All of the keyboards that have come through lately have had one thing in common – Cherry’s MX switches, which have a light action and that familiar clackety clack sound that evokes an old fashioned typewriter. They come in different flavours – my favourite are the smooth action Cherry MX Reds of the K60 and MK-85 – but they all make standard plastic dome keyboards feel like typing in treacle. If only there was a relatively good value ergonomic keyboard that uses them – I’d struggle to write without the layout of my Microsoft 7000 typist’s friend these days.

The question I find myself asking is this: how much longer would a mechanical keyboard really last me? Is it, at two to three times the cost, a sensible economic investment? The answer is a most definite yes: most keyboards have keys that are rated for about a million or two activations before failure. Cherry’s MX switches are supposed to last for 50 million operations before they wear out.

What does that mean, though? How many words is 50 million characters? In the interest of a lazy Friday afternoon, here’s a few things you can do with a single key of a mechanical keyboard before it breaks (assuming it makes it through to the maximum lifespan).

Things you can do…

• Play StarCraft 2 for 1,388 hours at 600APM
• Type for 772 hours the world record speed of 216 words per minute
• Make 290 copies of the entire script of Hamlet. Enough to give every cast member a copy for 15 different productions of the play
• Write out all 3 books of The Lord of the Rings 105 times each
• Produce 17 copies of the King James Bible, first produced 400 years ago and containing
• 3.1 million characters
• Coincidentally, you could also duplicate Tolstoy’s War and Peace by hand 17 times. It’s more or less the same length
• Get halfway through the first volume of Samuel Johnson’s 1785 edition of A Dictionary of the English Language (10 million characters total)
• Write 1/6 of the Encyclopedia Britannica
• Back up 0.003% of Wikipedia (13,900 million characters at the last count in 2009. It’s grown by more than a thousand articles a day since then mind)

(References are here, here, here and here).

According to some industry insiders, however, water cooling is undergoing something of a renaissance. Baroque designs and piping are back in fashion, so they say, and demand for water cooling has never been higher.

Actual figures are hard to come by, mind. Gartner and other analysts don’t really track the types of cooler PC owners are custom fitting to their machines, and any evidence one way or the other is entirely anecdotal. What’s almost certain, though, is that reports of the demise of the water cooler have been greatly exaggerated.

I was first alerted to the possibility that watercooling was back by the launch of a new shop specifically designed for watercooling by Overclockers.co.uk. The site has been typical of most over recent years, gradually reducing its stock of liquid chilled heatsinks to a handful of all in one sealed units like the Antec Kuhler range which, while very effective, aren’t really as exciting or personalised as plumbing your own pipes. Last week, however, Overclockers announced its new Tech Lab, headed up by Richard O’Neill. He says the new shop is entirely a response to consumer demand.

“The way I see it is that customers speak with their money,” O’Neill says, “The activity in our watercooling section of our forums and the week on week development of watercooling is staggering, especially as it is such a niche group.”

Quite how much money speaks that loudly O’Neil didn’t mention, but he says it’s enough to make the new site worthwhile.

“I would totally agree that watercooling is making a comeback,” he says, “Many users see watercooling as an investment because their loop will last many builds with maybe only a compatibility bracket being required for a new socket.”

Looking around at popular modding forums, it does seem that O’Neil might be right. There’s a healthier number of posts at specialist sites like Bit-tech on the subject of modding than I’ve seen for years.

O’Neill, of course, has a new shop to promote, so I asked around other retailers to see what they said. Paul Lockey, from liquid cooling specialists XSPC says that he’s also seen a significant increase in sales throughout 2011.

“We’ve had over 800,000 views on some of our forum threads,” Lockey says, “That would have been unheard of two or three years ago.”

Over at QuietPC.com, another retailer which has slowly replaced most bespoke water cooling kits with off the shelf sealed units, Glenn Garrett says that there’s still a lot of interest around the stock it has kept on the shelves.

“[The Zalman Reserator] must be one of our longest standing products in its current form [unchanged since 2006]”, says Garrett, “Sales continue to be surprisingly strong.”

If water cooling – and case modding in general – is making a comeback, I’ll be very happy indeed. Without mentioning the iPad (oops), there’s a dreadful tendency to conformity and celebration of the bland within computing at the moment, which should be resisted at all costs. And since we don’t need to upgrade as often as we used to, it makes absolute sense to me to spend more time fine tuning the case and performance into something unique.

There’s an ongoing thread over on the PC Gamer forums for showing off your modded cases and watercooling set-ups. There’s some excellent designs in there already (including Luciel’s awesome horned beastie). I’m going to be keeping an eye on that thread over the next few weeks for signs of increased activity, and if we can get enough good looking PCs up there look at making it a regular feature for the mag and blog.

Show me what you’ve got.

Note – the images at the top of this post and above comes from the mighty Desk Art mod, one of my favourite designs currently doing the rounds. Beat that if you can.

Unless you create your own private and near universal version of Steam Cloud, that is.

It’s a fairly straightforward thing to do, and almost identical to the way I showed you how to free up space on SSD drives using symbolic links, or symlinks. There are two ways to use symlinks to access data created on another machine: the first involves leaving your PC at home on, port forwarding your router and sharing the contents of your My Documents files over the net, possibly laid bare for all to see. The second involves using a simple and free online web storage service which syncs a folder on your hard drive with other PCs, like Dropbox, SugarSync or Skydrive.

We’ll be using the latter method. It’s much, much easier.

Start off on the PC that you’ve been playing Skyrim (or any other Cloud-less game in need of syncing). Install your Dropbox-alike service.

Now head over to the folder where save games are stored. In Skyrim’s case, by deafult it’s My Documents>My Games>Skyrim>Saves. Back this up by making a copy in the same folder – just in case this all goes wrong. I can’t stress how important this step is. I haven’t tested this with every game in the world, there’s a very good chance it might mess up our saves or fall foul of some obscure EULA that prohibits moving installation files around. I’ve not had any problems with it thus far, mind.

What’s more, Dropbox-alike services only have limited space, which you might easily fill up with some games.

With the Save folder safely backed up, copy the original to your desktop, so that you have two copies, just in case. Now make another copy in your Dropbox folder – it’s easiest to follow the same file structure as the game uses, for clarity’s sake if you do this with a number of titles. So I’ve created the folder Dropbox>Skyrim>Saves which contains my save game details.

Go back to the ‘real’ Skyrim folder and delete the original Saves. You did back up three times, right?

Now you need to create a symbolic link inside the Skyrim folder pointing it at your new Dropbox save folder. Assuming everything is installed according to defaults, you can do this using the Command Prompt, and typing the following:

mklink /d “C:\Users\your name\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves” “C:\Users\yourname\Dropbox\Skyrim\Saves”.

You’ll need to customise the actual directory location if you’ve changed these at installation. What we’ve done here is tell Windows that if it ever looks for a folder called Saves in My Games>Skyrim, it should head on over to Dropbox>Sykrim>Saves to find it. If the Command Prompt terrifies you, there’s a simple app called Symlinker //http://code.google.com/p/symlinker//which will do the same thing in a more friendly way.

Run the game on this PC once to make sure everything is working fine.

Now all you need to do is go to your second PC and follow exactly the same steps, except for the part about copying saves into your Dropbox folder. If you’ve done it right, they’ll already be there and you can just symlink to them.

Congratulations, whichever PC you play on you’ll now be using the latest version of your saves.

Naturally, I was a little bit skeptical.

Even though the latest generation of CPUs run almost impossibly cool for their processing power output, and the Intel stock cooler that ships with a Sandy Bridge Core i7 is the smallest I’ve seen since we had Pentium 3s in the lab, the idea of using a fanless heatsink seems utterly bonkers. There’s no way you can possibly remove enough heat without using a fan, surely?

Apparently so. In the tests I’ve been running, the CR-95C actually beat the stock cooler on the testbed rig shown above. That’s without the assistance of a single case fan to help disperse heat. In terms of temperatures, I used Prime95 to load all four hyperthreaded cores up to their maximum ability, and the heat peaked at 77 degrees – around five degress less than using the Intel cooler.

Cooling the chip back down after use took longer, of course, but within five minutes of idling it was back to under 30 degrees Celsius. And the best thing is that in a proper case, with well designed airflows and case fans, it should work even better.

You’ll need a big case mind. The CR-95C really is enormous.

The thing is, even though I’ve seen it working, I think I’d still be skeptical of installing it my gaming rig. It might be illogical to worry about the ‘what if it falls over after eight hours’ scenario, but I can’t get rid of that niggling doubt, and feel like I need the reassurance of fans if things start to get out of control. So I’m going to test it further over the weekend to be sure.

