Published on
January 30, 2008 in
General.
I went the Staffs Gaming LAN party just this weekend gone and it was really fun, nice organisers and generally nice people attending. I had a few problems with my LAN Party PC and ended up taking my quad core PC which wasn’t ideal but it was my only option.
LAN Parties are a great way to meet new friends aswell which is always nice. As a first timer I thought everyone was helpful on the Staffs Gaming forums and helped me make a little checklist regarding what to bring. It’s not just PC gaming either, most places allow you to take consoles, this is fun as you can have Co-Op Guitar Hero 3, 3 hour long sessions at 3am whilst 7 people are asleep in the same room and having Holiday In Cambodia blasting from the speakers.
I will definatly be attending the next SG LAN’s and if you live around the Staffordshire/Stoke area I would highly recommend coming down and joining in the games!
If you are interested, the Staffs Gaming forums are located here. SG LAN’s can accomodate around 30 people at the moment but their are bigger LAN’s, for instance Central LAN UK. I have never been to a big LAN so I can’t comment on them but I do like the small ones as you get to know everyone who is there.
Published on
January 30, 2008 in
General.
I bought my Razer and Microsoft collaborative mouse back in October 2006, it’s a nice mouse, comfortable, pretty accurate and the software ain’t to bad.
I have used this mouse daily for about 1 year and 4 months, over this period there has been various problems with the mouse, upgrading the firmware and software was a kick in the teeth, you had to perform some sort of hocus pocus to get the damn thing to update, once it did finally update everything was good and well, after this effort Razer (Who deals with the firmware and software) got their act together with the updates and everyone was happy.
November 2007 came and I bought a new PC, I also purchased a new mouse mat over my old generic one as you may have seen in previous posts, I had erractic behaviour with the mouse and I then went on to buy another mouse mat and it seemed to pretty much resolve the problem completly. I still cannot go in a straight line with the mouse as it glitches and moves around the screen on it’s own.
Yesterday I was playing Call of Duty 4 and I kept hearing the Windows XP USB disconncting and connecting sounds and my mouse would stop working for a few seconds, thought this was just the USB not plugged in all the way, it wasn’t. I dropped a support ticket with Razer and again, like last time I contacted them regarding Habu issues they just ignore the message, regardless of what it says, and pass me onto Microsoft. Support tickets to Microsoft refer me to Razer Support. This is an endless loop and neither company wants anything to do with it.
Luckily I recieved a Razer Diamondback 3G in the post a few weeks ago that came with a magazine subscription, it is not as comfortable as the Habu but it works, as can keep in a straight line. I think I will keep to Razer’s own products and optical sensors from now on.
</rant>
Published on
January 16, 2008 in
General.
I was pestered into going a LAN Party by a friend, I have never been one but always wanted to, so, I didn’t want to take my new PC as it’s rather heavy and seeing as I have a rather mid range spec PC sitting in my room I thought I would upgrade specific components and get it running again.
I then started enquiring around, a friend had a few bits and pieces he wanted to sell so I enquired about them (Thanks William) and ended up buying his Antec Nine Hundred and his old graphics card, an MSI 8600GT which had been factory overclocked and had recently had a Zalman VF900-CU fitted onto it, a nice bargain and ended up giving him a bit more than he asked.
Got it built up on a temporary hard drive and installed as many games as I could before running out of space. Waiting for my wages to come to resolve that issue but that is easily done. Got off a few pics of it, this is not in its finished state. I have bought some Hammerite smooth black spray for the inside of the game to get rid of the ugly metal look and make it look darker and stand out from the rest, also plan on getting a new PSU that has black braided cables to help with the cable mangement as the temporary PSU is a generic 350W which is far from ideal.
The final component spec is listed here but as soon as I can locate another 512mb stick of RAM it will be going to 2048MB dual channel which should help. CPU is running at a cool 20C (ambient!) so that gives a good bit of overclocking headroom if the motherboard obliges.
