ScinteX

If you fancy a fun, easy to pick game then you can try Command & Conquer Renegade. Personally I cant stand the actual single player game however the online multiplayer is great. The best thing is that though the game is old, there is a fanstastic user community that develop patches and utilities (e.g. Renguard anticheat). Also the game servers are pretty well suported with all sorts of ladders, contests etc. The Clan following is pretty large too. Anyhow ill shut up now.. this game has stood the test of time for sure

yep, try this: http://www.looknstop.com/En/index2.htm LooknStop is very good, although not that well known. or maybe the Tiny firewall. This link might add some confidence! http://grc.com/lt/scoreboard.htm If you have an old PC kicking about, you could try something like Smoothwall and use that as a gateway. This idea is probably for the more technical user though.

hey alec good to finally catch up Thx for your kind words too Yep ur solution should work... thats if the registry was ok before hand. I have a bad habit of installing such important software pretty early on in an install so potentially I could have the problem from day 1! But as usual we like to skin our cats in many ways! New rootkit? Hey that would have been fun lol ..although saying that there appears to be a lot more programs changing registry values that they really shouldnt be. I started using Spybot's teatimer (finally) and that would have picked up adaware should that particular bug decided to do its thing. Alec you may also like this: http://www.prevx.com/ "Prevx technology provides industrial-strength protection against: * In-Memory/Buffer Overflow Attacks * File System Attacks * Registry Attacks * Uncontrolled Program Execution * Process Hijacking" In my usual style... its free im using a hosts file too, its so much simpler than a program that does the same thing. All the best

Hi j0ckey, and welcome A reputable source of xp info: http://www.theeldergeek.com/quick_guide_to_simple_file_sharing.htm There are a few other factors to consider if you have tweaked your system or altered it from the default install. You will (may?!) need the correct services enabled on each xp pc. If you have no clue what I am talking about then the chances are you have never turned them off so all should be well Actually it has just occured to me - this process will probably differ between Home and Professional versions of XP. Anyhow another guide with pics may help: Home/easy way http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp/filesharing.htm Professional method http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp_filesharing/index.htm You may have to configure 3rd party firewalls if u use them (ZoneAlarm etc.) As far as your router is concerned, I imagine that you can leave it alone since it should just work....if not check the linksys forums Kind regards, S

A new build of ad-adware is available... apparently the previous version could cause your problem... link: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/

brain failure! oops do excuse me lol There was something about this in these forums... im sure i posted a solution. It was something along the lines of editing a registry entry (userinit.exe????). Indeed Alec is right, somekind of spyware causes it. Actually I think it is Ad-aware that 'fixes' something incorrectly. *side note - adaware is good, i like it, im not saying it bad as such....plus this prob might have been fixed by now.... I found the article!! hehe check here: http://www.smile-computers.nl/helpdesk/unablelogonadaware.htm have fun

36c on a slightly oc'd P4 2.8@3.06Ghz Ambient temp in the case is 29c. Both temps are taken from the Thermaltake sensors. Using MotherBoardMonitor (that uses the native mobo hardware sensors) its saying 36c also During gaming (Doom3, HL2 etc.) it rises to 42c. Just for the record there are 5 12mm fans (2 intake, 2 exhaust, 1 to circulate) in the case, a coolermaster jet cpu cooler, a zalman VGA cooler + additional fan. RPMs for the case fans are only 2300. Coolermaster is turned down just enough to stop the jet noise (sry no pun intended lol). Zalman fan runs at full RPM but is almost silent. Just for the record, this article is informative: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article191-page1.html To some of the other guys here - i wouldnt worry too much about temp since if ur box is stable (and cant quite brew a cuppa) then all is well -- Scin

I can highly recommend the Corsair RAM with the flashing activity lights :-) Yes I like flashing lights that do nothing

Sorry you asked for OS- This laptop is Windows 2000. The mouse is some nasty HP generic optical mouse with USB connection. At home, its XP SP2. One logitech PS2 mouse and this nasty HP USB mouse again in the USB port...

At work we used an adaptor that allowed two PS2 mice to plug into the one port. Therefore, the same signals were being sent down the cables. If I moved both mice at the same time then the cursor just went a bit bananas :-) If it is of help, type in "y mouse" (including quotes) into Google. It might be possible just to plug into 2 mice with no special adaptor. As I type on my laptop now, I can use the touchpad and the USB mouse at the same time. If I remember when I get home I can try a PS2 and USB mouse at the same time and post the results...