The other downside is that at £100 it’s a lot of money to shave off a few decibels – with cheap air coolers being so efficient and quiet any way, you’ll need an almost slient room and very quiet power supply to actually hear the difference.

Still, it’s a remarkable achievement all the same.

Here’s the issue: you have a fully functioning sound card, probably built into your motherboard. Up until now, it’s been working fine. Your drivers are up to date, it’s listed in Device Manager and shows up just fine as the default device when you right click the volume icon in the task tray.

If you’ve had this problem – and a few of you will – you’ll share my frustration with it. And I’m about to make you very happy indeed.

The problem in a bit more detail: The audio mixer is working perfectly, and headphones or speakers are detected when you plug them into the green jack around the back of your PC. But when you try to load a game or listen to music, there’s nothing.

Opening up ‘Playback devices’ from the Sound control panel and choosing ‘Levels’ reveals a blank bar where the gain control should be. There’s a white cross on a red background over the audio icon by the clock, and a message saying no speakers or headphones are detected.

The automatic troubleshooter says “Audio device is disabled”, even though it’s not.

I’ve had this problem for a while now on one machine in my office. I’ve read all kinds of advice telling me to return the motherboard as there’s a hardware fault (there isn’t, I’ve run functioning installations from a separate hard drive on the same PC) or reinstall Windows. I’d normally have done the latter any way by now, in the course of my normal work. But I’ve kept this system alive until I could find out the fault.

I hate reinstalling Windows to fix a fault. There should always be another way.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the Realtek drivers supplied with my motherboard (an Intel DP67BG) didn’t change anything. Curiously, even plugging in a USB sound card or a PCI-E one didn’t work either – indicating that the fault lies deeper than that.

Fortunately, there is a solution.

What’s happened is that the something has changed a registry value which give users rights to make changes to the Windows audio process. And in this case ‘users’ doesn’t refer to people logging into your machine, it’s other programs as well. By locking them out of the process in question, they can no longer playback sound.

You can check this by opening up Regedit and going to HkeyLocalMachine>Software>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>MMDevices>Audio>Renderer and right clicking any of the keys in this stack. In the Permissions tab of the properties dialogue, there should be a user called ‘AudioEndpointBuilder’ and another one called ‘Audioserv’. If they aren’t present, something has gone awry.

You could, of course, go through the enormous list of keys under this Audio Renderer and manually change each one to look like the above, or you could upgrade the rights of programs trying to access the audio services so they can read and write to correctly.

To do the latter, open up a Command Prompt as an administrator (right click the icon in the Start menu, then choose ‘Run as Administrator’) and type:

net localgroup Administrators /add networkservice
net localgroup Administrators /add localservice

Then restart your machine. Be warned, you are lowering the security of your PC by doing this – feel free to advise strongly against it in the comments below. If ever you want to go back to how it was, re-run the same commands substuting ‘delete’ for ‘add’.

Or just reinstall Windows.

Many thanks to jenae, the Microsoft Support person who posted the solution here. You have made my life immeasurably less stressful.

While I’m waiting, however, here’s a little experiment I’d like you all to try at home.

There’s no way I can benchmark every combination of kit available to see how it performs running Battlefield 3 in the lab. But you want to know which graphics processor you should buy if you own x, or how much better y CPU is going to be than z.

So here’s a better idea: discuss amongst yourselves. With our help, of course.

We want as many of you to benchmark your PC or laptop running Battlefield 3 as possible, so that we can create the most comprehensive test of a program’s framerates ever. If it works, you should be able to compare your performance with similar set ups, and figure out the best upgrade by finding other combinations of kit already tested.

If it doesn’t I’ll delete this post and we shall never speak of it again.

It’s entirely unscientific, since proper testing would require everyone to be running the same version of Windows and the same drivers and using exactly the same sequence to benchmark in. But as a rough guide to what’s good for performance, it’s more than just a bit of fun.

All you have to do to take part is install Battlefield 3 and FRAPS. Start FRAPS first, and set it to record the minimum, average and maximum framerates (Min/Max/Avg), bound to your favourite hotkey. Then, when you’re in the game press the hotkey once to start the test, and press it again a minute or two later to stop it. Check the log in your FRAPS folder (usually C:\FRAPS), and enter the results, along with some hardware information, in the form below.

To try and keep things roughly comparable, if you could perform the test sometime around the start of Operation Metro, where you’re running around and fighting outside, that keeps things simple and more or less the same. Needless to say if you die while benchmarking you’ll probably need to start again after you spawn.

The important thing is that we’re all using the same settings and – as far as possible – resolution. So if you could use a generic ‘High’ profile for graphics and submit one set of scores at 1920×1080, that’d be much appreciated too.

If you want to share the results on your triple-monitor 3D capable machine for bragging rights, that’s fine – but getting as many as possible at the same resolution is what will make this work. So feel free to run the test twice. If you have a smaller screen, then you can also take part but just make it clear in the question about res.

Once results start to come in, I’ll publish a live version of the spreadsheet as a separate post. If you’re really keen, though, you can see the rawdata by following this link.

I should point out that no personal details are collected in this Q&A or held by myself or Future Publishing. It’s all as anonymous as anything on the web can be.

So get benchmarking and fill in the form below. And when you’ve done so, invite your friends to do the same.

With just one weekend to go until it’s released, it’s time to face the question: do you need to upgrade for Battlefield 3?

Confession time: I didn’t get enough hands on time with the beta to do reliable benchmarking, but since there’s a day one patch and new graphics drivers already confirmed, even if I had it wouldn’t mean much. If you do want to see a very thorough analysis of graphics card performance in the beta, though, I can recommend Ryan from PC Perspective‘s work comparing 10 different chips at a range of settings here.

What I can say is that I think a lot of concerns will turn out unfounded. It ran flawlessly at Ultra settings on my generation old Radeon HD5870 from 2009. That was backed up by an embarrassingly good CPU, mind you.

Then again, perhaps I’m in the minority in thinking that. According to a report on IGN a couple of days ago, Battlefield 3 has already resulted in $1bn of PC sales and upgrades in the last year. I’m a little sceptical about that figure – NVIDIA’s last three month sales figure are good, but only $100m more in GPUs than last year.

To recap, here’s the official specs:

Minimum System Requirements

Processor: 2 GHz Dual Core (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHz)
Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive: 20 GB
Graphics card (NVIDIA): DirectX 10.0 compatible with 512 MB RAM

Recommended System Requirements

Processor: Quad-core CPU
Memory: 4 GB
Hard Drive: 20 GB
Graphics Card: DirectX 11 compatible with 1024 MB RAM

Not too demanding, huh? I’d argue any PC built in the last few years should meet the highest recommended specs. But if you are planning to upgrade, here’s the kit I’d recommend for playing BF3 on a single standard 1920×1080 desktop monitor.

CPU

Any quad core CPU should be able to run Battlefield 3 flat out, but the best buy at the moment is Intel’s Core i5 2500K, which costs around £170/ $220. There are lower cost, slower Core i5s – and I’d argue that the performance difference is going to be negligible – but the K designation means this chip is unlocked for overclocking, which is a useful talent to have for just ~£10/$10 more. If you afford the extra £100/$100 for a Core i7 chip, you’ll get four extra virtual cores thanks to Intel’s Hyperthreading technology. Again, nice to have, but not essential just for Battlefield 3.

Remember that a CPU upgrade almost always involves changing your motherboard and RAM too (these chips all require a motherboard with an Intel Socket 1155 compatible chipset). The point being that if you’re on limited funds and already have a Core 2 quad or later, you’ll probably find a much bigger performance upgrade by changing your…

Graphics card

The recommended specs include a reference to a GeForce GTX 560 (approx £140/$210). That should get you running at Ultra settings. It’s worth reiterating that there’s more than one type of GTX 560, though. Those that have the ‘Ti’ suffix have more shader cores and a higher clockspeed. The Ti versions cost £40/$40-ish more, but will likely give you headroom to add things like anti-aliasing if you want better image quality.

If it’s a Radeon you’re after, the HD6870 is an incredible bargain at the moment, at around £120/$180. It’s broadly similar to the plain GTX 560 in performance. Given that there’s not that much difference between image quality at High settings and Ultra settings in the game, I wouldn’t blame you at all if you wanted to save the cash and go for this. To give yourself a comfortable amount of headroom for maximum settings if you can afford the 2GB version of the HD6950 (£220/$280) it’ll likely last you for years – although it is more expensive than the GeForce GTX 560Ti.

