Morgan Nametbd

So our housemate Grey (moonbeamdanser) has an Xbox360 downstairs, and I'm wondering what we should look into in terms of games. elialshadowpine and I are both prone to tendinitis, so games that require button mashing are not a good thing. The box is, last I knew, not connected to the network, but that's just a matter of digging up a long ethernet cable (it doesn't have a wifi receiver due to the cost, but the wired setup is viable at this point... it's just a matter of spoons to do it). We also don't have a current XBL subscription; we might pick one up if we find it useful.

Personally I like RPGs and adventure games. Multiplayer would be nice as well. We also have either Guitar Hero or RockBand, not sure which, but I think the guitar needs to be cleaned. Just not sure if I'm coordinated enough to do something like that. I don't believe that it has a Kinect bar.

Things with demos are a plus, so we can try them out and see if we like them. I know that Craigslist is a good source of cheap used games as well. I just haven't been sure what to look for in the first place.

Thankies!

So, this is a long shot, but I thought I'd toss this out here. I have a pretty decent computer... 2.66GHz Core2 Quad CPU, ~4GB of RAM, Nvidia GT 250 w/ 2GB RAM. It runs really nicely for the most part, but every so often things just... stall. I've seen it happening in WoW, in my browser, and in DA2.

If I run the CPU performance monitor while it's happening, I don't see all 4 cores maxxed out; usually 2 will be between 50-75% and 2 will be fairly idle. There's still plenty of memory free as well.

I have not seen this occur when booted under Linux but I don't run the system as heavily loaded under Linux as I do under Windows (I hardly ever game under Linux because my mouse isn't fully supported, so it's mainly browser, IM client, and terminal windows) so I'm not sure if it's stress-related or OS-related. I'm currently running Vista 32-bit; I do want to go to Win7 64-bit (so I can use all 4GB RAM), but I just haven't gotten my hands on a copy yet.

The system in general does not perform reliably as well as Nonny's computer which has inferior specs. It almost feels like the hard drive isn't performing up to speed, and when it has to go to disk sometimes it lags. But the HD performance tester I ran ran clean, and I confirmed it's not something stupid like the drive being a 5400 RPM instead of 7200 RPM.

Any software that I can run in the background to help isolate what's going on, or diagnostic tests I can perform in advance, would be appreciated. Thanks!


EDIT: One thing I did find is that apparently when you create a share in Win Vista, it automatically adds that folder to the list to index. I had turned off indexing of all folders except the start menu, but creating shares for root folders of multiple drives added those drives back to the index list. Gyargh. I removed them and disabled the Windows Search service completely, which should help some. Onward to running PCMark 7 and 3DMark 11.