So you want to be able to play a game? You don’t know if your current system can play the game? Well this little website Can You Run it has the ability to show you in details of what does and what doesn’t work. It will recommend software or hardware that can be upgraded to allow you to play your game. It allows you to see where you can improve or where you Can Run it!! I’ve always have a question of what will run and what won’t. With this website, I know what will run and what won’t on my current system. If I need to upgrade, I know what needs to be upgraded and what will work. I have this site bookmarked for just that. If I have an inclination of wanting to buy a game. This is the first place I go for just that. I don’t want to buy a game a have to upgrade the whole system just to play a 40$ game. I also like to know when my system is too old for current games. Can you Run it — I can!!
Turn off Sidebar:
Turning of the windows Sidebar helps with performance and reliability of Vista. Some people tell me it is nice to have that up. I say this, it’s using system resources and isn’t going to help you out when you’re running on a battery. Here is how you do this:
Control Panel>Classic View>Windows Sidebar Properties
Check your Power Plan when you are on battery:
Doing this will help you with your battery power. By making sure your got your CPU on power Saver when on battery power you will save battery life and will give you more time to use the laptop.
Control Panel>Classic View>Power Options
Change windows for Performance:
By changing Windows Aero to look like basic you can boost your battery life by not using any unneeded video acceleration. Doing this will save your battery and will give you 30 more minutes on your battery. It’s 4% to 5% battery increase but all this will make your battery last longer.
Control Panel>Classic View>Performance Information and Tools>Adjust Visual Effects
As you can see, if you like some of the effects, you can customize it to your liking, but keep in mind the more you use the less your have on battery life. It also affects your system speed, so you may want the computer speed so keep the appearance to a minimum.
Turn off UAC:
UAC has been nothing but trouble for me so I’ve just turned it off, I suspect it is also helping my battery but I am not going to hazard a guess on how much.
Start Menu>type>Msconfig on the Search bar. run the Msconfig and then you go to: Select Tools Tab, then find Disable UAC and double click it. Reboot and you no longer have UAC.
Download Battery Saver:
Downloading Battery Saver will let you pick when and how to deactivate some of these things when you unplug your power cable. This little Utility comes with a lot of possibilities. It allows you to decide when to deactivate Windows Aero and Sidebar which helps on battery life.
There are several other things to consider when you’re trying to save battery power:
Turn off all unnecessary programs in the background.
Dim your LCD by hitting the Function Key + Left Arrow several times.
This also will improve battery life by not draining it. It will dim it to the lowest setting and will extend the battery.
These tips will improve your battery life in Vista but I do not know by how much time will be extended. I hope these tips will help you out when it comes to using your laptop out in the wild and not wanting to worry about time. Let me know what you think and I’d like to hear all the comments. Enjoy
This is one of those things that will effect us all. I am worried that the low-income families who need internet access will not be able to afford to pay for this type of bandwidth. Let’s look at the article and see:
The company believes the billing system will impact only heavy users, who account for around 5 percent of all customers but typically use more than half of the total network bandwidth, according to a company spokesman.
What only 5 percent most people now a days are watching HULU and stuff that is IPTV like AppleTV and Itunes, even NetFlix Downloads(Which can be a big file download). That alone is more than 5 percent. More like 50 to 60 percent and will impact a lot of families. It is cheaper and faster and more reliable to do this then to watch it on Cable. I think Time Warner is definitely worried, I know I am. I would have to be charged to watch all my favorite TV Shows on the net. I think Time Warner should go IPTV and get it over with!! let’s continue with this:
But the move could prove controversial. Unlike with utility bills such as the phone or electricity, which have traditionally been based on usage, U.S. high-speed Internet subscribers have come to expect a fixed monthly charge. An Internet bill typically only varies based on the speed of the consumer’s Internet access.
Yes this is going to be controversial and very unlikely going to happen due to the fact that people will complain and complain, if we stand up for this we will win but if we don’t we will lose. I know we’ve come to expect a price on internet but we shouldn’t be forced to changed. If time warner does this most people will go to FIOS or other companies like FIOS TV. Just some things to consider when calling Time warner. I urge everyone to stand up and make a voice to Time Warner, and tell everyone you know about what Time Warner is doing. This right now is being done in small portion of Texas and I know they are not liking this. Let your voice be heard!! Thanks to Geek News Central for the heads up!!
After a long and hard last few weeks with XBOX Live being up and down. There has been a class action lawsuit file against them.
Lawsuit Accuses Microsoft of breach of contract, breach of warranty, and negligent misrepresentation for not better warning subscribers that the service could suffer the kind of outages. These outages have been going on for quite some time. A few weeks in fact.
Earlier this week Major Nelson who is working in Xbox and has a podcast stated that “the pending outcome of the lawsuit means no more updates can be given to the users and paying customers. The progress of the repair is forcing Microsoft to be quite about it.” The podcast that Major Nelson talks about this is:
Does that mean Mommy is keep the child quite over this? I think so. I think Microsoft should be made to talk about this. This is customer rights and information and we have the right no know what is going on. We after all are paying for the service if your a Gold Member? Silver well you aren’t paying for the service so you really don’t have any rights. I think the government should step in and make them tell the truth. They have an obligation to the public whether they like it or not. Please leave comments on what you think!
