patience people, just pop the disc in and do something else for 10-15 minutes. Maybe watch some TV till it finishes. Mine took about 5-10 minutes for the 12MB installSk8ter_213

I wish I could talk to the people in charge and they would tell me, "oh be patient". I think I'd have a really nice conversation.

I waited for 1 hour with the logo blinking. My popcorn cooled off. Wah? Maybe. It's not about wah, it's about this BLOATWARE getting out of control. I remember when DVDs started saying "Operation Not Permitted Here". Who's running this show? Not permitted? Who says? I'm the user, I'm the consumer, my will be done.

So now with this bluray title, it connects to a server to download content of questionable (or at least unknown) quality and everyone posts here. Yay! We all just wanted to watch a movie, what did we get? Software bugs! Yesssss! Bloat, bloat, bloat. Is there any extra features I want besides high bandwidth on the video and audio? Multiple camera angles? Interactive blah blah? No. Movies are observation pieces. Stop cramming LAME features in there. I mean, this is like putting a happy meal toy in an oil painting purchase. Stop cheapening the final product with bolt-on lamestorming. I'll coin that word now.

If a person rips it, these problems go away. Reminds me of the Spore vs DRM argument of late. Real customers suffer.

I just picked up an X2 as well. I'm very impressed with how quiet it is (unless a game is configured wrong). It's a nice card. I like the Nvidia driver UI better but all in all, my PC is fun again (old one was slow).

Here's a few things I've figured out.

Catalyst AI tries to optimize games. In some games, it offers massive speed jumps. In other games, it causes slowdowns and issues. In yet other games, it can enable AA or image quality. I can't say it's a science, it seems to have a mind of its own. What I did instead of giving up on it, I created game profiles in the Catalyst Control Center. I fire up a game, hit the Windows key, open the ATI control panel and play with the image settings. When I find a setting that works well for me, I click apply and then click on Profiles -> Profile Manager. This opens the profiles manager window which will let you save your current settings. For any game that doesn't work with the defaults, I create a profile.

When I start a game, I right click on the ati tray icon and activate it Activate Profile -> ABC,XYZ. I don't like game profiles but this is actually easier than when I had an nvidia card. The ATI driver gives many more AA and image quality options so managing them with profiles is the best way to go (even if I felt lazy realizing this).

The biggest speed jump I've seen so far is enabling Catalyst AI (set to advanced) for WoW and HL2 engine games. For games like Spore, Catalyst AI seems to slow it down when set to advanced. Setting it to standard seems to enable AA (maybe spore is too new for the AI profiling). I dunno.

I'd also suggest, hitting newegg.com and checking customer reviews of your RAM. They might have posts about tight memory timings which can mitigate your CPU bottleneck. I found some good memory timings and voltages that have been perfectly reliable.