What Laptop is good For gaming?

I been thinking of getting a new laptop but would like to get one that is good for gaming.   The system I have right now is an Aspire Series 5610z and Yes it a good system.

The current system of this is:

Acer Aspire 5610Z
Intel Pentium dual core 1.6Ghz (533Mhz, 1Mb L2 Cache)
15.4 WXGA CrystalBrite
Intel Grahics Media Accelerator 950
1GB DDR2
120GB HDD
DVD Duper Multilayer burner
802.11b/g
bluetooth
Vista Home Premium

Now I want to consider getting another laptop but don’t know which would be good for gaming.  I know it will have Vista.  I actually like the O/S.  Although people don’t.   Here is what I want from my readers.  I want to know which system you suggest for gaming, and need as much detail as possilbe I would like to buy this from Amazon but if Amazon, so please give me links to the amazon page.   I am wanting to play some current games on this from last year but this system is not able to do some of the games.  So leave a comment and tell me which ones you suggest.

Signs of a Computer Infection!

So I was thinking this morning what I missed and I totally missed on how you might be able to tell if you have a computer virus. It does me no good to talk about a virus if you don’t know you’re infected. I was thinking of the times I had a client who had trouble but wasn’t what I thought.

So How do you know?

Some people would say it depends on factors but here are what I call clues that make me suspect a virus:

1. Slow or Sluggish computers –  Here is what I know if the computer is really slowing down and have a dual core or quad core.  If you are running a system and sees a lot of hard drive activity even when the computer is idle then it might be a virus or it could be a program doing what it is supposed to be doing.  So this is somewhat of an indication but not always.
2. Slow internet connection on the computer or on the network — Due to the fact that most people have a router that is connected to all the computers and if you internet connection on all your systems are slower than normal then you could have a virus.  I use Speed Test website to help determine this.

Facebook : Beware Spam for breakfast. (Virus)

In today’s society, we’ve been to complacent with people with people clicking links for the social group. In one such article on Channel Web, a nice little blog, says this:

The worm was discovered by IT security provider Kaspersky Lab, which said the threat, Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, is targeting Facebook users by creating spam messages and sending them to the infected user’s friends via the site.

“Unfortunately, users are very trusting of messages left by ‘friends’ on social networking sites,” said Alexander Gostev, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab, in a statement. “So, the likelihood of a user clicking on a link like this is very high.”

[Via Channel Web]

This seems to be a problem people thinking that a link someone sends them is a real good link but actually is a link to a video site. According to this article the links people are sending are actually a fake video link, telling you have to download some update to flash player, by downloading this program. The user gets involved with the virus and the fun begins. So how can you prevent this from happening, two ways one is a very good group of software to make sure you have the latest and greatest video codecs. That too can be something they’ll say you need and if you’ve already installed this list of codecs then you know they’ll not telling the truth and you can quickly get away from the site laughing.

GTA 4 Causes fatal error mma10, how to fix it!!

After seeing all this happened I thought I would help people out on how to fix it.   This seems to be a DRM problem according to some reports.  Others are thinking it is the Securerom.  Anyways the problem seems to be with the Rockstar Social Club and not to log in to that.  That will fix the problem, you will at least be able to play the single player game.  This is a temporary fix till the developers fix in the update.  This will also fix the Steam version of the game.

Google SearchWiki dies after two days!!

According to Techcrunch Google Pulls the Google SearchWiki.  Unsure as to way  but here’s what they said:

Users are reporting that the recent changes to Google’s search engine, called SearchWiki, have simply disappeared from the site. It’s certainly gone from my account.

User reactions were mixed but weighted heavily towards “this is lame,” and there was no way to turn off the features other than to conduct Google searches without being logged in. Another way to turn it off was to switch search engines.

[via TechCrunch]

I’ve got my theory on this, and it’s quite a good theory.   I think it was a making search results come up wrong or not at all.   The last two days they’ve had that going my page views have drop BIG time.    According to my Stats I’ve had 236 Unique Visits for Thursday, and 232 Wednesday.   My Friday stats show that I only got 185 Unique Visits, dropping 40 to 50 people.  My stats for today which is incomplete shows that I’ve only gotten 136 unique visits.  Although that is complete you can see where I dropped drastically.   I think Google was getting yelled at by websites due to the stats dropping.   I am guessing people could tell if they wanted to go to a site just by reading the comments.  This will hurt every site, including TechCrunch.   I will say this is only a theory and this might or might not be the case.

Google Creates the ultimate Search Wiki!!

Google has started to do let people rate the searches and help find the better articles. Google is calling it Searchwiki. Here is a screen shot:

You can now help judge and rate search results.   You can also X out the ones that are not right.   I am going to play around with this even more.  It started out on Google Trends and Now people are all wanting to know more about this.   This could help my site even more.   I want to know what others are thinking about this?  Is this Good or can this be good for the spammers?  You decide.

Some other Websites talking about this are:

• TechCrunch
• Wall Street Journal
• ZDNet

These are just a few but I wanted to let you see what other websites are talking about this new feature. I do want to hear what you think about all this and what is likely to come later on?

Looks like a scam to me : Personal Shopping Assistant!

Good afternoon!

We found your resume at _________________ and we would like to propose you a
position of Personal Shopping Assistant.