As you can see there is something in the air. That’s the Macbook Air. It’s really small, Might be interesting to play around with it. Any thoughts people?
This is the Time Capsule, a Network Attached Storage Device. It will come with 500Gb to 1 Terabyte Hard drive. It’s also going to be able to be wireless. 802.11 B, G, And the New N series.
Apple talks about Renting Movies instead of buying them straight off. The Prices for movies are 2.99$ (old movies), 3.99$ (New movies) and 4.99$ (HD Movies). Some of the rules are “You can keep the movie on your system for 30 days, once you start viewing the moving you have 1 day to watch the movie.”
There are some other things Steve Jobs talked about these were the picks that I thought were the most important. I really think Steve did a good job keeping a lid on some of this news and can’t wait to see the movies on itunes. That’s the next place I’m going!! Enjoy
Now in an article I read Blue Ray Takes the Lead by a blog called ITola. I was reading this and had to ask myself some questions and try to figure out some answers.
Is HD Players really Dead?
My Answer is : “NO”
I don’t say that lightly for several reasons. Recently today Arstechnica states that Universal and Paramount haven’t changed there stance on switching to Blu-Ray. Now why is that a big deal, it just proves that there is something that Blu-Ray Founders don’t know . Here’s what I know, having thought about this for several days. If cable companies start offering Blu-ray HD movies in there service that is some major bandwitdth. Even though HD DVDS are 15 GB and Blu-ray DVD’s are 20 GB, Blu-ray Movies would take some time to download or stream it. Blu-ray would have to compresse the file into small pieces to even view the movie. Although HD movies are a little smaller they require less bandwitdth and in doing so are faster and easier to watch on Hulu and other sites like that. They have a HD Gallery that is really nice to watch on my intel and seems to work really well for an example of the HD Horton Hears a Who! – Trailer to see what I mean by the HD. I love how they stream it without much of a problem. Now if that was going to be a Blu-Ray HD movie it would be crazy to try to stream it. I think HD will not die, it will however change if needed into a way to stream really good video and movies on the internet. I think we haven’t seen the HD and Blu-ray Wars going way soon. It will continue without much help from anyone. The way I see it, the world will always change and go about it’s business. I know there is always going to be a choice and I hope to see this type of competition more often with players.
So you want to be able to play a game? You don’t know if your current system can play the game? Well this little website Can You Run it has the ability to show you in details of what does and what doesn’t work. It will recommend software or hardware that can be upgraded to allow you to play your game. It allows you to see where you can improve or where you Can Run it!! I’ve always have a question of what will run and what won’t. With this website, I know what will run and what won’t on my current system. If I need to upgrade, I know what needs to be upgraded and what will work. I have this site bookmarked for just that. If I have an inclination of wanting to buy a game. This is the first place I go for just that. I don’t want to buy a game a have to upgrade the whole system just to play a 40$ game. I also like to know when my system is too old for current games.
So I’ve been Playing Half-Life 2 and Enjoying it so much. I’ve had a problem with Vista popping up and saying “The igfx video driver has stopped responding and has recovered!”. Which means this, that the game goes black and stops being played. It’s an annoying Vista flaw, I am thinking that if it wasn’t Vista it wouldn’t of happened. I’ve got the Minimum system specs for the game. DirectX 7.0 Compatible, 512 Megabytes of Ram, 128 megabytes Video Ram Card(some supported cards here but I don’t have one of those cards!), and Windows NT/XP/2000/98.
I did a little research and found out that the game was only using 256 megabytes of ram. How do I know? I went into the Taskmanager Manager and looked at hl2.exe (it was around 254 megs of memory!). So that got me thinking, I have 1024 megabytes(1 gigabyte memory) and I was using 256 megabytes of that for video. Well I still had over 700 megabytes of memory to use.
I did some digging and found this great article about Steam and Commands that I could put in to force Half-Life 2 to co-operate. The article is from the Linux Community and using the WINE engine to help people to play Half-Life 2 with Linux. This little option is available to most of the Steam community. To use these commands, one must do some stuff check farther down for details. These commands are:
Command Line Commands
-heapsize [Kilobytes]: This command tells Half Life 2 to allocate more RAM to the game system heap, where it can be accessed by the game to improve performance by storing more game information in RAM and hence reducing loading pauses. The default heapsize is 64MB, however you can safely allocate around 128MB (i.e. -heapsize 128000) for most systems. You can use higher values if you have more RAM, but I don’t recommend exceeding half your physical RAM (e.g. for 1GB RAM, set heapsize of 512000).
-console: Speeds up the loading of Half Life 2 at startup by not loading up the background 3D graphics on the main menu and instead loading up a blurry background picture and the Half Life 2 console open. Note you can close this console using the ‘~’ key.
-width [pixels] -height [pixels]: Using these two commands you can set a custom resolution in Pixel Width x Pixel Height (e.g. -width 640 height 480 starts HL2 with 640×480 resolution). Make sure you choose a resolution supported by your monitor and with the correct ratio of width to height (usually 4:3).
