upgrades posts

We all love upgrades -- whether it's just an additional stick of memory, a new sound card, or a whole new rig -- but there's the small matter of what to do with the upgraded-from stuff. At some point, all your tech-averse family members will have systems built out of your cast-off components, and want something a tad more potent than a P3 800. At the same time, your significant other, who has caught onto the fact that fragging you is an excellent way of relieving stress, will demand to be on equal technical footing.

You are, in short, eventually going to be stuck with some dead tech. Or, as a reader of this column, something more akin to a moderately-sized drift of it. The laws of physics being what they are, and lacking a handy TARDIS in most of our spare bedrooms, we will eventually need to do something about it.

There is a tremendous amount of discussion as far as what to do when your PC reaches end-of-life (and, truly, this has hit close to home for BI, as the three-year old Dell at his day job gave him the electronic middle finger, and summarily refused to boot this week, earning much-needed retirement, and subsequent replacement with a shinier, faster, and far less recalcitrant black obelisk).

But what should you do with that dead tech? Googling "old computers never die" yields more than six million results.

With the impending deployment of a new calendar (why, hello Miss January), a young gamer's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of higher resolutions, better anti-aliasing levels, and new DX10.1 effects. But something is knocking the luster off the lust faster than dropping Aunt Edna's fruitcake in your lap. Jacking up a single setting is dropping your framerate to a crawl, even with the latest drivers hot off ATI or Nvidia's server.

You've got multiple CPU cores and a fistful of dollarsRAM, and things still aren't remaining as smooth and speedy as you'd like? In short, is stuffing another video card in your box the way to achieve Nirvana? Chances are, if you're already sporting a rig with the aforementioned goodies, a multi-GPU setup is about the only way to get a performance bump. The question becomes, is throwing another couple hundred dollars at the problem worth it?

Ready to put the screws to all that shiny stuff and get the most out of your rig? It's time to scare away the timid, or drag them screaming into the realm of the technorati.

It's time to tweak your BIOS.

That's right, it's time to play with the Blue Screen of Life. None of that namby-pamby, "I fell on my face choking on a device driver and puked up a memory address error" Blue Screen of Death crap today. We've got Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of Beethoven's Ninth cranked up, and it's time to soar to new heights.

Besides, cranking up clock speeds is an excellent way to keep warm in the absence of hot cocoa, egg nog, or Irish coffee (which are fattening, vile, and not allowed at the office, respectively).

Tim Allen wasn't precisely the same flavor of hardware guy that we are, but his Tool Time mantra, "More Power!" certainly resonates with a lot of computer enthusiasts. Not only do the games we play and the applications we use require more and more computational chutzpah to perform well, but the silicon bits themselves are not shy about sucking down the wattage to do it.

If you're considering an upgrade or a new build, you're going to need to feed that beast. Onward, to the supplies of power!

Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead, Red Alert 3, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2 -- oh my! Folks declaring the death of PC gaming are clearly smoking something, as all those games and more have been making waves at E3 this week. You're going to need a computer to run those, right? Thing is, these days notebooks are outselling desktops by quite a large margin. And for good reason -- who wants a giant, bulky brick uglying up their space?

Hence the rise of gaming laptops. To help you make the call on which one to get and how to configure it, GameDaily has a guide to buying a gaming notebook. It's mostly beginner stuff -- and some of it we kinda wonder about; it asserts that a 1280x800 screen resolution is too low for serious gaming, for example, which we're not sure everyone cares about quite so much. In fact, wouldn't you want a lower screen resolution to ensure that your notebook will be able to handle newer games at the native resolution for a longer time? But all around it's a good intro to what you need to look out for. Give it a read if you're in the market.

Behind every single one of the games we love, it lurks. The lucky ones never fall prey to it. Some can barely escape its grasp. And it changes and evolves with every new title that comes to market.

What is this modern Grue, waiting to devour the unwary or unprepared? What rough beast, its hour come 'round at last, slouches towards NewEgg to be born?

The system requirements to play your favorite title, or the hottest new game coming down the pipe.

If your PC can't deliver a decent level of performance, it's all but impossible to enjoy playing a game. Fortunately, there are several factors that have come into play to allow the vast majority of us, the gaming public, to do so. At the very beginning are the minimum and recommended system requirements published by the game developers themselves. These specifications aren't drawn up out of the blue, but are laid down by the devs in order to make sure that anyone who wants to play their game can do so with the expectation of a decent level of performance.