I wish I had a big enough attention span to read all this crap but I think I got the just of the argument.

I haven't jumped into the whole PS3 360 stuff yet. Its too much drama if you ask me. My aging PC hasn't died yet and I have a PS2 with 70+ games.

The fact of the matter is, the PS3 and the 360 are NOT PCs! They are a gaming console! I don't want to "upgrade" my harddrive in a console to play more games. That's just a bunch of corporate b.s. to turn their product into a service. Its a console, make it work! Want it to load faster? Have more system memory and/or a faster optic drive. Or.. as its going to end up.. ditch the drive and go back to cartridge.

With that said its funny how in the end Nintendo with its cartridge arra was way a head of its time if you take into consideration were technology is heading now. Flash/Solid state drives and larger memory are coming back. Once its cheap enough there won't be any reason to have a disc with moving components. That's has been one of the benefits having a PC.

This is a growing Issue think. I feel the gaming community is being taken advantage of. When a game is done its done. PC games of course need updates for compatibility issues on a broad range of hardware. As for consoles? I don't want this"will add this feature or that feature at out leisure" We all know that games like GT5 takes a huge amount of time to produce. Although I have an issue with some of the new games being released as a core product vs a product that's finished to the vision and plan. I'm not going to spend money on games that don't include features that are talked about while the game is in production but only added later has an update. This is going to be my biggest concern with GT5. I have yet to buy a next gen system and I probably wont till game companies step up and actually finish a product. I already have a PC to putz around with updates and extra features.

Well your laptop memory has a higher MHz.. not by much but that effects it a bit. Although there could be a possibility that the drivers are more optimize for the components in your laptop then your desktop. And the the 8600 does run faster than the 7800 even though there both 256MB. Switch to XP and you will gain about another 20% in performance. Other than that I couldn't tell you.

There is always going to be a game that tests the very limits to was aPC can do regardless of price or equipment. If you don't want to worry about specs go buy yourself a PS3 or X360. Real PC people don't bitc..cough, complain.