More expensive GPUs like the GeForce GTX 580 or Radeon HD6990, or even a Crossfire or SLI set-up, are really only likely to be necessary if you’re thinking about triple monitor set-ups or using 3D. There’s a whole other article in that for another time.

Keyboard, Mice and Headsets

Given that the differences between Ultra settings and High settings in Battlefield 3 really are cosmetic, and if you’re looking at aliased outlines you’re not paying enough attention to the game, there’s a good chance you won’t need to upgrade at all. In which case, if you have the money to spare, you might be thinking about new peripherals. There are some great new mechanical keyboards coming through at the moment, like Razer’s Black Widow Stealth Ultimate or Corsair’s K60, which are amazing if you can afford them. Otherwise it’s hard to beat Microsoft’s X4 if you’re on a budget.

Headset wise, you’ll want something to help you communicate with team-mates. As anyone who regularly reads the mag will know, I’m normally quite dismissive of cheap headsets, but Corsair’s HS1A is currently available for just £30 over at Overclockers, and at that price is pretty much unbeatable.

Feel free to add your own recommendations/reviews/bargain finds below…

While not at all game related, it is has been interesting to look at techniques involved in one experiment for 3D storytelling that’s taken place in Spitalfields Market, London, this week. Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), an NGO which sponsors doctors and hospital workers in crisis regions and the developing world, teamed up with NVIDIA and one of the best photojournalism outfits around to create a short piece of 3D photojournalism about one of their midwives in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Why I think this is important for PCG readers is that it’s about what 3D can do to improve an already great story. From a film making perspective, we’re still waiting for 3D movies to have their ‘Hitchcock moment’, when the technology is used to create a more compelling narrative than could ever have done before. Right now, the common complaint about 3D movies is that story has become subservient to the effect rather than the other way around: in many big budget films plot mechanics often seem to exist purely for something to be thrown dramatically out towards the audience.

The argument takes a slightly different form in games production. Games are created in fully 3D worlds, so applying stereoscopic camera angles is technically trivial. But should more effort be spent making sequences that are designed to be watched in 3D, rather than simply letting the graphics card drivers do their bit and let the ‘moments’ come from being in a more immersive world?

Sony made the bold claim a couple of days ago that gamers can improve their scores by using 3D screens. Others reckon that the effect often looks forced and distracting, like cardboard cutout scenery at the local am dram panto. Personally, I struggle with 3D because its unreliable and has innately high barriers to enjoyment – cost of kit and the necessity of wearing glasses being the obvious ones.

So the question is, how does 3D move beyond gimmickry and become an integral part of the storytelling mechanic?

Which is why, even though it’s not about games, NVIDIA’s latest application of its 3D Vision technology is worth looking at – it’s a story in its purest form. The MSF installation was shot by a photographers from duckrabbit (one of the best multimedia/editorial agencies in the world whose blog is required reading if you care at all about photography) using a Fuji W3. NVIDIA has donated PCs, screens and glasses for public showings of the film, and for the last six days MSF volunteers have been encouraging passers-by at Spitalfields Market in London to view it. 2D and 3D versions of the pics are being hosted over on NVIDIA’s 3D Vision site, and there’ll be a 3D version of the film up there soon too. In the meantime, you can watch the same film in 2D over at MSF’s pages.

What I found interesting is that it was the scenes directors and producers would expect to work well in 3D which felt a bit flat – cars splashing through water and people standing looking at the camera feel a little bit artificial. Where the 3D was most powerful was where it added something to the drama – forcing you to really focus on the baby or face which was closer to the camera than the team of surgeons behind it, for example. Where the stereoscopy brings out an element of the story that might otherwise be missed – and that’s a lesson anyone working in 3D can learn.

It reminded me of something mentioned at a recent round table hosted by Alienware on the subject – that there’s an art to 3D which is waiting to be mastered by someone, but no-one’s sure who just yet.

Which is exactly why you should look at the best examples of this emerging form where ever they come from.

Plus, it’s a great film and a worthy cause, of course.

That’s not to say you should rush out and buy a Sony Z series. At almost £2,000/$2,500 for the laptop plus dock you’re almost certainly better off with a cheaper thin and light that has NVIDIA Optimus graphics, or a proper gaming laptop like the ASUS G73. However, the astonishing point about the Vaio Z is that the dock connects over USB 3.0. None of your flashy Thunderbolt or Expressport stuff, just a bog standard peripherals port like everything else.

The idea of external graphics, transforming a highly portable PC into a poly-pushing powerhouse, has been around for a long time. ASUS and Dell both had docks in the past which never quite made it market, and Creative was one of the first to talk about modular designs over a decade ago. As far as I’m aware, though, no-one’s pulled it off like Sony – and even if the laptop isn’t quite as successful as the company hoped (it’s up against stiff competition from newer, cheaper ‘ultrabooks’) I really hope that it develops the dock concept further into something more universal and compatible with other machines.

Because if it does, and can get the price down in future iterations, it’ll be quite something for those of us who want a laptop that’s both properly portable but doesn’t force us to compromise in games.

Partly, this is because gaming tastes have changed and the sims that require this gear aren’t as popular as they were – it’s been five years since the last Flight Sim, for example. Partly it’s because there just aren’t as many industrial strength peripherals around any more, and what there is can be very niche and usable only by the kind of sim fans who already have a real helicopter pilot’s licence.

This is an oversight I hope to fix in the hardware section I’m putting together at the moment (issue 233). I’m on the hunt for the best controllers out there, and let the devil take the price. These are the wheels, sticks and pads that make games more like real life and command collector’s prices.

The local couriers are not so happy. Not only does Thrustmaster’s T500 RS GT wheel (pictured above) cost almost as much as a second hand car, it weighs about the same too. And that’s not including the crash cage-solid frame that supports the pedals. My office is up a fairly tight flight of stairs. Sorry, UPS man.

I don’t tend to play many sim games nowadays, being more of an FPS and RTS fan, but playing with this kind of kit is proving to be a highly nostalgic exercise which brings back many memories from when I did. Without wanting to sound too geeky, a really good peripheral can create just as many memorable moments as a well designed game, especially when the two are almost perfectly matched (and I don’t mean in a Guitar Hero kind of way).

I’d be enormously grateful, for example, if our sister mag PCFormat would return my Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2, the best joystick ever made bar none. They borrowed it for a photoshoot several years ago and it hasn’t been seen since. I still mourn its loss, and the memories of Mechwarrior 4 and Crimson Skies it left behind.

Any suggestions for favoured kit you’d like to see included in the round up gladly received.

The changes being discussed involve the introduction of a compulsory standby mode for network adaptors, with maximum power consumption phased in over several years. Adaptors that need to wake within under one second will be allowed draw slightly more power in standby than those which are less essential. The actual limits are what will be on the table tomorrow.

The maximum limits being suggested are 4W for kit that doesn’t need to turn on instantly and 12W for kit that does. The plan is to introduce those limits in 2014, and reduce them to 2W and 8W respectively by 2016. According to the European Commission, 40TWh per year – the equivalent of the residential electricity consumption of Sweden – can be saved across all of Europe plans are adopted.

Lobby group ECOS, the European Environmental Citizens Organisation for Standardisation, which represents environmental NGOs in Europe, reckon that an extra 8TWh per year of energy could be saved by giving consumers more ways to turn off their kit that don’t involve reaching behind the sofa to pull out a plug. It recommends management software that let’s you program shutdown times when you know you won’t be using it. Like the early hours of the morning, for example.

Fortunately, this is an area which it shouldn’t be too hard for manufacturers to agree to targets. Electricity is the single most important cost in datacentre design, and enormous amounts of R&D dollars have been spent making computing kit more efficient in exactly this area over the last few years.

The technology is already in use too: a quick test of equipment around my flat shows that Sitecom’s enormously powerful Gaming Router II, with its dual band antennas and packet prioritisation engine, already draws just 4W when simply surfing the web use. The bigger culprit is the cable modem it’s attached to, which is eating 6W consistently. That means together they meet the first phase requirements for a single device. While on the whole, the initiative is to be applauded, it might be that the energy savings hoped for are ambitious.

There’s absolutely no reason to buy an Intel-based tablet right now, as they’re power hungry, heavy and run Windows. The iPad and Android tablets are all doing much better with processors derived from ARM’s architecture. As tablets eat into one of Intel’s core markets – netbook shipments fell by over 50% in Europe last quarter – it’s clear they have to do something.