2000 has a few (well... two that I can think of) disadvantages: Less mutimedia support No whizzy memory process stuff thats in XP SP2 Other than that... well not much I guess. I would suppose it all comes down to your ability to tune, configure and tweak the install for the hardware that you have. I'm surpirsed this thread hasn't errupted into a rather large arguement! I use both OSs (one at work, one at home) and the speed is roughly the same (apart from -as mentioned- the startup and shutdown processes). I think nowadays that if your hardware is fairly good, you can run the OS at it's theorical maximum speed. What I mean is, browse around and change some settings here and there etc. Of course this changes when we start to launch applications. Here is where you could argue one OS is faster than the other however that would be down to hardware. Of course faster hardware, faster experience. Now I have confused myself so I'm going away LOL

Hi, Just a quick one- maybe it is your encoding that is set incorrectly. You can easily check this by clicking "View" then "Encoding". My IE here at work is set to "Auto-select" and "Western European (ISO)". I would imagine that Western European is unicode and thus includes lots and lots of characters (although I think it has problems with Japenese/Chinese characters) however it should be find with all european characters. You could try that and maybe it will work. If not, just say and then we can pursue other options Scin

Hey everyone.... lol u may remember me! I could bore u all with what ive been up to but to be honest its really boring! Anyhow, onto business. NFS has always been a great game and of course i jumped at the shelves when i went to my games shop Got home, installed it, and drove around the virtual world like some rude boy (minus the baseball cap). After a few days i thought id try the online gaming. Out of habit I tried GameSpy but of course no games there since its all done through the game itself! haha so anyways I click on "online" in the game only to be greated with the following: "Connection lost, please retry, please make sure you are connected to the network", or words to that effect. Slightly puzzled, I read the readme.txt file (the one ur supposed to read striaght away :x ) It tells me to open up some ports on my firewall. So I browse to my router and do that. Thought it was strange since the router is normally pretty insecure with outgoing connections- its usual stance is to block everything from the outside world. So anyway i open up a few ports and try again. Still no luck.... Thinking that the game might be just lying (the error message was shown instantly so it looked like it didnt even try to connect to EA) I went onto the net in search of a packet sniffer. For those who dont know, that simply shows me the data that goes to and from my pc. The aim here was to run it and see if NFS was actually sending anything. I came across AnalogX and tried that, since the download was a lot smaller than ethereal, and i couldnt be bothered to wait that long (!) for ethereal... Installed AnalogX packet sniffer and hit the start button. Got a funky error of "Could not open socket"!!! Socket?? eeeek!! Hmmm every other game I own works ok online (Renegade, Doom3, Joint Ops, TOCA, Soldner....) Casting my mind back, I remember going to Steve Gibson's website- http://www.grc.com. Great site, I am sure many of u have been there. There is a program called socket lock on there. I used it because i had no need for raw sockets. At least i thought id never have a need. So i visit the page and it says: "Please note that SocketLock is NOT meant to be used with the final release of Windows XP. This demonstration was only created to prove — without a shadow of doubt — that Microsoft can EASILY engineer a superior and secure solution to the problem of unnecessary raw socket exposure." Ahh ok so maybe i have been too secure!! LOL So I run the program and put everything back to XP standard. Back to the sniffer... click "start" and get no error. Great so far.... Go into NFS and hit "online". The ****** thing works!! EA need raw sockets to get me gaming online?? I run XP SP2. A note from microsoft: "We have removed support for TCP sends over RAW sockets in SP2. We surveyed applications and found the only apps using this on XP were people writing attack tools." So now im really confused..... either NFS is an attack tool or i am really missing something here!!!! Anyway the point is, if u play NFS Underground 2 and you cant get online, check to see if your sockets are ok on your install. If u used socket lock from GRC, go back in and enable sockets again.

I think that u r all wrong and you should go with a greased pig and wafers

Its my over zealous (maybe?) lock down of my PC. I should not need windows sockets (full raw sockets) in my usual day to day activities. Theres a real big arguement over the TCP/IP protocol and Windows sockets.... still after many years. Some background info if u r bored: http://grc.com/dos/xpsummary.htm http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html So as i said it is fixed now. NFSU2 has however decided to crash on me a lot now. it was always a bit unstable but the 1.1 patch seems to have made the crashes more frequent. If i put the CD in my drive and let the game run it seems to increase the chance of it working more than if i launch the game from the desktop shortcut. I just hope the next patch will fix my prob. Ive submitted a tech report to EA so you never know it might help! Thats with regards to the crashing. not the sockets thing. But of course my main point was that if u use socket lock from GRC then you might well have a problem when u come to play online. Other programs might interfere too, like Zone Alarm. Sometimes I think I should just not store any sensitive information on my PC, and leave it completely unprotected, unpatched and generally wide open. Then everything might run ok LOL 8)

