Another reason why I want to ditch Microsoft.......

[CatHerder]

 i am not into 3d games, tried them, but i think they suck. nothing new since the doom days. just mixed in a bit of this and that genre and a little graphics update.

Yeah right...

You obviously haven't experienced Planetside (online 3D futuristic combat game where you can literally have up to 450 people (150 per faction) all fighting in the same area on a continent (and over 7500 in the world map)...

You must have never seen Battlefield 2, or any other "3D" FPS game where it's so realistic that you're literally ducking and leaning in your chair...

You've never got to experience 50 guys (and gals), all on teamspeak (realtime voice chat over the internet) operating together as a cohesive battle unit, each filling a particular role while you wipe the map with the corpses of 75 enemy. Playing games is never the same after you've got to experience getting to know 30-100 different people who you not only play a game online with, but you're also in constant voice comms with the whole time -- when you aren't in the battle you're BSing about real life stuff... good times, really good times. And those 30-100 are just one tiny group of players in a massive online universe of literally thousands of players from all over the world.

Those games are just two examples of the 20-30 new generation first person shooter type games that make *anything* ever to appear previously on any computer platform (or console) look like a bad game of Pong.

Nothing new since DOOM... what an extremely uninformed opinion you have.  :-o

[CatHerder]

Well, if you want to see a 3D game that not only is a fantastic GAME but it looks phenominal, has a perfect musical score, and pulls it all off without any death (other than a few ship captains falling overboard) just go buy "Sid Meier's Pirates!". It's one of the very few 'remakes' of a classic that deserves to have the same name as the original.

Another amazing game (again 3D) that isn't a first person shooter is Black & White, another is Command & Conquor Generals, yet another is Grand Theft Auto III, and yet another is Dungeon Siege; "3D" is not limited to first person shooters. The list is almost endless on the PC. Games are better on the PC compared to a console: I can't get into console gaming, they're too limited, they're all gimped to work around 10 options (all the buttons on your controller) and the PC games allow for more variety, updates, expansions, etc. (I even gave my modded xBox to my niece because I never used it). Games that are popular on the PC almost always end up with a community supported modding group where people create new missions, maps, units, characters, options, etc. The value in most new PC games is just that much greater than its console version because of this.

The audio and visual effects of today's games are stunning, when you toss in a great game and great gameplay you end up with a product that it becomes almost unfair to compare anything from the 80s/90s beside it.

All that being said, the reasons I use PCs and Windows is because of Photoshop and other productivity tools (Adobe Encore and Adobe Audition! also get a lot of mileage here), the wide range of website development tools, the wealth of online tools, and finally because I can also play the best games out there when I have time to take a break. :-)

Of course there are going to be security vulnerabilities in Windows operating systems, it's used by over 250 million people. If 250 million people still used an Amiga you bet your arse it would have a pile of vulnerabilities (doesn't anyone remember how many viruses there used to be on the Amiga every week back in the early 90s?). An operating system is only as secure as the number of people trying to exploit and attack it. It has nothing to do with who writes the OS. Just ask any of us who have gone through hundreds and hundreds of patches and security updates and kludges for RedHat and Apache...