Over at IFA in Berlin this week, quite a few manufacturers have been showing off ultrabooks. Toshiba’s Portege Z830 (pictured above) looks fantastic, as does ASUS’ UX31, and Acer’s Aspire S3 packs a (dual core) Core i7 chip into a machine that’s thinner, lighter and cheaper than an Air. Samsung’s Series 9 and Sony’s Vaio Z have both been out for a few weeks now, although they’re a bit pricier.

As far as gaming goes, most of these ultrabooks feature the higher specced option from Intel’s Sandy Bridge hybrid GPUs, the HD Graphics 3000. It’s not great, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not entirely useless either. I’ve been playing around with an ultrabook – although I can’t say which one – for a couple of days. It’s obviously very limited for gaming, but Deus Ex: Human Revolution is just about playable at its lowest detail settings. Even there, it looks better than most Xbox games.

I wouldn’t recommend buying an ultrabook for games just yet, but next year’s models with better GPUs should be really interesting. With the Steam Cloud syncing save games between your desktop PC and an ultraportable laptop so you can fill in a few puzzles or levels while you’re on the train, the convenience more than makes up for the temporary loss in resolution and details.

As much as I like the look of the Razer’s LED laptop touchpads, I’d be willing to bet that there’ll be more ultrabooks figuring in the future of PC gaming than there will be Blades.

Gartner’s analysis, for example, that PC shipments in Western Europe were down by nearly 19% was bleak indeed. Acer was especially badly hit, losing over a third of its sales compared to last year.

No-one, it seems, is buying anything but iPads. Which is one of the reasons HP spectacularly announced last week that it is selling off its PC business altogether. That’s the world’s number one PC vendor leaving us to focus on cloud stuff. Ouch.

Despite what Razer might have you believe, though, things are actually looking quite good as far as PC gaming hardware goes. Jon Peddie Research – one of the few analyst firms that track sales of graphics cards – published its quarterly report yesterday. In this, it showed that shipments of graphics cards were below slightly below average for the last three months.

However, it included this interesting qualifier:

“The add-in board (AIB) market is fuelled at the high-end by the enthusiast gamer, small in volume (~3m a year) but high in dollars (average spend for an AIB ~$300). The AIB shipment volume comes from the Performance and Mainstream segments. GPU-compute is adding to sales on the high end.”

That’s a figure which surprised me, and pleasantly so. If high performance GPUs are still near enough to a billion dollar market, that’s big enough to keep the big graphics companies interested for some time to come. To check I wasn’t viewing this through the proverbial rose tinted contacts, I mailed Dr Jon Peddie and asked him to clarify his thoughts.

“The remarkable thing about the AIB market,” he explained, “Is that the high-end enthusiast segment is the most stable. The other segments move up and down and the enthusiast is relatively (he said ‘relatively’) stable.”

Delving a bit deeper into the figures from his latest report, the big hit on GPU sales has been for low performance cards. Discrete desktop graphics (all types) are down by just 500,000, from 16.67m last year to 16.12 for the same period this year, while discrete notebook graphics are down by 300,000 to 19.06m.

All of which is to say that yes, there are profound and fundamental shifts happening in the way we use PCs and computers in general. There’ll be more big names go the way of HP before too long, no doubt.

But as far as high performance gaming set-ups go, in this analysis at least, they’re looking just as popular as ever. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Turn off Hibernate

First up is to disable the Hibernate feature of Windows 7. Hibernate is a halfway house between standby and shutdown when you come to close down your PC for the night. It copies the entire contents of your system RAM over to the hard drive before turning everything off, so the PC is in a state that uses less power than standby, but can bounce back to exactly the state that you left it in.

The thing is, Hibernate also requires a file to be created on your boot drive that’s 75% the size of your system RAM. Which if you’ve got 8GB of RAM or more is a considerable chunk of an SSD. To make things worse, you can’t move this file with symlinking either, it is where it is and there it will stay.

Fortunately, with your SSD accelerating your boot times anyway, there’s little reason to use Hibernate on a desktop PC. Certainly the benefits don’t really outweigh the space cost.

To see the size of your Hibernate file, go to C:\ in Windows Explorer and look for hiberfil.sys. You may need to turn on ‘Show hidden files’ in Folder Options>View.

To disable Hibernate, open up the Start menu, go to Accessories and right click on Command Prompt. Open this as an Administrator and type the following: powercfg -h off.

That should delete hiberfil.sys automatically too – if it doesn’t, just delete it.

Sort out your storage

The second tip is to move your common file libraries to a storage drive.

This is very straightforward – just open up Windows Explorer, and right click on the Documents link under Libraries in the left hand pane. Here you’ll get a load of options for folder locations. Set up a Documents folder on your storage drive and then click ‘Include a folder…’ in this window.

Select the folder, then choose it from the list and click ‘Set Save Location’ – anything that automatically saves to Documents will now go in here. You can copy over the contents of the original Documents folder to the new one if you like, and remove that link from the Library list altogether.

Now do the same for Music, Pictures and Video.

The standard advice for making the most of SSD space is to install Windows and a few key games onto your SSD and put everything else, like videos and music, onto a larger, slower hard drive. If only it were that easy.

Lots of programs, from iTunes to Google’s Picasa to most games, save large files like thumbnail caches or save data in the Users folder on the C:\ drive. That’s regardless of where you install the application itself to. They offer you no control at all, and in the case of iTunes and Picasa especially can quickly use up many gigs of precious space.

Fortunately, you can wrest control of your machine back even from these insidious interlopers, using the power of the symbolic link, or symlink.

A symlink looks like a shortcut in Windows explorer, but it’s slightly more embedded in that applications see it as the folder they’re looking for. So if a program looks for a file called ‘Save.gme’ in a directory called C:\Games and it finds a symlink pointing it to D:\Games, it will load up the file from D:\Games\Save.gme.

You can use symlinks, then, to move these large data folders over to your harddrive without the program that needs them knowing. It’s outrageously easy, but first you need to find them.

1 – Open the Start menu and type ‘Folder Options’. This will fire up the control panel that lets you see hidden files in Windows Explorer. With the disclaimer that any thing you do after this point is at your own risk and I’m not responsible for breaking your PC, click the ‘View’ tab and check the radio box for ‘Show hidden files, folders and drives’.

2 – Now you need to find those large files. Download and install WinDirStat. This displays the contents of your hard drive as coloured rectangles. The really big ones are the large files you want to move.

3 – If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod backed up onto your PC via iTunes, you’ll notice one of the large blobs will be for some Apple related files. This will usually be in C:\Users\your name\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer, and you can find the exact location by right-clicking a blob. Another place files often get stored is C:\Users\your name\AppData\Local.

4 – Create a duplicate folder on your storage drive, for example D:\Apple Computer. Copy the contents of the original folder over to the new one, and rename the original folder something like ‘Apple Computer Bak’. Don’t delete it yet, just in case.

5 – To make symlink, you’ll need to use the command ‘mklink’ from the open up the Start menu, click All Programs>Accessores and then right click Command Prompt and ‘Open as an administrator’.

6 – There’s information about the syntax of the mklink command on its Wikipedia page. To move our iTunes back-up folder, we’ll need to enter this into the command prompt: mklink /d “C:\Users\your name\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer” “D:\Apple Computer”.

7 – You should see the symlink appear as a semi transparent icon in the original Roaming folder. Click it to make sure it works, then run the program – in this case iTunes – to double check nothing has been lost.

8 – If all is fine, you can delete the original folder on the C: drive completely, and reclaim several gigabytes of room.

If this has been at all useful, stay tuned. We have more tips for on how to save space on your SSD here.

I’ve had this problem present itself itself on several different systems in recent months – I thought it was as a result of doing lots of driver upgrades/card swaps for various features, but it turns out to be pretty common. Especially with any of the drivers from the 11 series.

Normally, best advice would be to uninstall drivers before upgrading them or changing a card, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference here. The control panel may vanish, but getting rid of the drivers themselves is pretty tough.

In older versions of Windows, the cure would be to boot into Safe Mode and remove the drivers – except that Windows 7 doesn’t allow you to run an installer package in Safe Mode any more. At least, not without hacking the registry – and there are instructions for how to do that here.

A quick Google of the problem shows that a lot of people have resorted to nuking Windows completely and reinstalling everything from scratch to get around this Catalyst installer problem.

There is, fortunately, a simpler solution which has worked every time I’ve run into it so far.

When you boot your PC, give it a couple of seconds to clear the POST part of its boot process and hit F8 to enter the Windows boot menu. You might need to tap F8 repeatedly to get it to register. Now choose the option for ‘Enable low resolution video (640×480)’. Oddly, even though this still boots the video driver, it should now allow you to upgrade Catalyst suite problem free.