Imagine having an exciting job with incredible salary (up to $100,000/year) that
lets you use your creativity while being paid to shop. Welcome to the world of
personal shopping!

As we know shopping is the world’s favorite leisure activity, but in our busy
society an increasing number of people need to hire someone to do their
shopping. Thus personal shoppers are more in demand than ever before.

There are absolutely NO START-UP FEES and NO FEES for being employed at this
position. As long as you live in the USA, and you have a credit card or any
other line of credit, have 1 or 2 free hours during the day – you are eligible
for this job!

This is what you will have to do in short:
• Purchase the requested goods using your credit card.
• Send us receipts.
• Wait for us to issue a credit to your credit card in the amount of purchase
plus shipping fee plus your commission which comprises 10%.
• Ship out the goods.
• You are finished, come back for a new list of goods.

A good free VPN Client — OpenVPN & more

I’ve been doing some research on what might be good to use in case, I was away from my home network.  I was thinking how safe am I at Starbucks or other places that I might doing my web.  So I did a little looking around to see which one I liked and I came to the conclusions that only one I need right now is:

The nice thing about this was the simple installation of the software and how easy it was to set it up. This service is in beta but seems to be really well done with regards to the end users. When you install this software and want to connect it uses the OpenVPN software with there configurations. OpenVPN, is a open sourced SSL VPN solution and is free to use. The way this this free is of Ad Supported banners. Now it is cheaper than paying monthly for a VPN service. The ones I’ve found so far are these few:

• OpenVPN (FREE)(*advertisement)(Linux, and Windows)
• Always VPN (Prepay) (5 GB to 80 GB limit) (Linux, Mac and Windows)*Out of Beta
  
• Hotspot Shield (FREE) (*advertisement) (Windows) (3 gig Cap)
  

WOW:Chamber of Secrets might have a Copyright issue on there Hands!!

At any rate, the quest is called Chamber of Secrets and asks you to investigate the Servant’s Quarters of Karazhan for a new NPC (possibly boss). [via Curse.com]

So I sit here thinking how interesting this could be!!!  WOW is having a quest called “Chamber of Secrets”.  Now I don’t know much but this might infringe on Harry Potter’s Book Chamber of Secrets?  Would someone like clarify me this point.  I’m going to keep my eye on this one!!!

• The Reward can be found at Monster Slayer’s Kit
• Quest is probably going to be on nod Castlevania series

White House is Open to a new Stimulus Check Yet again?

The Economy is still trying to rebound after being told that there is a recession coming our way.  Can they actually make the economy better by introducing even more money?  Did it help the last time around?  The 2008 Stimulus Check that they released doesn’t seem to have made a great amount of difference.  So why introduce even more money into a economy that will have to bottom out, sooner, or later.

You see having the economy bottom out, is actually good for it.   It clears away the dead and creates life, just like a forest fire it will create even more life in the future.

So what about this New Stimulus Check that the White house is thinking of doing?  Are we going to have to pay more in the future for this so called free money?   I am curious as to what people think about this?   Do you want another Stimulus check or should we let the economy fix itself?

5 ways to improve your chance of getting hired.

Having seen the economy this week, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is time to redo all the important essentials and get all my ducks in the order as they say.   I’ve been thinking of how best to be ready in case the dreaded day comes when my employer no longer needs my assistance and what could I do to be prepared.

• Get Someone to Critique your Resume — This is the most important step because this is the first place employers look when they want to hire someone.  So how do you get it critiqued?   Here are some good links to help you start off with:  Careerbuilder Critique, Mind of Root Peer Critique(Last until Oct 30, 2008).
• Have your Resume Ready to upload to Resume sites –  You should always register at all the important resume sites just in case.  The Sites that I recommend are : Monster, Career Builder,  Hot jobs, Dice, US jobs, Best Jobs USA, Computer Jobs, and Nation Job.
• Use your website as a place to put your Resume – Have your resume available in case some contacts you and tells you they know someone who is looking to hire people.  Have this resume hidden and only give it out to people you know.   This is also known as networking.
  

Living the Life of a Blogger 101

Having been blogging for the last few months and years. I’ve learned so much from blogger the platform. I thought I would talk about that in this post. To give those who want to use Googles Blogger platform to there fullest. It is inconsequential to the grand scheme of blogging. It is not enough to just blog it has to be some kind of meaning in it. You have to think of how best can I help people out. It is legal to use fair use. That is why congress has put it into congress.

Fair Use comes from the idea of using something that is ‘Copyrighted’ and use some portion of it to talk about or as a demonstration. Most people don’t understand that, you can use anything on the web as long as you don’t publish there material fully. I like to us hulu for example. I’ve embedded there videos on my site, and talked about Hulu from time. This last few weeks they had clues out on there site. I started trying to solve the clues they Published to better help figuring out there clues. Although they might consider there promotion as being copyrighted. I used there clues to publish what I considered was fair use. They couldn’t do much other than smile that some one started blogging about there clues weekly because once they published there clues. I had the right to try to figure the clues out. I actually loved doing it.

Use Exploratree to Plan A Project or Idea

Plan a project or map an idea with Exploratree, a free online library of “thinking guides” you can either print out or use online. Templates include the Futures Wheel pictured above, thinking boxes, compare and contrast, and a lot more. Each template is customizable; you can also use them to collaborate on projects with other people.

Exploratree