Which reminds me, commerce never had a knack for timely but fair adjustments to pricing variations as with the GST tax proved twice & over in Canada -- regional principles aside, we buy a Japanese car here and get shipping & handling costs MUCH higher than in Australia.

Strangely, even the US tried that gimmicky process on our Lumber under free-trade agreements. I guess they couldn't keep their word and that their signature is still worthless.

When a barrel of crude black gold spikes at 140$ and within months plunges back to 60$ or less, it puts Dinars in perspective and fills your tank with delayed truth for abusive costs.

PC hardwares included.

Trouble is, who keeps track of a dealer cards at a poker table when your hands are loaded with luck & bluff rules any result.

CAD at 90+ rather than 75 lately, is the greenback losing its value or MY purchasing power gaining on it? Get in some stores and see for yourselves.

At present the AUD is trading at 80c in the US dollar. Now while 20c mightn't seem like a lot, it soon mounts up on larger purchases, so you can well imagine PC component prices when we were trading at just on 50c - 55c in the USD... even on *say* Gigabyte motherboards for Taiwan, because (just like oil) USD is the recognised/accepted currency.

As was proven with my purchase of the Phenom II!   It was manufactured and shipped in April 2009, purchased in May when the AUD was trading at 74c... yet I paid the (old stock) February price when it was trading at below 55c.  Had the saving been passed on, I would have paid around AUD $270 ish and not the $330 retail price... 310 with store discount for valued customers.  And like the store owner explained, his markup was less than 5%, so somebody is profiteering bigtime.

Ah yes, the 'Free Trade Agreement"!!!  When John Howard was 'trying' to negotiate that for Australia, opposition to it came crawling out of the woodwork from all over, for that very reason.... that we'd get screwed.  And sure enough, with the Oz dollar never on a par with the greenback (and deliberatley kept that way), that's exactly what's happening.... we are paying more for imported goods and getting less for our exports, given that the USD is the accepted currency, even in Asia.  Of course that's not the only reason we pay more... we have our own profiteering Capitalist pigs who seek constantly to screw their own people.

Getting there.....the Toy now has Impulse and SDC installed.....

I'm thinking of upgrading my graphics card. I have a run-of-the-mill proc, a Core 2 Extreme X6800 (the fastest back in its day), but I hear that ARMA II doesn't like the 8800 very much, so I may upgrade to a GTX295. I have this notion that I must only upgrade to whatever is top of the line, so I can upgrade less in the future.

I think to an extent that is true however I would also think that the rest of the equipment could have some impact on performance as well???

Ah, so now it really IS heavy artillery.   Glad to hear it's all going well.

Wait what? Stardock central? Ithought that died quite awhile ago...

Nothing ever dies for a Member Elite! We have it all and can always get whatever it is there ever was or is.

With the new updates that just rolled out Jafo - you should have very little problems with win7 anywhere! Glad to hear things are going well.

Ah...one 'quaint' issue.....Win7 decided to put a 'system reserved' partition [100meg] on my 'D' HD....the one I want to be able to hot-swap out ....and now I can't.

So I either have to work out a way of relocating the partition....or re-install the OS...and make sure I don't have the drive connected at the time.

Error is 'explorer has been removed...do you want to delete it?'

Now I'm so 'lost' I'm not even confident which drive has the OS....both are identical [250g seagates]...

What...????????????

First thing....name the drives (ie: C: System, D: Storage).

Second thing....you're in charge, not Windows. Clean the D drive and install Win7 on C: (use the partition option during install. Name partition: W: Win7). If the boot Mgr is already active, blow an image (or MBR) back into C: after you kill D:.  

That sounds like a reinstall to me.

Hope we see you in the morning Paul.

Gah....I was hoping not to have to reinstall.....figuring there was an easier way.

Next time I'll install the OS while the second drive is out of the box.

What caused it was some quaint anomaly....Win7 hid its rescue partition on the wrong damn drive.

The OS is on 'C' where it's supposed to be....the hidden part is on 'D' where it's not supposed to be.

Both drives are physically identical....and hot removing either gets the same result.....kinda fun, really...

I can't find any hits/reference to this same issue.

BTW...all 4 drives were raw at OS install....none formatted.

I had the wild idea of drive-imaging and putting 'c' into what remains of 'd' ...but DI7 isn't compatible with Win7.....and probably wouldn't work anyway...

Your simple ideas are a cluster fuck. How 'bout we stick with that for a bit?

...damn, I just fired up a 4 quad Opteron rig....I smell something burning...................................

The Win7 built-in imaging proggy gets upset when restoring....probably because I'm trying to do it without that 'D' drive in...so it can't rewrite the 100 meg part.

I'm getting closer to a win re-install....there doesn't seem to be any shortcut solutions....