Spell Reviewer
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2005
- Messages
- 27,218
What tin foil headed person told you this?
Firstly, everything you run on your computer uses your hardware. It is impossible to run any form of program without hardware to run it on. Hardware runs software, it is that simple. If you do not want to use your hardware, then do not turn your computer on.
Programs do not draw power. They are a set of instructions that a processor runs. The processor does draw power to run these instructions but the power drawn depends on model and generation. There is no "CATCH FIRE" instruction which causes your processor to turn into a heater incase you were worrying although some instructions can consume more power than others (the nvidia 8800 GT running SC2 is an example where SC2 used graphic opperations which are not performed very efficiently by the 8800 GT and like cards). A programmer is not concerned about the thermal performance of the code he runs as it is up to the hardware designer to make sure that the processor is capable of dissapating all the heat generated to run at worst case situations. I do admit that not all hardware designers do this inorder to save money and as such you will get products like the 8800 GT which it is possible to cause them to overheat due to the heatsink being designed for average case loading and not worst case.
Internet Explorer 9 uses hardware, like all browsers. The difference with IE9 over older IE versions is that IE9 uses the graphic accelerator partly meaning your CPU is used less. Unless your graphic accelerator is defective or badly designed so it causes a fire when not running idle then if anything it will strain your system less as the GPU can handle image generation far better than your CPU.
Well I have played Diablo II for years and can assure you it is not only physically impossible for it to damage your hardware, it also just does not from personal experience. The origan of this legend is not false though. Diablo II used to require the CD be present inorder to run. This was to avoid installing unesscescary files back when hard disks were small. As such it would stream data from the CD on demand, especially data such as music. Caching was also bad back then meaning that data would continiously need to be reread from the CD. What few people realise is that CD, DVD and now blu-ray drives have a limited running life. The lasers they use to read the discs have a half life meaning that after X hours running they will be half as bright than before. Thus by playing for hundreds of hours people were greatly wearing their CD drives and eventually causing them to fail (the laser is too dim for the drive to function). This is a thing of the past though as now you can install the game completly (no CD required to play D2) and the caching systems of modern opperating systems like W7 combined with large memory sets means that every file is only ever read once per session from hard disk (or CD if you still use that for some stupid reason) so the wear factor is nonexistant.
because you don't need to format everything in process.
).