For some reason, which makes absolutely no sense to me, the default option in the BIOS is not always set to turn this spectacular feature on.

The older your motherboard is, the more likely it seems that this setting is turned off. That’s an observation based purely on anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me that more recent boards have been set up correctly at the factory. Whether your system is new or ancient, though, it’s worth seeing if you can silence it.

Simply open up the BIOS by hitting F2 or DEL – depending on your motherboard’s settings – during the first stage of the boot process, and use the cursor keys to find the option marked ‘Hardware monitor’. This could be almost anywhere: in a top level menu of its own, or as a sub-menu within the ‘Advanced’ settings for example. It’s there though, I’m almost certain of it.

What this should show you is a readout of the temperature settings the motherboard is monitoring, along with other information like fan speeds and possibly voltage readings if you’ve got a top end board. Somewhere on this page there will also be a setting for the CPU fan. Often this menu is broken up into seemingly random phrases, like Q-Fan or Extreme, but basically it’s a list of settings for running the CPU flat out or at a slower speed.

The beauty of this setting is that unless you set it to run constantly at a particularly percentage of its maximum speed, it’ll automatically accelerate to provide extra cooling if the CPU is running hot. In other words, you can set it for the quietest maximum speed and be confident that it won’t let your CPU damage itself.

With that done, just select ‘Save settings and exit’ and enjoy a quieter gaming experience.

If you don’t fancy playing around with the BIOS, there is an excellent Windows app called Speedfan which can tap into the same settings and let you configure them from the desktop. It may need manually resetting after every boot, though.

The writer wanted to know what the best graphics card would be for his motherboard, and proceeded to list all the bits and bobs inside his PC. Some of them were nearly ten years old. Two things were immediately obvious from his mail. Firstly, that a graphics upgrade alone wasn’t going to get Crysis 2 running at full speed. Secondly, that he’d obviously made a mistake identifying his components. According to the email he was running an Athlon FX chip from the middle of the last decade with a Pentium 4 motherboard circa 2001.

Since he also reckoned he was using two GeForce graphics cards in SLI configuration, I surmise that the writer is probably right about the chip, wrong about the mobo (since that predates SLI technology). Or that it was someone deliberately being silly and trying to catch me out.

The serious question the story raises, though, is how do you know what motherboard is inside your machine, and what its compatible with when you come to upgrade?

The easiest way is through Windows’ own System Information tool. You can call this up by typing its name into the search bar of the Start menu, and it should come up with a screen that looks something like this. The highlighted lines are the motherboard manufacturer, the model number and the current BIOS and revision number.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a foolproof piece of software. If you can’t get any useful information from it,  you’ll have to open up the side of your case and have a look at the motherboard itself. If you’re lucky, the manufacturer name and product code will be clearly visible – as in the image at the top of this post – and you can go along to their site and look for a manual online. This branding could be anywhere, but the most common places are by the CPU socket, near the expansion slots or along one of the edges. If there’s no obvious stamp, however, there’ll be other identifying marks.

One of them should be its FCC ID code. This is the serial number assigned to components when they pass through testing at the Federal Communications Commission in the US. This should be printed onto the PCB itself or a white sticker that looks like the one above. You can check it at the updated FCC Site here. Turns out the component pictured is a WiFi adaptor from an old , abandoned  motherboard. Who knew?

If there’s no FCC label, you could start your component sleuthing by trying to figure  out the manufacturer using its factory code. This is a six character code beginning with a D which usually appears next to a symbol that looks like a circle with an arrow pointing through it. Gigabyte, for example, is D33006. The hard drive below is from Kingston. I can’t find an up to date list in English, so you could try translating this page or just Googling the code and seeing which name comes up most often. Armed with the manufacturer name, the BIOS code and version which appear when you first boot the machine (and in System Properties) should give you an exact match.

Launched at the CES trade show last month, the latest Core i5 and i7 processors from Intel have been winning plaudits from PC Gamer chums like TechRadar. Codenamed Sandy Bridge, performance of these new chips is notably up against the already respected older Core processors, while the price has been kept the same or, depending on where you shop, even lowered.

It’s not surprising, then, that most online pundits have marked the new range as ‘the one to get’ if you’re after a new CPU.

So yesterday’s news that Intel was performing a massive product recall for PCs designed around Sandy Bridge CPUs put a bit of a dampener on things. Something which none of the early reviewers spotted has gone wrong, and it’s going to cost Intel an estimated $1bn to fix.

So should you be worried if you went out and spent the £300 Grandma gave you for Christmas on a shiny new Core i5 2500K set-up? Possibly, but don’t panic too much yet.

The fault itself as described by Intel is a problem not with the CPU, but with the socket 1155 motherboards needed to use Sandy Bridge chips. Specifically, it’s in the part of the chipset that handles the SATA requests, known as the Series 6 chipset.

Intel says a design flaw in the B2 stepping versions of this chipset – which is all of the ones produced thus far – could cause performance to degrade over time, causing read/writes to return errors and possibly corrupt your data. Only a small number of boards are affected, it says, but it’s planning to recall all six milllion sold so far, just to be safe.

While such pre-emptive action on Intel’s behalf should be applauded, there’s an interesting discussion of whether or not such a small problem requires such drastic action over on Tom’s Hardware.

If you do have a Sandy Bridge CPU in your machine, PC Gamer has begun receiving instructions from the various motherboard manufacturers for what you should do next.

The basic line is that Intel doesn’t think it will have replacement chipsets – B3 stepping – available until April, so you should contact the retailer you bought your motherboard from and plan to swap it then. The general advice is that you can carry on using your kit as normal until then.

Sounds sensible to us.

Our favourite comment so far comes from Gigabyte, which effectively suggests that since the problem only affects the legacy SATA ports, you could just attach your hard disks and optical drives to the newer SATA 3 sockets and ignore it. Not a terrible idea, so long as you don’t have too many drives (or are thinking of adding more in the future).

Business as usual for us, then, but it remains unfortunate – not to mention coincidental – that a fatal flaw in Intel’s “most exciting product… ever” should come within days of AMD’s rival Fusion CPU being sent out to early reviewers. Watch the web for more news of that soon.

Ignoring the editorially dubious airport sequence, it’s still one of the most popular online shooters going, with difficult to conquer maps that rely on both strategy and skill.

We can’t do much to speed up your reactions, but we can help to speed up your PC. If you fancy indulging this weekend, here’s a quick guide to getting the fastest frames per second possible.

The basic in-game settings.

One of the good things about Modern Warfare 2 is that it’s a relatively lightweight graphics engine. It looks great, but most systems – even laptops with integrated graphics – should be able to handle running it at a decent resolution.

On the downside, however, there’s not a lot you can actually tweak. Infinity Ward removed the dev console, and hard wired most of the important legacy cvars from the underlying Quake 3 Arena engine. What’s more, no matter how much you change the maximum framerate is capped at 90fps. (You should start any tweaking exercise by making a note of your current average frames per second in FRAPS.)

The in-game graphics options screen covers all the usual graphical effects and controls for turning them on and off. As with any game, start searching for speed by turning off anti-aliasing first, and then post-processing effects like Depth of Field and Soften Smoke Edges. These will have the least effect on the way the game looks, and anti-aliasing will yield the highest possible speed increase.

Unless you’re using an old graphics card with a very small amount of on-board memory, reducing the texture size won’t make an enormous difference to framerates. After anti-aliasing, turning off shadows and specular lighting should give you the biggest boost,  but they’ll also have the biggest effect on what the game looks like. Without shadows, characters can seem to float rather than walk on the ground.

The config_mp.cfg file opened for editing.

If you want to drill down a bit further into the game engine, you can edit the game engine settings. You may find anti-cheat software like VAC takes a dim view of this, but there’s a couple of flags that are worth playing around with.

The configuration file is called config_mp.cfg, and you’ll find it in main installation folder under ‘players’. For Steam users, this is ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\call of duty modern warfare 2\players\’ by default.

Open up this document in Notepad and you’ll find it’s a little harder to edit than cfg files from other games (if you’re in the habit of playing around with cfg files that is) because the different settings aren’t separated by carriage returns. You can resize the window to force long instructions onto a single line, but ultimately you’ll rely on CTRL+F to navigate to different cvars.

A comprehensive list of the variables that make a difference can be found in this excellent forum post, but most of them simply relate to the same options in the in game menu. For example, setting ‘seta r_dof_enable’ to ’0′ is the same as turning off depth of field the normal way.

