The improvements made in Explorer (ribbon, up button) have made it a moderate improvement over Win7.

I've got a modern midrange laptop - an x220, with a low end dual core i5. It does have an SSD, but it loads Win8 after the BIOS in, oh, 3-4 seconds.

It makes sense. I used some mild hyperbole to make a point.

As you're learning the basics, planning a move to full frame is silly. You're all in trying to get minor technical details here when it's clear that you should focus elsewhere. :P

And they were made to last because they cost $1000. Not $10 after 30 years of inflation.

Black and white is a LOT more in post than color is to achieve a simple baseline. I'm not kidding. B&W film photographers use lots of filters, and you could do that, or you could do them in photoshop by manipulating the colors in the image (Yes, I'm serious) - plain B&W JPEGs out of a digital camera are useless.

No problem.

Lenses:

A normal person that takes photos of stuff?

I used 2048x1536 with Win98 and it was fine ;)

I live in NH, but heat doesn't bug me too much. People look at me funny when it's 100 degrees and I'm in a long sleeved shirt and jeans. And then I wear the same thing when it's 40. Too many people here keep the air blasting so it's 68 or lower inside, so wherever I go that is inside, in order to be comfortable, I…

I keep my central air at 78 unless I'm overheated and need to cool off (which is infrequent).

Yes, you are right. A free falling ball will hit 64.9mph from 141 feet.

That doesn't hit 100mph from the little 122 degree hill. It probably hits 65 or so. If it hits 100, that is from the launch. There's not enough height there to hit 100 from a complete stop.

El Toro >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kingda Ka. Sorry, it's true. There's fun, and there's "designed to look ominous". But the bottom line is Kingda Ka gets you a quick accelerating launch, staring up for a few seconds, and staring a the parking lot for a few seconds. El Toro, on the other hand, is fun the whole way…

Looks like an Intamin to me. Same company. They have some crazy designs there, yes, but we do here, too, beleive it or not. A smaller, slower coaster that has been in the US with the same concept is Farenheit at Hershey Park, which has a 97 degree drop (there are several others with similar drops, too). Built by…

My Lenovo x220 draws about 6 watts at total idle. It has a dual core, full voltage CPU, a screen, an SSD (which is off at total idle). For light usage with wifi on, screen not at minimum brightness, and doing stuff that keeps the SSD awake, I see 8-13W.

A computer with a 450w PSU does not consume 450w. A typical Windows PC with similar specs will probably draw something like 70w at idle, probably <100w for something like HTPC usage. OSX is a bit more efficient, and you can easily toss together a computer with more efficient parts than what is in this computer. A low…

The one they set up has a quad core desktop i3. I wouldn't be surprised if they use laptop chips on the new Mini and use a dual core. Also, there's nothing stopping you from using an i5 or i7, or a better video card (the one in this article is only 3-4x as fast as what the current Mini has, as Koztah notes, there…