Cutts

OK, looking at the specs of that it does seem to have a Sandforce based controller, so it is possible your problem could be solved with a firmware upgrade. Looking at Intels website, I found this I *think* this tool will get the latest firmware and install it for you, but I haven't ever used it so I cannot be sure. Again, it should be relatively straight forward, but be careful so you don't accidentally brick the drive. Best of luck, and let us know if you have any problems.

I'll just leave this here: And if you like that, here is a the history of "Chap-Hop":

Hmm... I cannot be certain but it may well be because of the SSD controller inside the drive. There are a variety of controllers out there, and some of the "Sandforce" models have had firmware issues which can make them a bit unstable. If you know how, I would advise upgrading the firmware on the drive. This can be a bit fiddly, but should be as simple as following some instructions. If you're not confident with doing it, find a friendly tech wizard to do it for you. I have a similar issue - just after boot my PC pauses for about a minute, then continues. Every now and then it might do it again (indeed, during a game) which doesn't normally crash the game exactly, but does usually make me time-out and disconnect from any server. I haven't actually bothered fixing mine yet (because I have discovered that my mainboard doesn't support the technology required to flash the firmware on the drive, and also the OCZ one I have is a bit of a bitch, even though it has really high performance). Let us know what model of Intel drive you have, and maybe we can find some more specific information about any issues it has.

I'm not talking about for the whole unit, just us old timers who have been playing games since the only Tandy and Turtle computer systems or the old Colicovision consoles lol. I still remember saving up my paper route money for 3 months to be in line to get the Atari2600 system when it launched, was short $50 but my grandfather gave me it for trying so hard to save up enough for it on my own. You know those who remember how hard it was to bounce a square ball between a pixelated hole in the wall beyond a moving stick, who can truely appreciate a fine work of art that you helped create. Heheheh. I REALLY wish I had freebies now! I'd give you all of them, just because of how awesome this post is! Extra marks for mentioning Tandy. Though, the only way I can hand them out is if I buy them myself first.

If I could get and distribute freebies I totally would. Unfortunately, no freebies, presumably because they know just how many I'd be handing out!

EVE does suffer from server lag... sort of. For any interested geeks: Although its all "one server" that is really a big cluster of machines, so busy star systems that have a few thousand players on them will be run on one dedicated physical machine, but you'll have say 10-20 usually empty star systems run on another. Imagine all the different WoW shards running different worlds, but being connected together via portals which allow your unique character to step between those shards, connecting all the worlds into one big universe. You step through a portal, and behind the scenes you are disconnected from that shard and connected to another one, and thus you're through to another world. That is EVE, but with spaceships instead. What used to happen (in simplified terms): Anyway, they did used to have really bad server lag once too many people were in a single fight. The fight calculations would take longer than the 1 second tick time, and so the server would process the first part of its "list of shit to do" and just ignore stuff it didn't have time to process. As a result, people would lag out unevenly: some would carry on firing shots as they expected but others wouldn't be able to move, shoot or anything, and would wake up dead 20 minutes later. What happens now: They introduced a feature called Time Dilation. They literally slow down the game time during massive fights, so that the server has time to process everything, and everyone gets a fair game. They only need to slow down the system where the fight is actually occuring however, so the rest of the universe gets to continue as normal. So during a fight like THAT, time dilation will probably resulted in something like 10 seconds passing for every 1 game second. Damn, I'm gonna have to start playing again, aren't I?

Heheh... *smug face* ...although its not all that much different from a regular programming job to be honest. Ultimately, replaying the same bit of a game over and over, trying to fix weird glitches and broken bits, can get a little frustrating; its funny for 5 minutes when you accidentally make a nazi twist his torso round 180 degrees and cause him to shoot his own feet, but then its hours of trying to stop him from doing it! Anyway, I'm interested to know what everyone thinks, if and when you play it. Let me know if its awesome or awful (and don't hold back with the criticism on my account!)