BrightStor ARCserve has a very detailed log... its that detailed it gets a bit.. yawn... boring On the Bright side (ho ho) it hasnt failed us once- even when doing disaster recovery on 49 Win2K servers, 6 Nt 4.0 boxes and various other bits and bobs. Same applies for regular backups and restores. It isnt actually that pricey considering it is (i suppose) an industry standard. I guess my point here is that by all means do something like an annual disaster recovery routine just to prove that your methods are still valid and work. Of course this can mean the odd bit of downtime. However, assuming the worst, another box is well worth it since if the restore fails then u r stuck considering you've just done it on a production server! I feel a bit useless here since ive only every worked in big organisations.. ...which can have its faults. We have a contract with a 3rd party that deals with the real bad stuff. So thats anything from a fried CPU on a production box all the way to fire, flood etc. With that is bundled remote working so that we can all work from a completely different location using the 3rd party's servers. Scaling this down to a shop- maybe you can rent an identical server to restore to? That would prove the concept. Then maybe you can find a company that you can pay to get you out of the poop if something does go wrong. A failover plan could be as simple as renting a server..... or it could be more formal depending on the suits' preferences. Regards, Scin

Try here (i think the site has a USA and a UK bit) http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/...;subcat_uid=352

It works of course- cos u just frigged it so that DirectX 9.0c installs! Same as going back to 8.1 ...... Just glad u r a happy bunny Bjork- if u try to install an earlier version nothing will really happen since the installer knows what the current version is. Follow the post above or the link i supplied. Both work

I have a 9800XT and at high settings the games runs ok... but if i knock a few of the details down a bit it is a lot smoother. If u want to go the expensive route go for PCI Express

I have a CTX - not too pricey and i cant fault the screen itself.

thx alex, much appreciated. Quote: //=============================================================== //G R A P H I C S - APK Tweak per TechZone! //For ATI Radeon 9800XT + Pentium 4 3.2ghz CPU //512mb DDR-400 Corsair RAM //Dual WD "Raptor" 10,000rpm 8mb buffered RAID 0 Array disks //Cenatek 2gb RocketDrive Ramdrive board //Plus, tuned OS and ATITool 2.x and RefreshLock softwares! apk //=============================================================== We have almost the same setup. Of course no ram drive for me. I have DDR 500 corsair tho hehe My 2.8 P4 is oc'd to 3.1ish .... only a small overclock So this post is valuable to me - thx again

tell me about it! i got the game when it was released in the UK and i spent ages getting things in the right order. Then I accidentally hosed the doom3 folder with a dodgy batch script... dunno how i managed that anyhow it died! The only thing i cant get up now (no pun intended LOL) is the FPS rate. Since i couldnt get it working via a cfg file I changed my shortcut to this: "C:\Program Files\Doom 3\Doom3.exe" +com_showfps 1 +disconnect show fps ( great!) and disconnect = no intro movie. Lurrrrrrvly But it still doesnt work!!! any ideas?

Oh and welcome! oops 4got to say that :D

Try this: http://www.ntcompatible.com/thread28858-1.html Id suggest that your integrated graphics will struggle to run Sims 2. Main reason I say this is that i think the SiS650/1 gets its memory from system RAM and thus is a bit slow. You never know the game might run but just not that quickly. Nip over to sis.com and grab the latest drivers for the 650 chipset. If I remember rightly there are a few downloads there 4 u. Something like: IDE, chipset & AGP and graphics. Anyhow download all of the latest drivers that will help. The link above describes how to remove and reinstall DirectX too. Its worth sorting the issue out now since this error seems to be generated from DirectX not installing properly so you will get errors on other games too. Not all, but some.

only if u want to overclock your system massively.... or if you want to build a more 'future proof' machine. You need to get the supporting hardware ideally. Like a mobo ... Once again, we see the bottleneck shift. 675 odd Mhz from RAM is lovely, but only if the other buses can handle it. Start firing 300 odd Mhz down the uncooled tubes and u could see meltdown! Quality DDR2 is pricey for the time being. Of course this time next year we will be running pci express mobos with DDR2 probably