps try a mission with it turned off. The driving is greatly improved over GTA:IV (not a difficult accomplishment) but no where near as good as Sleeping Dogs (which I've only just finished playing). Still suffers from frustrating amounts of oversteer, especially at high speeds. What I was hoping for was something closer to Burnout Paradise. This is the first game I've played where the framerate has been very noticably low. Not sure I like it. Sleeping Dogs had it's moments during high speed/high action sequencies, but this is flickering during a stroll down the street. I see what they've done - the City is a work of art - but that work of art is coming at a heavy price. Graphically they are really pushing these current gen consoles to their limits. That said, the city is the real star of the show. Breathtaking, immense, detailed, sprawling. What scares me is after 2hours I've bearly explored the local neighbourhood. I don't think it's the mythical faultless perfect game, but (so far) the characters, humour, story and (especially) the city all more than make up for the few faults it does have.

I prefer the Sleeping Dogs approach... Visit the local parking lot and get a brand new one

Initally no, but over the lifespan of the product? It's an important question to ask suppliers when you go out to tender. What is the expected lifespan of the kit? How will the supplier support the installation post-sale, and for how long? I'm of a mind that wave 1 in a mixed environment is probably right now, by the time you replace the equipment the industry would have (hopefully) long since moved into wave 2. If I understand correctly clients will work with both waves of .ac but you won't get the full benefit of wave 2 until you have wave 2 clients and wave 2 access points? A bit like the change from .n to .ac?

Which is why MIMO and management is very important. 802.11n done right gives this, 802.11ac improves on it (in a big way from what I can gather). Either way, spending money now I'd say build for the future and not the present. Get a proper survey done. Install a managed .ac infrastructure if you can afford it. Use .n clients now knowing you can buy .ac clients in the future and reap the benefits.

Er, you have played GTA games before? Surely they've taught you how to deal with rush hour traffic

Unfortunately I can't remember where and I haven't checked it's effect on this part of Windows 7, but somewhere in GPO there is an option to allow/disallow access to specified drives. I think all you need to do is disallow access to the C: drive and it will stop the pupils from seeing/accessing it.

The users desktop is a subfolder within their profile. C:\users\ contains user profiles loaded on to that machine. C:\users\%username%\ is the students profile and C:\users\%username%\desktop is the students personal desktop. Similarly C:\users\public\desktop is where you place shortcuts you want to appear on everybodys desktop.

Two weeks after Red Dead Redemption

I don't know the specifics, but I believe .ac has better use of MIMO and uses the 5Ghz band as standard. In a managed system I'd guess it'd do a better job of elevating the usual AP overload problems than a managed .n system would. I'd be interested in reading independent tests on the subject if you do manage to dig some up.

Afraid I can't help with a report, but if I was planning a wireless infrastructure now I'd be pushing 802.11ac for future proofing on the powers that be.

Having thought about it some more, I'd say it probably stacks up... PSP - Best for Retro 3DS - Best for Right Now Vita - (Probably) Best for the Future (if you buy into Sony's ecosystem)

I predict it's going to be on the news tomorrow night: "Record number of gamers trying to sell unwanted copies of GTA V. CEX refusing to do exchanges. Quoted as saying - 'We've got too meny copies now, We fear when word gets out how bad this game is we just won't be able to shift them'".

Couldn't do that here. All three of us are pacing the floor waiting for the day to end. If one of us had tried taking an half day or calling in sick... well management might just have taken a dim view on that. If all three of us had done it...

Well, if you don't trust eBay, can't afford new and don't mind secondhand - then I'd go for a trip to the local Cash Convertors and see what they've got before settling on something.

robocopy /S /ZB /EFSRAW /COPYALL /MOVE /R:5 /W:10 That should do it. /S and /MOVE copy everything in subdirectories and deletes the original /ZB /EFSRAW and /COPYALL pretty much means one way or another everything will be copied, including file attributes /R and /W sets the Retry and Wait time for the odd file that it can't copy. Don't use /MOVE if you want to keep the original files in place Use /E instead of /S if you want to copy empty folders Options exist for excluding specific files or folders, running continuously and monitoring/copying changes to a directory, and setting run times so it only runs within specified hours. Very useful command.

Once you learn the command line, nothing beats Robocopy IMHO.

Again, back to the question of your views on emulation? The PSP is easily hacked has emulators for a wide range of systems inc. Atari and Arcade. Keeping it legal, Nintendo appear to do a better job with their Virtual Console on Wii(U), I don't know how that translates across to 3DS? The Vita promises Gaikai in the next couple of years. Allow streaming of games from PS1/2/3/4/PSP/Vita including some SNK and Sega retro's in their "Mini's" range.

Geez! I'd sooner have paid the extra £10 and downloaded it direct from the PSN store! So long as it arrives in the post today the Amazon pre-order was definately the best purchase method.

Could ebay be worth a look? I'm sure you could pick up an 18month old machine with (albeit older, but) better cpu/gpu/ram than you'd get new?

If he's into retro games, then I suppose the question might be - what are your views on emulation? In this regard I don't think the PSP can be beat.

Is it home time yet?

£400 is not much, can't see getting a dedicated graphics card for that. Personally I'd look into something based around AMD's APU's. They tend to have pretty good spec integrated graphics, maybe load up on the RAM? Something like: Buy Laptops - Best Laptop Deals Online - Misco.co.uk And double the RAM to 8Gb? I'm sure @VeryPC can build something suitable...

You know what neither could I. I rented from Blockbuster a few years back and didn't like it. I tried around last Christmas using the PS+ 1hr timelimited trial, and still couldn't warm to it. I think it was a mixture of god awful driving mechanics, main character I couldn't warm to, and the boring opening story. Giving this one a go more on the back of how good Red Dead was.

Don't know if using snapshots are wise in this instance, since you're messing with the files partitioning information. If you have got the hard drive space, just temporarily, take a full copy of the VMDK. Belts and braces.