What you can do that the game doesn’t allow, though, is turn of anisotropic filtering and the heat shimmer around fire. Do this by changing ‘seta r_texFilterAnisoMax’ and ‘seta r_texFilterAnisoMin’ to ’1′, and ‘seta r_distortion’ to ’0′.

At lowest graphical settings, but with high texture detail. Note the lack of shadows.

It’s good to know the cfg file is there, and better to know that Black Ops will support the dev console, but the most useful change you can make is to change ‘seta drawLagometer’ to ’1′. This brings up a small square which graphs your network throughput and will let you know if you have a spiky server connection, rather than graphics problem affecting your game.

Do remember that editing the config_mp.cfg file is at your own risk, and if you screw it up you can just delete it to restore default settings.

Kill the driver

I have a Mionix Saiph 3200 mouse. It was acquired free from a subscription to PC Gamer UK no less. The problem is that, maybe one in three times upon booting my PC, the mouse drivers fail to load. The result is usually the mouse cursor not moving at all and no LEDs light up on its body. Disconnecting and reconnecting the mouse at the USB port always quick-fixes it. I have Googled this problem and it is apparently an issue with Windows 7 64-bit and its hibernate mode disabling the driver and not reloading it again.

However, I don’t actually use hibernate. There’s a suggested fix is a registry hack to stop hibernate disabling the driver which i am not prepared to mess with.

Mike Smith

PCG says The relationship between Windows and third party drivers has never been a happy one. In order that we can all move on and live our lives happily, though, we have to come to some sort of blame-free resolution. Whether it’s Windows not letting go or Mionix’ control panel refusing to leave, I don’t care – it’s time for them to go there separate ways.

Uninstall the Mionix driver completely and let Windows do its own thing. You won’t miss anything other than the inconvenience of the conflict – you can still change the sensitivity using the buttons on the mouse.

No mouse power

I was a heavy FPS gamer a few years back, until I bought a business, then another one, which left me no time to play. I’ve kept reading PC Gamer, though. I built a machine about 7 years ago, with an Abit Uguru motherboard, an Intel P4 2.8GHz Northwood CPU, XP Pro, an ATI X800 PRO, 2GB RAM and 5.1 surround to round it out.

My problem is I haven’t booted it up in a couple years. I had some free time the other day and wanted to play a little HL2. I’ve been getting the itch, if you know what I mean. Well anyways, I booted up and my mouse wouldn’t work. It’s a Microsoft IntelliMouse 1.1A USB. It lights up for a couple seconds while booting then goes dark, and I can never move the pointer at any point. Updated the driver with no luck. Any ideas?

Jeremy Mitchell

Buffalo's USB 3.0 adaptor is available for just £20.

PCG says I do have a few ideas. Four, in fact, three of which are nothing to do with the mouse. You’re going to need to plug the mouse into another PC or laptop (and I can’t believe a businessman like yourself has spent seven years PC free) to see if the mouse is working. If not, there’s solution number one – buy a new mouse. If it is, then it sounds like a USB problem:

2 The worst case scenario is that you have a broken motherboard or hardware failure on the USB channels. You could pick up a cheap PCI expansion card with fresh USB ports on to get round this.

3 Your USB drivers are corrupted (ie. not the mouse driver, the sofware which governs the internal USB hub). It’s unlikely in Windwos XP, but possible. Try Abit’s site for an archived drier update.

4 There’s some sort of power problem. The PSU may have got damaged/worn out in storage and can’t put out enough juice to run the mouse, or there are too many devices on the same USB hub. Make sure the mouse is plugged directly into one of the USB ports on the back of the board. If it is already, try changing the port it’s in.

Design dilemma

I am bordering on my next major build and was wondering if I could get some advice. Where possible I try to stick to a 4-5 year plan, building a PC on a good base that will allow me to tweak (mostly RAM and graphics) without having to re-build.

I’m keeping an eye on the new motherboards particularly paying attention to any news regarding support for Intel’s upcoming octo/deca core processors and I was wondering if you had a view on where the current market lies. I cant help but feel that I may have missed the boat on the i7 processors and would now be better off waiting for the next major socket change, but I cant seem to find anything conclusive about how long this is going to be, there even seems to be some hypothesis that the oct cores may be compatible with the current sockets but nothing concrete.

Essentially I see three options:

1 Spend the money on a Q6600 CPU and a GTX 470 and wait a bit (roughly £300)

2 Build based on the i7 model (£1100-£1200) and hope that it will stay capable for the next 4-5 years

3 Do nothing as the motherboard supporting oct/dec cores is just around the corner so save my pennies

Kind regards

Tom

(Tom mentioned in a follow up mail that the biggest problem he has is that his current Socket 775 board can’t be upgrade to a Penryn-class Core 2 processor, which is why he’s looking at the dated and hard to get hold of Q6600).

Early quad core CPUs aren't really flagging yet.

PCG says The easy part of this answer is get the new GPU sooner rather than later. It’ll be a massive boost to your system and keep you going for years. As for the CPU, I see the dilemma and there’s no right or wrong. Upgrading to a Q6600 will save you a lot of money, and I don’t know anyone who’s got one of these that’s thinking of upgrading yet, so I’d say that’s the sensible option. For me the temptation of gutting the system and replacing it with a Core i7 would probably be too great.

As far as waiting for eight or ten core chips goes, don’t do it. So far the take up of multithreading in games has been disappointing, and the games which scale really well across cores tend to be those that you won’t stress a decent quad anyway. Like RUSE or Napoleon: Total War. It’ll be a while before an octo-core machine is worth the cost – which is likely to be enormous, if the introduction of Intel’s six core chip is anything to go by.

Got a question for Adam? If you have a technical problem you need solved or are just curious about PCs in general, leave a comment below or email him directly here.

Beeep Beeep BEEEP

My PC is crashing and I’d be very grateful for some help.

It often freezes and the only option is a manual reboot. This used to happen quite often soon after boot-up, but recently it’s begun happening after it’s been working fine for an hour or more. On reboot it may then crash a number of times before successfully booting up and then working for a reasonable time.

Sometimes on reboot it refuses to boot up and instead makes a BEEEEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP sound. Looking this up I think this means “no graphics card” or “video card error”.

I don’t have much experience diagnosing problems so walking me through what to do would be greatly appreciated.

Vanilla Bear

PCG: I’m currently putting together a troubleshooting feature for the mag with a special section called ‘It’s probably your PSU’. Because most of the time, it probably is.

In the short term, try swapping the connectors that plug directly into the card if you can – this might tell you that a particular rail isn’t working well – or putting the graphics card in a different PCI-E slot to see if there’s enough power coming through the motherboard. Either way, it’s likely the long term fix is a new, more powerful PSU.

The perfect sound set-up?

Currently I have a Logitech Z-5500 speakers for playing when the neighbours are out. Also two sets of headphones; Platronics wireless ones forget the model and Creative HS-1200.

What I want in my headset though is for them to be wireless and when I turn them on they mute my seakers. Also I want the Z-5500 control box to be the charging station and wireless transmitter for the headpones.

I think Logitech is more than capable of making such a device and even one where you could buy just the control box with added wireless transmitting charge station, without having to replace all the speakers.

Better yet, if there is a system out there that does those things already point me to it.

Friction

PCG: I’m not aware of any system that combines headphones and speakers in one, and to be honest I wouldn’t hold out hope of anyone making one either. It’s a good idea, but possibly a bit too niche. Besides, the Z-5500 already has a headphone jack in its control unit that mutes the speakers when cans are plugged in – that’s probably as good as it gets.

Reviving an old PC

So I have a relative that has an old PC that he wanted to get working. It’s been sitting in the closet for nearly 3 years before I pulled it out last week to try and fix it up. I concluded that it stopped working due to a faulty power supply (when you shake the PSU you hear something moving around). I bought a new power supply and also a new 1GB stick of RAM, as he had removed the RAM in that computer to give to another machine. Once all the parts are in place, I pressed the power button and nothing happened. I have a suspicion that it might be a dead CMOS battery, but I’m not sure how I could figure this out. What’s the easiest way to test the CMOS battery? Also, is there an easy way to test the new PSU and RAM?

Coded One

PCG: A dead CMOS battery doesn’t usually stop your machine from booting. It can in rare cases, but normally it just means the clock will reset to sometime in the mid ’90s every time you shut the PC down. If everything is cabled in correctly the bad news is that this reads like a dead motherboard to me.

I’d double check the first part of that sentence before consigning it to trash, though. Check every cable and component is correctly plugged in by taking it out and reseating it – especially the CPU and memory. You might also want to have a look at the front panel connectors that hook the power switch up to the motherboard. Your problem might be quite simply that this has worked its way loose.

