@groowagon: Before you go around starting your comments with "wtf?" acting like you actually know something, take a second and think before you comment. Not everybody has ball bearing fans(several do indeed have oiling ports), in addition some cases and older fan builds are using sleeve bearings. In that case you can detach the fan to clean out and lube up the rotor/shaft even if it does not have oiling ports. So yes they can be maintained I have been using several 120mm/240mm sleeve bearing fans on my Antec 1200v1/DF-85 cases for about 9 years now and I have to cleanup the sleeves at least once every year even if sleeve bearings are rated at 40k hours.
That's a few dollars saved on avoiding fan replacement purchases that could be put into actual system upgrades.
If you want to see dust/dirt buildup on the rotar for yourself you can watch it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRkHq-P9TQE
I like to oil up the fans every 6-12 months while I cleanup the dust buildup , as fan RPM can be sub-optimal in addition to the annoying sounds. Fan maintenance is a critical part of maintaining your PC.
Browser extensions like WOT(Web of trust) and Adblocker can help prevent drive-by download exploits when you visit a shady website by mistake. For Windows, some additional tools to help clean up with malware are Combofix.exe(only use when you find rootkits on the system that are not getting removed), Trendmicro Hijackthis (this checks registry keys , you can then export the log and cross-check it with a database found at hijackthis.de) , Spybot Search and Destroy and Adwcleaner. These used in conjunction with Malwarebytes are usually capable of clearing out most malware/adware incidents. Do a reputation lookup when you have to visit a website you are not familiar with is also a good preventive measure.
Then running something like Procmon (sysinternal tool) and manually verifying all running processes is a good way to double check that everything is in order.
Managing startup programs in msconfig will also help optimize system boot times.
Schedule Disk Defragmenter to run one time a week especially if you are the type of user that keeps installing and uninstalling programs. This will help optimize Disk I/O performance and file access speeds.
In this day an age privacy is a hot topic and a sensitive one at that. Doing something unethical will get you called out quick, and gathering trend and marketing data falls into that category.
Battle.net client only looks up for games in the default directory, if it is not located then you can manually give it the directory or manually search the drive.
Abusing the UserAssist functionality that was in Windows Vista was extremely shady. Which mind you gives you the ability to basically extract all running executables on the system with time stamps and how many times they were run. That is a violation of privacy on all accounts no matter how unimportant that information seems to you.
Exactly it doesn't provide any value to the consumer , unfortunately EA probably does not want to have to deal with Steams terms of use , other requirements and even providing a share of sales (I am assuming there definitely has to be something of that nature behind the scene). That could be a primary reason they created the platform in the first place. Giving Steam even 5% from all sales would translate into massive amounts of money and definitely much more money than the cost of developing the origin platform. So due to this we sadly will have to deal with multiple platforms.
I personally don't bother with any platform other than Steam which plays an important role in my decision to buy a game, if it is non-steam than it better be damn good.
I think this whole discussion is irrelevant. The whole point of Origin is so that they can manage EA titles , sales , game updates and multiplayer for their bigger titles i.e BF4 , BF Hardline etc etc while gaining the ability to advertise their own titles and potentially gain additional sales via the platform(shown by the extensive EA game ads and "Buy Now" links on the homepage once you login).
In order for Origin to compete with Steam they would have to directly enter the retail business which they have showed no incentive of doing, and in addition to this from a technical standpoint for multiplayer functionality it is much easier to integrate with a pre-existing framework.
Another similar example to this would be the Battle.net client, which has exactly the same purpose. Both Origin and Battle.net have existed for years and with two large corporations in Activision-Blizzard and EA behind them I am positive that if they wanted to compete with Steam they would have done that along time ago but that is not the case.
In the case of GoG is a much younger platform but decided to fill a niche market that Steam didn't cover with classic games and that did get them market share and a dedicated following. Now they are trying to grow and compete as depicted by the GoG galaxy presentation they had last year.
Some might give me flak for this, but going back to this years releases only two worthy PC titles come to mind:
1)TW3
2)Dying Light
Dying Light while not as epic as TW3 was indeed a great game. As for FO4 I didn't get hyped enough to buy it and will be buying it in next years summer sale. The rest of the releases were sub-par and don't deserve a nomination.
@Snowx1: Are we talking about the same article, or am I missing something? Because I can't relate to your argument. EA's marketing team contacted Ben with the chance to do promotional work for Starwars. Every company does it in every sector, welcome to the world of marketing. EA did absolutely nothing wrong in this case, but everyone still goes ballistic.
At the end of the day business is business and what he did was unprofessional. If he wanted to voice his opinion there were a million ways to say it in better words, and I quote "They wanted to pay me to post that I like this peice of shit game ... They can shove it up their ass..." hard to imagine a grown man talking like a teenage kid plus he didn't even spell "piece" correctly.
At the end of the day this will only hurt his ability to get promotional work in the future, and EA in this case doesn't deserve any flak.
Wrong move by Ben no matter how you slice it, he could have provided that in a response directly back to EA. This is a PR disaster and will hurt any future possibilities of Ben getting any future work with any other company. That is a bad business decision on his part.
Think its a bad game? Provide EA a response and reject the offer, no need to tweet garbage about it. Anyways it doesn't really matter as Ben is pretty much irrelevant nowadays.
As for the typical people hating on EA, if someone wants to directly go buy a game because of this marketing then let them. As long as you make your own educated decisions by reading game reviews, twitch gameplay streams, youtube videos etc.. you sure as hell have all the tools to do so, no need to be salty about how others choose to spend their money no matter how uninformed or bad that said game is.
@bobafetthatesu: With sites like GoG , Kinguin ,G2A , Steam (summer/winter sales) and several other online retailers in most cases it is possible to get new games up to 20% cheaper then their physical copy counterparts.
GoG provides legacy games that are no longer sold as physical copies in addition to getting the games to run with DoSBox.
Gaming is one of the cheaper forms of entertainment giving the best dollar per hour ratio in comparison to many other things. Which holds the statement "you basically flush that investment down the toilet" mute. Putting money into any form of entertainment is not an investment, if you wanted better returns on your "investment" i suggest you apply that money to the stock market or any form of business rather than trying to sell used games.
Speaking for myself I don't have the time to go through traffic to stop by a shop to buy a physical copy. Buying online saves me time which translates directly into money.
I can keep on going on with counterarguments for your null statements but the above should suffice.
The only sheep here seems to be you, welcome to the new age and learn to adapt.
SiNoNaX's comments