-dxlevel [version]: Using this command allows you to force Half Life into only using the specified DirectX version for shaders. For example, use -dxlevel 70 to force Hardware DirectX7.0 level support for shaders. This means a reduction in image quality but an increase in performance. Other values include -dxlevel 80 -dxlevel 81 and -dxlevel90. Note that this only works if you choose a DirectX version which is lower than the current one supported by your graphics card. See the Hardware DirectX Version option under the In-Game settings for more details.
-refresh [Hz]: Specifies the refresh rate the game will use upon loading. This is normally not required as your system should already use the optimal refresh rate at your chosen resolution. However if this is not the case you can force it to a specific refresh rate (e.g. -rate 85). Make absolutely certain that the rate you are trying to apply does not exceed your monitor’s capabilities otherwise you may damage your monitor – especially if you change resolutions and forget to change this option.
-novid: Disables the intro video so that Half-Life 2 loads a bit faster.
Now what I used to make Half-Life 2 a more enjoyable game was to go into steam program and Right click Half-Life 2 and select properties Then select : “Select launch options” and I added this:
“-console -heapsize 512000 -dxlevel 70”
Now let’s clarify some of this:
the heapsize I set that to add more memory for Half-Life 2 to make it around 512 megabytes. I then told it to Use only DirectX 7.0. Now when Direct X 7.0 was out you could only have 128 megabytes of Video so that was fine. I’ve got 256 megabytes of shared video memory, I Just told it to use only 128 so it actually helped out the game performance. I Got a more stable game to where I could play for hours without any annoying glitches and got to see the story line. I will say you shouldn’t use this particular setting unless you have enough memory. I think Vista is having trouble with Direct X 10.0 because the change of the game was surprisingly smoother. I am not sure why it works I just know it does. I hope this helps other gamers out with this little problem, I’ve had with Vista and all.
If you like this an other posts I’ve done please show your support by telling people to come here or just click the links at the bottom and let people know you like what I’ve written, this is the only way the blog will grow!! Thanks
VERIFY YOUR GMAIL ACCOUNT NOW TO AVOID CLOSE !!!
GMAIL lettering
Dear Member,
This message is from gmail message center to all gmail free account owners and premium account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center. We are deleting all unused gmail account to create more space for new accounts.
To prevent your account from closing, you will have to verify it below so that we will know that it’s a present used account.
CONFIRM YOUR IDENTITY. VERIFY YOUR FREE GMAIL ACCOUNT NOW !!!
Gmail! ID:…………………….
Password:……………………
Your Birthday:……………..
Your Country or Territory:………..
Enter the letter from the Security Image :……… Registration Verification Code
Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account before two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.
Sincerely,
Gmail Team
This actually got through the spam filter. I did some checking with Google and here are the results if anyone else gets the email:
I am sure there are more but these were enough to make me think this is a scam so I will not reply to it. I did want to warn everyone else about this little scam, I am calling it that because it has to be a scam. If you get this email just report it as spam and go on with your life!!
To think these guys don’t know how easy it is to figure out it’s a phishing attach. I will tell you this. Banks and other Financial areas will not email you to email them with your personal login information. Please don’t click links also that is also a form of phishing attacks. It will send you to sites that look like the true blue site but it is 85% of the time not going to be the site you think.
VERIFY YOUR GMAIL ACCOUNT NOW TO AVOID CLOSE !!!
GMAIL lettering
Dear Member,
This message is from gmail message center to all gmail free account owners and premium account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center. We are deleting all unused gmail account to create more space for new accounts.
To prevent your account from closing, you will have to verify it below so that we will know that it’s a present used account.
CONFIRM YOUR IDENTITY. VERIFY YOUR FREE GMAIL ACCOUNT NOW !!!
Gmail! ID:…………………….
Password:……………………
Your Birthday:……………..
Your Country or Territory:………..
Enter the letter from the Security Image :……… Registration Verification Code
Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account before two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.
Sincerely,
Gmail Team
This actually got through the spam filter. I did some checking with Google and here are the results if anyone else gets the email:
I am sure there are more but these were enough to make me think this is a scam so I will not reply to it. I did want to warn everyone else about this little scam, I am calling it that because it has to be a scam. If you get this email just report it as spam and go on with your life!!
To think these guys don’t know how easy it is to figure out it’s a phishing attach. I will tell you this. Banks and other Financial areas will not email you to email them with your personal login information. Please don’t click links also that is also a form of phishing attacks. It will send you to sites that look like the true blue site but it is 85% of the time not going to be the site you think.
| Posted by Paul Sylvester 
So you want to be able to play a game? You don’t know if your current system can play the game? Well this little website Can You Run it
has the ability to show you in details of what does and what doesn’t work. It will recommend software or hardware that can be upgraded to allow you to play your game. It allows you to see where you can improve or where you Can Run it!
Categories: Uncategorized | 
Tags: Can you Run it, Console Systems, games, Personal blog, Uncategorized
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