Got a question for Adam? If you have a technical problem you need solved or are just curious about PCs in general, leave a comment below or email him directly here.

Deep freeze

I’m wondering if anyone here can give me any advice to help me track down the reason my PC has been freezing.

I’ll be playing a game happily and suddenly the screen will go black and completely unresponsive. The only way to recover is to reset the PC. Sometimes the last chunk of sound will repeat continuously. In Assassins Creed 2 I’ve completely lost my save twice and had to restart from the beginning of the game. More recently I’ve been re-playing the original Deus Ex games and it seems to happen in those too, though it always recovers. There is no information in my event log except that “the previous shut down was unexpected” as I’d pressed the reset button. Any advice would be great!! Thanks!

wiggles

PCG: There are a few responses to your thread in the forum but I have to say that for once I’m not with the accepted wisdom there. The key thing you’ve mentioned here is that unlike most PC crashes, sometimes your system is recovering. To my mind, that immediately rules out overheating and PSU problems, and probably most driver related ones too.

I think the sound looping aspect is what you should focus on. Update the drivers (you may need to search your motherboard manufacturer’s website if it’s an integrated sound chip). If the problem persists, either remove your soundcard altogether or turn off the built-in audio in your BIOS – if everything works after that, you know what the problem is. You might find turning the sound back on/reseating your sound card works, or the worst case scenario is you need to buy a new soundcard (and they’re not too expensive).

YAAAR!

I’ve installed Call of Duty and United Offensive, but I believe (this was a while ago) I might have deleted some pak files by accident. I’m not sure if this is the case, but it could be. So, this morning I installed COD again, everything went smoothly.

I then put in my UO disk to install it, and it says they need to install the patch for COD. As the patch is installing, I receive an error which reads “The File C:\Program Files\Call of Duty Game of the Year edition\Main\pak0.pk3 is not a valid previous version and could not be upgraded” So, after this I go back to COD and click on the multiplayer shortcut, hoping to get to the multiplayer menu. But when I do, up comes a Fatal Error – “configure.csv not found” after I exit out of the box.

Shadow

PCG: Oh dear. What you’re describing is a sequence of errors which is normally associated with cracked copies of Call of Duty. Forgive me for casting aspersions if I’m wrong, but are there any telltale signs you might have picked up a dodgy copy? Like the label is written in felt-tip pen, or Pirate Bay pops up in your browser bar when you start typing the URL for Pittman’s shorthand training courses? If your installation disc is genuine, trying copying over pak0.pk3 file over from the original CD again, or doing a thorough reinstall (manually deleting all associated files and folders) and starting from fresh. (If it is a cracked copy, we now know where you live – Internet ed).

Card sharp

I was planning on upgrading my graphics card, but wasn’t sure whether to get the 5830 by ATI or the GTX 460 from NVIDIA. From what i can tell they’re both good cards and whilst the 5830 is in the sale cost exactly the same. Also, there seem to be a lot of different types of 460 and I’m just wondering if it makes any difference buying the more expensive ones. My price range is £150-£200 or £250 at a push.

INinja132

PCG: Go for the GeForce GTX460. It came out on Monday and has surprised most reviewers (myself included) by being rather impressive. It’s the first NVIDIA card I can wholeheartedly recommend for a while, and will be making its way into the PC Gamer Rig at the next opportunity. As far as which model – I’d say the cheaper 768MB version should be top of everyone’s shopping list right now, as its price/performance ratio is astronomical.

Fixing a broken internet

I use a wireless for my gaming machine, because it’s unfeasible to get a wired connection, mainly because this isn’t my house and thus my PC (Which is in my room) is nowhere near the router. Recently I’ve been getting dropped from the internet, but still being connected to the router. I can still access the router and edit the settings if I need to, but any internet browsing gets me disconnected.

I only get dropped if I open up the internet. Steam chat works fine, Thunderbird works fine, and the last time I this happened (It fixed itself somehow…) I could browse using the in game Steam browser.

Any suggestions?

Drug Crazed

PCG: Ah… The mystery of the dropped internet. I have a laptop at home which regularly ‘breaks’ my WiFi and can only be cured by resetting the router. I’ve tried blaming interference from neighbours’ networks, bad drivers and even Windows 7, but while all are plausible, finding a cure is going to take me a lot longer than the 30 seconds it costs to restart the router. So the wisest use of my time is to leave things as they are.

In your case, though, this sounds like it relates to the specific browser you’re using, doesn’t it? Have you tried using a different web browser, like Firefox or Opera? Or reinstalling whichever one you’re using? It could be a good old fashioned bug, or it could be a piece of malware that has installed itself into your browser and is overloading your net connection with requests when it starts.

Smokin’ hot graphics

When you turn a TV on to static, you can see a horizontal line usually crawling it’s way down the screen. That’s started happening to my PC while I’m playing games. It makes texts and interface flicker, and persists until you either quit the game, or temporarily remedy it with the solution (mentioned below).

Usually the symptom is accompanied with ludicrous amounts of lag. Pausing the game, alt-tabbing, and then going back into the game usually solves temporarily, but the problem likes to persist… a lot. I also attribute it as a primary factor of why I’ve stopped playing ME2.

Mythic

PCG: In your forum post, you mentioned that you’d recently moved your PC, which leads me to think this is likely to be one of two things. Either the graphics card has come slightly adrift in its slot, and this is interference caused by bad contacts, or it’s an overheating problem. Try taking the card out of your PC and putting it back in firmly, if that doesn’t cure it, check the GPU and CPU heatsinks for dust build up. As a last resort, try removing the CPU heatsink to clean it and reapply thermal paste.

Pin head

I am using a AMD Phenom II X4 965. I was replacing the stock heatsink with an Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7 Rev. 2, but when I unlatched the stock heatsink and pulled it from the motherboard, the themal paste stayed on the CPU and pulled it out of the socket while the locking lever was down. I removed the CPU from the heatsink without touching the bottom and meticulously checked the pins for any defects and found none with my naked eye. I cleaned the leftover paste off the top of the CPU with rubbing alcohol, dried it, and reapplied new paste (with a pea-sized dab in the middle) and attached the new cooler. Everything seems to be working fine.

Is there anything I can do to see if the CPU was damaged in some way? The CPU is new so I am not too familiar with how it should be acting normally. Any methods I can use in the future to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

EC

PCG: As stupid as it sounds, I’ve had exactly the same problem with AMD chips being torn out of their sockets several times in the past. At first I thought I hadn’t fitted it properly, but when it happened a second time I just got more careful. It is possible for pins to break off when this happens, but unless you can one see one sticking out of the socket, then you should be fine. While the hatred I feel towards AMD’s overly delicate design is real, the chips themselves are ludicrously tough. I’ve repaired many bent Athlon and Phenom pins following workshop accidents over the years using nothing more sophisticated than a ball point pen.

UAC: good or bad?

I was having an argument about the benefits of UAC in Windows Vista/7, I am of the opinion that it does a good job and anyone turning it off is asking for trouble. I compared not using it to logging in as root on Linux for everyday use. Could you clear this up please.

jon_hill987

PCG: Like most people, I’ve come full circle on this one. When Vista launched, UAC was a good idea poorly executed. It prevents programs from installing or altering system files without explicit approval from the user and helps to stop you accidentally installing malware on your system, so it’s a good thing. But because it popped up so many times and needed so many clicks to clear, turning it off and relying on firewalls and AV for security was enough for me.

Under Windows 7, it’s far less intrusive so I leave it on all the time. But it still bounces up more often than, say, Ubuntu’s root prompt. Why? Because Windows doesn’t make the same strong distinctions between user and root space as Linux. For example, logic says an app like Core Temp which reads CPU sensors shouldn’t need to access UAC protected areas every time it’s run. But because of the way Windows is constructed, it does. On the other hand, there are a good many Linux apps which are buggy because they don’t have root access – if you want to use the GUI to change a graphics driver setting, for example. So there’s no perfect solution just yet.

Why don’t graphics chips cook?

My question isn’t really anything serious, more of a curiosity. I was wondering why a GPU’s thermal rating is always so much higher than a CPU? For instance, Nvidia’s new Fermi cards will safely run at temps above 90C without breaking a sweat! Nvidia even lists the maximum temp at 105C on their website.While at the same time, even the most adventurous overclocker won’t push a CPU’s temps much above 70C under load. Why is that? It just seems like there shouldn’t be that large of a discrepancy.

Makius

PCG: Good question. There are differences in the way that the two types of processor are manufactured which affect performance at temperature, but I put the fundamental part of the question to Lars Weinand, Senior Technical Marketing Manager at NVIDIA.