Heheh. FYI, I didn't work on this, but the guy sat opposite me did! I played it a little yesterday - it was kinda fun. Anyway, I probably cannot reasonably review this, as my opinion will be necessarily biased!

I should also point out (in agreement with Holland) that BSODs are usually some kind of critical driver issue. Back in the days of Win95, you could make it BSOD really easily. Practically anything it didn't expect would completely fuck it up. Since XP, it became a lot harder, as the windows NT family of OSes were much more robust. Then with Vista and 7 it became harder still. So, if that processor affinity trick works, then great. If it doesn't, then you have a more serious problem.

Also, yeah, uplay is rubbish. I mean, I get it: Ubisoft (and other large publishers) want more control, and don't like the idea of being beholden to Valve for their digital sales etc. So they make their own game & content delivery service. Only the problem is, everyone who does gaming on PC has a steam account, and they have got one willingly. 95% of peoples PC games will have been bought through steam. No-one wants more than one of these fucking things. As a result, you end up buying ubisofts games via steam ANYWAY, because ubisoft cannot possibly NOT sell through steam, or they wont sell any PC games at all. Then you have to load up the categorically inferior uplay service to play the damned thing, when in reality you'd rather Ubisoft either: A ) fucked off with all that shit entirely, and just gave you your game or B ) actually integrated it with steam properly, like everyone else generally does

This issue might be related to one I had (but it also might not). Assassins Creed 2 (& Brotherhood & Revelations) have issues with more than 2 processor cores. I wouldn't be surprised if the same issues crop up in AC3, but I haven't tried it out yet. I used to get lockups/crashes (though not usually BSODs, just total hang with no animation, or black screen, and looping audio). The solution I found: 1) Start the game normally and wait until the main menu has loaded. 2) Alt-Tab out to desktop. 3) Start task manager as an administrator (Start menu... type taskmgr.exe in the box, and it should appear in the list above... right click it, and click Run As Administrator) 4) Find the assassins creed exe in the list of tasks.... (probably something like ac2.exe... I know brotherhood was acbsp.exe for the single player) ...then right click and select "Set affinity" 5) Uncheck "All processors" and re-check "CPU 0" and "CPU 1". I'm not certain that this will work, but it stopped the game crashing for me. Turns out this can make a fair few games more stable, but its generally only advised if you cannot find another solution to the problem. Best of luck!

http://www.youtube.com/embed/HTIkfr_wj6s?rel=0

Signed up... I really hope they give me priority because I'm a game developer. They'll probably put me on a black list though. (

No problem!

Hmmm... Have a look in this directory: ...\Steam\steamapps\<user_email>\day of defeat source\dod\cfg It should contain one or two config files named config.cfg and autoexec.cfg (this one may not exist, as it is user created). Open those files in notepad and look for the following two lines: con_enable "1" and bind "`" "toggleconsole" The first one lets the console appear at all, the second one binds it to the key "`" (which for me is just to the left of the number 1). You might have instead, on a US keyboard: bind "~" "toggleconsole" Ok, so if those lines are missing at all, add them to the autoexec.cfg (which you can create if you dont have it... its just a text file renamed ".cfg"). You *could* add them to the config.cfg, but that file is automatically generated by the engine and saved whenever you exit, so your changes might get overwritten. Also, you can write the autoexec.cfg with nice spaces in between each line, rather than the engine-generated-wall-of-text that is config.cfg. If, instead, those lines ARE present, then it is possible that the engine is having some problem interpreting your keyboard input (maybe due to some odd non-standard configuration in windows?) and it might be that the bind is just wrong. You can try putting a different key in there, for example: bind "F1" "toggleconsole" Which might be the wrong key, but generally people don't have F1 in use, so its an OK workaround. Not sure if any of this will help, but its worth a try. - Cutts PS. Not sure if this one works any more (might have been just an old HL1 thing) but you can try adding the "-console" switch to the command line for the game. To do this in steam: 1) Right-click "Day of Defeat: Source" in your library. 2) Click "Properties" 3) Click "Set Launch Options" 4) Type "-console" into the box that appears 5) Click OK. That should force the game to enable the console if it isn't already (forces con_enable "1"), but it is unlikely to work when the .cfg methods haven't.

