pc Archive

7 articles

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

There are several things that make Brothers a unique and worthwhile experience, despite its length. And I hope that by publishing a review of my experience, others will give it a shot or a second look, if they've already passed it by.

WTF: Unreal Tournament 3

Some big news was announced a couple days ago in the land of video games. The former PC/PS3 exclusive Unreal Tournament 2007 is now headed to the Xbox 360 and has been renamed, Unreal Tournament 3. Wait, what? Now, it's been a while since I've been in school so my math skills are a little hazy, but doesn't 3+1=4? I've been a fan of the UT series since it's debut and have all current releases sitting next to me as I type this. All 3 of them - Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004. Notice, there's no Unreal Tournament 2 in that list and there's also 3 of them.

So Long PC

Late last week I did something I've wanted to do for what seems like months on end - I bought a big, beautiful Mac. I've been a PC user since day one and have only had a Mac of my own for a short time while I was working for the Participatory Culture Foundation. Since the day I sent it back to MA, I've missed it dearly. My PC has been giving me so much grief lately, I couldn't tolerate it any more and simply hopped in my car one morning at 10am when the Apple Store opened, and returned with a massive box containing my shiny, new 24" iMac.

Busted

Sunday morning I was presented with a blank screen after firing up my PC. Switched over to the Mac and everything's a-ok. Son-of-a! Time for a new video card. I jumped on the local shop websites to see what was in stock. What do you know... nothing! Suddenly my plans to do absolutely nothing turned into a road trip to pick up a new video card. Luckily, I was able to score the new AGP version of the Nvidia 7800 for a reasonable price and only half an hour out of the way. I know it's time to make the jump to a PCI-Express enabled mother board, but that means a new processor and reformatting so I'm holding out and will just get a whole new machine. I was going to upgrade any more on my current rig, but this was kind of unavoidable. And I'm not going to complain about having a 7800 in my box. ;-)

The Importance of Proper Cooling in a Gaming PC

Over the past couple weeks, I've barely played any games at all. I got back into F.E.A.R. and have almost finished it, but my system has not being running so hot lately - actually, it's been running very hot, which brings me to the topic of this post. Over the past year I've replaced just about every piece of hardware. I started with the motherboard and worked my way out. Most recently replacing my 266MHz memory with a pair of 512MB, 400MHz Corsair XMS ProSeries RAM. Since my CPU has a front side bus of 800MHz, I was looking forward to a pretty significant performance increase. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case at all. After installing the RAM, I noticed no increase at all. Still the same hiccups and lags remained. It was time to do some serious troubleshooting - having dropped so much cash on my machine over the past year, I wasn't ready to give up on it just yet. I knew there had to be a cause for the slowdowns and poor performance I'm seeing.

Xbox 360 Controller For Windows: Review

I may be able to wait to drop a few hundred on an Xbox 360, but I couldn't resist picking up a controller to use on my PC. They don't come cheap - I paid close to $60 (CDN) and I almost wish I hadn't. For whatever reason, there hasn't been a whole lot of chatter on this topic. Which is why I was so eager to pick one up. I have a couple Logitech gamepads, but they're nowhere near as good as the Xbox controller. Since the first time I squeezed those triggers, I've never looked back. Best game controller design ever! Especially for racing games. With most gamepads, it's all or nothing. With an Xbox controller, the triggers act as a third axis (z) allowing you to apply as much or little pressure as desired. Since I've been playing Need For Speed Most Wanted a lot these days, I was itching for those triggers and picked up a 360 controller on release day.

Upgrades In Progress Pt. 2

When I left off, I still had some significant PC hardware to pick up. I’ve since upgraded to a 520 W PSU and a P4 3.2 GHZ processor. Battlefield 2 is running pretty smooth now. I could still use some more ram, but that’ll come in time. I love getting new hardware because it always […]