Most places don't bother selling 512 MB sticks for ddr2 6400 and up. Crucial for one. Second, the price difference between adding one more gig and two gigs is nearly insignificant with ram prices.

Thus I assumed he was contemplating a single stick of ram.

SVCHOST loads and runs dlls or drivers in the Windows environment. Some suggestions.

Reboot the PC. Watch memory usage on the offending SVCHOST instance and see if memory usage keeps increasing. This would suggest a memory leak. If you have XP service pack 3 installed on this computer, there has been a reported issue of the DHCP client running under SVCHOST with a memory leak. Easiest solution here is a rollback to service pack 2 until microsoft fixes the problem, if they haven't already.

Second, an awful lot of trojans, viruses, etc. use the guise of SVCHOST to do their dirty work while being ignored as a ligitimate windows process. You should do a complete virus scan to insure this is not the issue.

The final and most difficult solution if the above two suggestions do not solve the problem is to breakdown all the dlls loaded under the offending instance of SVCHOST to find the dll that is causing the problem. There are third party solutions that do this for you without doing the legwork, such as registry cleaners and such. If you're still having problems and the first two solutions don't help, post back and I'll point you in the right direction.

If there is any problem, its not occuring at a software level since the issue occurs during boot. That points to either a BIOS issue or a hardware issue.

Clear your CMOS to default your BIOS back to factory standard settings and try a new boot. Eliminate the BIOS problem first, since its the easiest to discern.

Toshiba laptops are to date, to my understanding, one of the brands that ATI does not provide driver support. Thus you must rely on Toshiba to provide driver updates, which is something they won't do after about a year that the product has been on market.

The only possible solution to get some sort of driver update in your situation is to use a third party driver solution. Be warned, third party drivers are not as stable and sometimes you lose functionality of certain aspects of your video card, especially if they are brand specific. I know firsthand, because I use third party drivers for an old Toshiba that I have using an NVIDIA card.

Try Omegadrivers first and foremost. http://www.omegadrivers.net

Make sure you fully uninstall your current drivers before using any third party drivers, and be prepared to install several different versions to find the one that works best with your laptop. Good luck.

I have one of those, and they're a pain. Notorious for having the fans fail, either outright or due to certain brands having the stickers flake off and get lodged in the fan.

They are temperature idled, so if the temps get too high on the card they'll throttle down so as to avoid damage. It only goes so far though, as the fan failed on mine and only after noticing the nasty smell did I pull the card.

They run very hot. 75 under load is a bit too hot though, but nothing to freak about. If you don't hit 80s I would let it slide.

Don't apply thermal paste with the pads. You probably have to use the pads to get contact, but if you can get contact without them, scrape them off and go with the paste. I suggest using paste on the gpu and leaving the pads for the memory, they're usually problematic to deal with on a third party cooling solution.

Open your case up and use another fan around your house to blow in the case and continue using your computer for a while. It sounds pretty stupid, but it works. If you're still having lockup issues, its not a temperature problem.

Is it just me, or is there nothing but a desolate quaqmire in the near future, because I can't seem to find anything coming out in the next six months to excite myself about.

I mean, Starcraft is coming sometime, and there are little things that I will definitly get like borderlands and spore, but I don't see anything that destined to release soon, as in anytime to this summer, that makes me excited.

Am I missing something, or should I go back to resinstalling a train simulator because I'm so freaking bored?

I think the reasons tactics was so good is because of the atmosphere and storyline that the two previous REAL fallout games instilled into it. Even if the third was a different game type than RPG like the first two, I would still gobble it up because its a fascinating storyline and setting.

So my suggestions is to actually play them through from the beginning if you like a good story and the graphics don't put you out. You'll enjoy tactics and the coming game much much more if you do. Do yourself the favor.

The problem to this question is who you are asking the question to: the gamer or the software developer/publisher.

If you're asking the gamer, it is a morality question. There are no right answers to such questions, despite legal implications.

If you ask the software developer/publisher, the question is typically yes. Every single game that is pirated, and not paid for, is lost revenue. That's simple math, and there isn't any plausible way to deny that.

Thus the question should be, is piracy that bad that it causes credible damage to either the gamer or the software developer/publisher?

My answer would be a resounding yes in the overseas market. I've been there, and I can tell you that you can buy a pc game for about a fourth or a third of what you pay for it stateside/europe. They don't play by the rules in most markets, not just in software, so thats a larger issue that involves not just our world of computer games but a larger goods market as a whole.

Stateside/europe, I would say no.

The problem with pc games is in this area is not piracy, its the companies themselves and the nature of the pc market. If you have a game concept, you decide which system to put it on. Console games are pretty set and bug free once released (although this is becoming less and less true in time). If you release a game for the pc, you are releasing it to a smaller demographic. Not only that, this demographic virtually has no two machines alike. You're going to be working long after release to fix the invariable problems that beta testing didn't catch, if you even did credible beta testing at all (ahem...bioshock..ahem). And if you have a buggy product, the pc gamers will literally castrate you and tell everyone and their brother to stay away from their products to save them countless hours of reinstallation and desk/head pounding.

The real winners in the pc market, as said previously in this thread, are those that manage to make quality, fun games that have active communities and continue to sell over the long haul, especially if those games are top tier hardware requirement games and everyone else catches up to enjoy them. That is why crysis will keep selling in the next two years. Same with a Neverwinter Nights or a World of Warcraft. Not so with most unforgettable games.

Piracy is not the problem. It's the lack of quality that has permeated the pc game industry as more and more developers jump ship to the less problematic higher demographic world of consoles. The industry can point fingers all they want, but as long as they keep marketing something worth buying, I'll pay for it.