“A CPU is much more error critical than a GPU running graphics,” he explained, “For example, if the CPU gives a wrong value when running something as ‘simple’ as Excel, then the whole OS can crash whereas a slightly wrong pixel colour when a GPU is pushing out millions upon millions of pixels at once does not cause a game to crash. This is simplifying things, but the end result is that a GPU has a much higher thermal range. Also, half of the die space on the CPU is dedicated to cache and its few cores have long pipelines which creates hotspots where heat builds up. On a GPU the heat is shared over a larger die area hence GPUs having a higher heat threshold.”

Giving it the boot

At reboot, or normal boot-up, I come to a black and white screen with roughly the words “Boot error, please insert disc and hit Enter.” So essentially, it again does not bring me to the “which OS do you want screen”, just this new screen. So, I put in the Win 7 disc, and did a hard reboot. As expected, after reboot, the next words to come up were “Hit any key to boot from CD or DVD…”, but to test things, I hit NO KEY. I let it pass. Guess what? The two choices screen came up! “Earlier version of Windows, or Windows 7″. Very perplexed, I chose Win 7, and it boots up no problem. So, to test it out again, I took out the 7 DVD, and rebooted. Wham, same problem black and white screen: “Boot error, please insert disc and hit Enter”. So I did, but this time I DID hit a key, went into 7 setup, and tried the “Win 7 repair startup” option, and rebooted w/out the disc and tried it again; again, SAME “boot error” message! But when I put the Win 7 disc in, hard reboot, let it come back up, display the “Hit any key to boot from DVD” and I SKIP THIS (hitting no key), it then goes to the “correct” screen of offering me two choices. I hit Win 7 every time, and it boots up fine.

The_Terminator

PCG: The_Terminator’s question comes from our excellent new tech forum which is well worth checking out as a first point of call for your problems. There’s some more background to the issue and some excellent advice for repairing damage to the Master Boot Record (MBR) of a damaged Windows installation. I think there may be a simpler solution, though. It sounds as if the hard drive order got swapped around during a BIOS flash. Even though nothing has changed physically, if your XP hard drive has been set ahead of the Windows 7 one in the Boot Order, it would account for nearly all the problems you describe here.

Every Tuesday, our hardware expert Adam Oxford is on hand to answer your hardware and software gripes. If you’ve got a question, ask below in the comments, or in the tech folder in our forum.

Enough Cooling?

My question regards the PC Gamer Rig. I’ll be building it in about a month and was wondering about the cooling for the system. Should I invest in another couple of fans to put into the case? Similarly, should I consider a different heatsink to the stock Intel version or does that keep temperatures down all right by itself?
Elliot Metson

PCG: Putting together the Rig as it appears in the UK magazine will give you all the cooling you need, but you might want to upgrade the CPU and case fans (or even the case) to deal with noise. We’ve had no problems running even overclocked processors on stock cooling, but our ears have suffered a bit, if we’re honest. For your CPU, Arctic Cooling’s excellent Freezer 7 costs less than £18 and yet is barely audible and super-chilly, while the biggest improvement you can make to the Coolermaster Elite case we use is to fit a throttle to the existing fan, rather than replace it.

Seriously. How much is enough?

I do my PC gaming at a desk at home, with my PC tower inside a reasonably ventilated large drawer space. My current tower is 19 inches long, 8 inches wide and 16.5 inches deep and fits with just adequate air flow around it. The PSU needs to be at the top of the case too. When I look into building a PC of my own for the first time, what current mid size chassis/case would you recommend for my gaming PC & how many fans?
H2o

PCG: Your current tower is a standard size for what’s often called a ‘midi’ ATX case. It’s identical, in fact, to the Coolermaster Elite mentioned in the question above. When it comes to cooling, the general rule is that the bigger your case is, the better you can manage airflow inside (and the more fans you can fit). If that’s the biggest space you have to play with, though, there are still some options for silent gaming. The Lian-Li PC-8FIB is a stunning enclosure, but costs the Earth, otherwise you could try the Antec 300 as a cheap alternative, but which is quite noisy.

In terms of number of fans, unless you’re planning on overclocking, so long as you keep them clean and the inside of your case dust free, one at the front and one at the back should suffice. Top and side fans can often be disconnected if your system is running stably and you want a little less noise.

Beyond Native Resolutions

I see that most monitors seem to be 1920×1080, but for a higher cost I can get some higher resolutions. I see a lot of game benchmarks listed in much higher resolutions to stress the power of a video card. My question is, what does a game look like on a 1920×1080 monitor if you select a higher resolution in game? Do you see a loss of picture quality or what happens? Is there a reason to buy a super high resolution monitor for gaming? or is the 1080p versions enough for most gamers?
Fox91

PCG: Unlike old-school CRT monitors, you can’t actually run an LCD monitor at a resolution higher than its ‘native’ one. In other words, if there are 1920×1080 pixels on the screen, there simply won’t be an option to game at 2560×1600 in your settings.

Gaming at native resolution means each pixel your graphics card is outputting correlates exactly to one pixel on screen, and so long as the pixel pitch isn’t too high – in other words the pixels aren’t too far apart – it’s the best picture you can get. Run at a lower than native resolution and you’ll find a lot of artefacts and blur on screen as the monitor struggles to interpolate missing pixel data.

The good news is that anything up to a 24inch screen looks pretty sharp at the HD-standard 1920×1080 resolution, and any half decent PC can run games at that setting in its sleep. Instead of increasing the resolution, you’ll have plenty of processing headroom to ramp up image quality settings.

Dead motherboard

A few weeks ago I tried to power up my PC and was met with a black screen. I tried the usual things, including checking cables, connections, unplugging external devices etc… I was starting to think that the graphics card had gone, but eventually realised that the motherboard wasn’t getting to POST – no reassuring “beep” of success to let me know everything was working. I tried a few things, resetting the BIOS, replacing the battery on the motherboard, unplugging all hard drives and eventually stripped everything down so I just have the motherboard, PSU, processor and 1 stick of RAM connected – it still won’t post. My question is really: is there anything else I can try to see what is wrong before I spend money on something that isn’t the problem? And, if I do have to spend money, what should I replace first motherboard or PSD – I suspect one of these is the culprit but which is more likely?

Andy Pearson

PCG Bad news I’m afraid. Short of trying everything again in the stripped down PC, there’s not a lot more you can do for this one. I have seen similar motherboards rise from the dead, though, so as a last ditch attempt I’d suggest resetting the BIOS again now that everything is out, and re-seating the CPU too – together with applying new thermal paste for the heat-sink. You could also look for a recovery BIOS on the motherboard manufacturer’s website, to see if there’s a way of flashing your board back to life.

Normally, though, I’d suspect the PSU before the motherboard – unless you’re overclocking there’s little reason a healthy motherboard should suddenly give up like that. You didn’t mention your motherboard model, but some have contact points built in for attaching a multimeter to check the PSU’s health. If it’s not supplying power, you know what to replace.

What Wattage?

How important is it to get the right wattage from a PSU? How do I know what I need? Is there any danger in having too much?

BJRose

PCG The only thing that’s endangered by feeding your PC too many Watts is your wallet. After 600W or so, the price of decent, reliable power supplies gets painful – and it’s an unnecessary expense. Totalling up the power requirements of your PC is like that scene in Apollo 13 where Ed Harris is trying to get Tom Hanks back to Earth on batteries. You tot up what each component needs (for example, 150W for the CPU, 200W for the GPU, etc) and then add 50-100W for good luck. If your PC needs 500W to run flat out, that’s what it will use regardless of the size of your supply.

Unless you’re running dual graphics or a large number of hard-drives, you should be OK with a power supply rated 600-650W.

More important is the efficiency of the PSU. This tells you how much energy is lost in the conversion from mains power to the DC supply your PC needs. An efficiency of 80% or more is good, anything less means you’re spending a lot of money warming up your case.

Should I liquid cool?

I want to change to liquid cooling for my graphics card and processor. Are there any tips you can give me or am I changing to much?

Kris

PCG Personally I’m not convinced by water cooling unless you’re overclocking, as there are plenty of cheap air coolers for CPUs which outperform most liquid units and run quieter too – particularly if you have a big case with plenty of room for airflow. I find the biggest problems with noise tend to be graphics cards and power supplies.

Liquid cooling can help with graphics card noise, but changing the cooler on a graphics card can be a real pain to do and you mentioned this is your first PC build. My advice would be to build the PC using the standard coolers first, and once it’s up and running look at adding water cooling if you need it when you’ve got the experience of a full build under your belt.