Flipside is: Hardcopy costs big money to ship here. Distribution and production are -major- loses everywhere. And while big runs are cheaper and a large readership will get a writer/gfx work snapped up by a commerical publisher quick enough, but getting to that size is hard.
Would I buy a H.O.L.E. lot of eBook? – if it’s cheap and not crippled (ie common format eg cbr or even pdf). Because $5/book electronic is $5 over the net (paypal or SWReg).
But Hardcopy if even only $2/comic is _$25_ of postage! (and I have to -wait-!!!!)
So doing eBook makes a huge increase in your available market population.
… Then you can follow-up with some extras and tidbits/expansions in hardcopy once you have softened your market.

I believe a similiar technique is being looked at by Thunt

Fortunately the greed of your Service providers forcing extra crap onto your systems and failures by the American companies and their employees to remember why people buy their products cheer us up immensely

For example $300 of my $700 was the video card. “512 MB nVidia” is not a video card. Since you didn’t tell me anything about its actual speed or model, it is probably a $5 chip that is one of several minor components on the $50 motherboard. I avoid slow-as-molasses lap tops like the plague, and wrap my PC in a blanket for transport when needed. Or you could spend $2000 on a lap top that can actually do something (and if you want something that can run office software or linux, gimme $200 and an old version of windows it can handle to do it on a PC, anything can do that).

To remove extra software use msconfig, uninstall, and check for anything new running with ctrl-alt-delete (I like to save it to ms-paint). Cleaning up other files that aren’t actively running will do absolutely nothing. If that’s too much trouble and your computer has gotten so slow you want a new one, try backing up your documents and reinstalling windows and all your software instead.

Rather, I’ll use a papersheet, a projector and a mike:
http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

I recommend Macs to regular folks who want a computer. When folks get bent out of shape about the price (which is, IMNSHO, too high) I just point out that it’s a matter of the cost of their time. When their Redmond OS screws their ability to work because of an upgrade, a virus or just poor coding, and they have to take hours or days to rectify the issue, what did *that* just cost them.

Hellfire, I also recommend that they get Ubuntu, but I can’t be an impartial judge. My Linux distro has 15 virtual desktops, with the Avant Window Navigator (looks and kinda acts like the Mac OSX Dock) and all of the eye candy switched on. It makes me happy and does what I need for work, which is being a sysadmin. It also looks sexy while doing it.

If Apple would just provide me with a 15″ MacBook Pro with 1690×1200 screen real estate, I’d buy it. It would have Parallels on it and I’d have Linux for Unix-ing, Mac for day-to-day and MS for D&D Character Builder, KotOR and if I could make it work on W7, Vampire: Bloodlines. I miss that one. Maybe WW will get their MMORPG together soon.

And to whoever said that Windows can multitask, I salute your miracle. This lappy of mine dual boots, has a 512Mb nVidia chip, 4GB of hard Ram and screams in Linux and on its best day, ambles in Windows XP. My personal experience.

I’m a PC enthusiast but I recommend all my non-gamer friends get Macs if they can afford them; I even recommend Macs to Windows-bound business types if they can stomach the extra cost of dual-booting and/or virtualizing. They pay anywhere from 50-150% more than they would equivalent PC components, but they get Mac OS (which just works) and access to Apple support (which also just works) and extremely nice Apple enclosures and chassis (which are durable and sexylicious).

I dunno why W7 would slow down your computer unless you do an “update” as opposed to a reinstall. Never use a Windows update/upgrade service! You should always reinstall. If you have a competent backup system it shouldn’t be a problem. I just install Windows and vital apps on C:/, then image the system and store that on another drive (I use Acronis True Image, but there’s free cloning software). Every 3-4 months I just revert to that old image and have a fresh install again without the hassle of actually reinstalling (it’s a 15 minute unattended process). Takes another ~5 minutes to grab pending Windows updates.

Regards store-based versions of your work: it depends on the format (and thus, the publisher & platform). If your stuff is in a proprietary container that can only be accessed on certain devices or in certain programs I probably won’t bother. If there’s a particularly good collection I might buy it and figure out how to remove the DRM so I can put it on whatever devices I want. That’s really just a stupid proposition, DRM — “we’re going to make the user experience worse for the people who legitimately buy our content and better for pirates.” That’s not a good way to gather patrons.