Well, it really depends.... In general I take my shoes off when I go inside. I even like to take them off at work when I'm sat at my desk. However, sometimes in the morning I find I've gone out of the house in a hurry and forgotten something; when I go back in to get it there is no way am I taking off my shoes (and you can't make me!).

Awesome. That man loves giraffes slightly too much.

Well, congratulations dude! You've mentioned this before, and its really cool that it has all come together for you. 3rd Platoon are going to be a very sorry bunch indeed for a few months. Anyway, stay safe, and I'm sure you'll have an excellent time and meet a lot of excellent people!

Bah... I pique some interest, then my lovely 7.1 headset dies. And I wont be able to get a new one till next week. BAAAAAAH! I'm so angry I could punch a fox.

Lol... I got all defriended on steam by that lot! | Well, I guess if I see anyone playing I'll jump in.

OK... basically Dr. Who is a children's show. That having been said, it is a pretty good one, and I do watch it. A lot of the ideas in it are totally "out there", hence much of it is completely preposterous, but on the other hand at least it's interesting. If you're really into scifi, you should definitely give it a go, because nothing else really does what Dr. Who does. Before you watch ANYTHING however... listen to this:

Yeah... I managed to kick my serious addiction to that a couple of years back, and I really dont wanna get hooked again! Its great fun, but it sucks up time like nothing else! Not sure about the levels though, sorry. If your combos remaining hits 0 and you don't progress to level 8, then I guess there isn't one.

I'm seriously addicted to this at the moment, but it is quite difficult to get a good game. Its usually so one-sided that the losers ragequit after the first round or two, and that is no fun at all. So, I'm just looking to see if anyone here likes versus mode at all? Maybe we can sort something out! - Cutts

Camden Protips: #1: When you are approached by intimidatingly sized, dreadlocked men, the answer to their question is "No." If the answer is ever "Yes" you probably want to find less dodgy, non-Camden types. #2: Visit each of the markets at least once (there are a few... Stables Market, Lock Market etc.). If you like cheap, cheerful and unbelievably brightly coloured hippy shite, you will be in heaven. Tip #1 ought to be in full effect here. #3: If you're in the Stables market, visit Cyberdog and The Psychedlic Dream Temple, two shops quite close to each other. The first one sells ludicrous raver clothes; always a good laugh. The second is wall-to-wall psytrance CDs; also fairly entertaining. Both have cafés filled with pretty girls, which is excellent. #4: Avoid any Chinese food on sale. Go to a different part of London for Chinese, where you wont get ill. No, really.

Basically, that is a pretty good choice. I've not used EVGA before but I'm told they're a solid brand. NVidias 600 series is pretty good; only slightly more performance than the equivalents in the 500 series, but operating at less than half the power usage and considerably less heat output. The 680 GTX is also at a reasonable price:performance point... you only get a little bit more speed with the more expensive cards or SLI, but the price becomes astronomical. Not sure what your level of expertise is on this sort of thing, but do make sure: 1) You've got a high enough output rating on your power supply. Apparently a 680 GTX machine can function on around 600W, but that seems ludicrously low to me. I always make sure I have a 1kW power supply for a high end card, just so I'm always comfortably within the limits. NVidia generally recommend 1kW. 2) Your motherboard supports PCI-Express 3.0. Cards are generally backwards compatible with older PCI-e versions, but to get the most performance out you want the latest one! One other thing: Your chosen card has 2GB on board, which is about average. I would usually advise getting the 4GB version of the card if you can afford it; you probably wont find it makes much difference with todays games, but releases in 3 years time will probably really benefit from the extra available memory. If you do choose a 4GB card, however, make sure you have at least 8GB of system memory: Whatever is in GFX memory is often also cached in main memory. So what that means is, with some games your GFX memory usage can eat into main memory usage, so you need an absolute ton of main memory!