9th November 2016, 5:37 PM
Folder support is great, yeah. I use a folder on the 3DS for all the demos for instance.
I have several issues with wi-fi. First, the first wi-fi router we got is one we got in the '00s and used for many years. It was Netgear or something, but worked terribly! From just one floor away sometimes computers couldn't see it, one laptop we had wouldn't connect to it at all, it was really unreliable and would drop out regularly... yeah, that was bad. After not having a router of my own for a while I got one early last year, and it works pretty well. It does need rebooting occasionally, but it's way better than that one. I did some research before choosing one, and it was worth it. But yeah, internet speeds are definitely slower on wi-fi than they are on wired, which is why I really wanted the 360 on wired.
Additionally, I have been hesitant about the whole 'wi-fi signals are bad for you'; I know you can't get away from them, and cellphones are the bigger issue versus regular wi-fi from all I've heard, and some studies show no negative health effects from cellphones, but are they really safe? We don't know for sure.
In contrast, the PS3 supports any drive up to 1TB, no restrictions. That is nice.
On a mostly unrelated note though, man USB 1.0 is slow! On those rare occasions I plug a USB flash drive into my old computer, the WinME machine from '01, it takes forever to transfer anything not small from it because of how crazy-slow access is...
Quote:Do I agree with you about wired internet being faster? Well, I mean it's not even up for discussion. The specs are easily available and it's simply a fact. Even AC, at it's highest theoretical speed, reaches only 780 Mb a second, vs ethernet's 1 Gb (that's the standard right now, although 10 Gb does exist, it hasn't really been widely accepted yet). AD does allow up to 6 Gb, but it can't go through average walls very easily, if at all, and isn't a good replacement for AC. In practice, most devices still use either N or even G, and so they don't even approach the 1 Gb speeds. Most modern routers have a combination of either N or maybe AC and multiple gig ports. Almost nothing these days still uses a 100 Mb ethernet port (the Wii and Wii U are exceptions, but those devices also use G instead of AC, and G is still slower than 100 Mb connections).Interesting info, it's good to know that yes, wired really is better.
That's not even the half of it. Even if AD were a good fit (as in a large open office space with few to no walls), there's the matter of reliability. Wireless simply isn't as reliable as a solid wired connection, and it likely never will be. There's just too many variables in a wireless connection which are all absent from a wired connection. There's also the matter of latency, and between SSID and security negotiating as well as the aforementioned reliability issues, all but those locations almost next to the access point are going to show both latency and speeds lower than the device's listed maximum.
That's not to mention basic security, as a wired connection won't have people listening in like a wifi connection can (even if secured, that data is still going over the air where a cable wouldn't).
I have several issues with wi-fi. First, the first wi-fi router we got is one we got in the '00s and used for many years. It was Netgear or something, but worked terribly! From just one floor away sometimes computers couldn't see it, one laptop we had wouldn't connect to it at all, it was really unreliable and would drop out regularly... yeah, that was bad. After not having a router of my own for a while I got one early last year, and it works pretty well. It does need rebooting occasionally, but it's way better than that one. I did some research before choosing one, and it was worth it. But yeah, internet speeds are definitely slower on wi-fi than they are on wired, which is why I really wanted the 360 on wired.
Additionally, I have been hesitant about the whole 'wi-fi signals are bad for you'; I know you can't get away from them, and cellphones are the bigger issue versus regular wi-fi from all I've heard, and some studies show no negative health effects from cellphones, but are they really safe? We don't know for sure.
Quote:This whole time I've badmouthed wifi quit a bit, but I do want to be clear that it has one overwhelming advantage, and that's for portable devices.This is also true of course; I got that wi-fi router because I was also getting a tablet, and you need wifi for that. It's also proven really useful for the 3DS of course. Because it's got higher security than old wi-fi system support it's useless for the Wii (or PSP or DS, but both of their internet is dead now anyway so that doesn't matter), so for the Wii store I need to use a wired internet adapter, and switch the cable from the 360 of course. This pain is part of why I so rarely played Wii games online, I never had a reliable wi-fi router to hook it up to (or much interest in playing much Wii online, with how limited it was... except for that one week I was playing The Last Story online before it shut down, that was really fun for some reason. But anyway.
Quote: I do have the first model PS3 (with the PS2 chipset and everything), and it does have those flash memory ports. I even tossed a few old unused memory cards of each type in those slots just because I wasn't using them for anything else. In short, the memory isn't locked off when a hard drive is installed (to be clear, all but the latest cheapest model PS3 had a hard drive installed out of the box), but games can't actually "see" those cards. While you can store saved game files on any of them, it would be pretty inconvenient as you'd need to move it back to the hard drive for the game to do anything with it. Further, unlike the model you have, if the hard drive is removed entirely then the system won't even boot up correctly, since so much of the OS is stored on the hard drive. That internal flash was put in your model purely as a way to allow them the possibility of selling the system without a hard drive.But it can actually access them and also the HDD? Then why in the world can't the 12GB model keep the OS installed on the flash and let you use it, and also let you use the HDD for games? I could accept something like what you describe, that is games only being able to save to the device they are installed to, if it'd just let you use them all,, and not waste like 60-70GB of HDD space for something that could have just been left on the system! I really hope that some technical limitation was a factor here, because it kind of sounds like the 12GB is less functional here than the first model, if just by a little bit... apart from it being able to run without a hard drive installed, of course, that is good.
Quote: I've got the S revision, and you're right, it was 4 GB rather than 8 GB. For my part, the moment the 360 was updated with the option, I usually installed any game I was playing entirely to the hard drive anyway, just to avoid load times. The flash memory would of course reduce them further. One big issue with the 360 is the lack of official support for using whatever hard drive you want. That's one area where Sony comes out ahead, at least. With the PS3, if you want to store your games in flash, you can buy an internal flash hard drive. They've got some pretty nice ones now, though the cost per gig is going to be higher so a 1 TB drive is going to be out of your price range I'd imagine.I've never owned a flash-based hard drive, so I have no idea how much faster they are than regular drives.
Quote:Technically, one can do that with the 360, but MS sure makes it hard. For one, special 3rd party formatting programs will be needed, and for two there's that really annoying drive bay that is shaped to only really fit MS's own proprietary drives. While other SATA drives CAN fit, they sit pretty loose and could come unplugged pretty easily. One could cut open the little black box MS's drives come in and swap in their own drive into that box to solve that problem, but it's rather annoying that MS makes people hop through all those hoops. Well, there's always just using a USB flash drive.The biggest issue with X360 hard drives isn't the various enclosures, the PS3 needs one too (or at least the Super Slim does). The biggest issue is that you can only use hard drive sizes that MS released, for driver/formatting reasons, which means that people were stuck with only slowly being able to upgrade their hard drive size if they got the system early, as MS slowly released larger hard drives over time until stopping with the last one, the 500GB drive which first released in 2013 (7-8 years after release!). And it didn't have 2TB external drive support until this year, yes?
In contrast, the PS3 supports any drive up to 1TB, no restrictions. That is nice.
Quote:USB 2.0 is technically faster than the SATA connection used internally on the 360, but in practice most USB 2 ports don't actually come close to that maximum so a SATA connection still ends up a bit more reliably fast in the long run.... Huh, I didn't know that.
On a mostly unrelated note though, man USB 1.0 is slow! On those rare occasions I plug a USB flash drive into my old computer, the WinME machine from '01, it takes forever to transfer anything not small from it because of how crazy-slow access is...