Cutts

David House invokes the 5th.

"Challenge... 3... 2... 1... Get your cock out and wave it at an old lady!"

Oh no, its Balkenbush, suggesting her minge is war-torn and ravaged by cold winters.

Is her name "Molly Barking-Bush?" Please say it is, that'd be only one step less funny than "Molly Queefing-Minge". Sorry about insulting your colleagues... however, next time you're presenting a report directly to camera, just imagine her sat next to you, queefing. Yeah, that concept should now be nicely lodged in your subconcious memory for a future day at work. Heheheh. Incidentally, you've got a very nice news voice... I'd be happy hearing about local murders if you told me. When do you get promoted to "Ron Burgendy"?

Why is Michael Fassbender in everything? He's not bad, I suppose, but he has a fucking stupid name. Also, I'm looking forward to yet another computer game I.P. to be ruined by the film industry... I hope they do it right (I always hope), but I expect they'll fuck it directly in its ass. [Cue obligatory conversation about if there have been any game-to-film transitions that haven't totally sucked?] [Cue obligatory comment that the Resident Evil films were at least pretty watchable.]

Merci beaucoup, monsieur! Voulez vous couchez avec moi, se soir? Bien sur, n'est pas! Qui ne voudrait pas? My french is rubbish, but I am AM a now expert in saying "L'addition s'il vous plait".

I had a lovely time, near Vannes on the western coast of Brittany, and I had a lot of fun including, but not limitted to: * Drinking more alcohol in two weeks than I have in the last two years. * Eating a lot of crêpes. * Being entertained by nephew and niece (who are pure awesome sauce, because they're a bit naughty). * Goggling at fine French waitresses. * Burning my face using the sun. I shall see you all out on the pub server a bit later on. - Cutts PS. Congratulations to the big list of people promoted!

Report: Liberating the coast of France. Expect to take it in 2 weeks. Will call for reinforcements if necessary. - Pfc. Cutts

Hmmm... do you only get them when a game first loads, or jittering on and off in an instant throughout the game? If its the former, then I guess you might be able to live with it until you can get a replacement. If the latter, then it probably is a GPU hardware fault and I don't think I can help you, I'm afraid. Incidentally, I'm going to be disappearing on vacation tomorrow, so I won't be able to reply here for a while (unless I get some kind of connection there... unlikely)... I've basically run out of ideas to help though, other than whatever I said before. Sorry - Cutts

A mate of mine is actually doing this... I'll find out if it was any good, or not. Apparently, if you go along as a volunteer zombie on one night, they'll give you a go as a surviver for free.

If its only with new games, you might be lucky and just need a new set of drivers. Check out the AMD website, and they should have easy directions to find and update your drivers. If its with older games, especially games that were previously working fine, then it is probably a hardware fault. You might have some luck by changing the video mode settings in the game (difficult if the menu is all screwed up...). It sounds like only some video modes are affected, so possibly it might work at a different colour depth, resolution, or refresh rate. Would you say it looks like chunks of the picture appearing but sort of staggered around the screen like a weirdly symetrical jigsaw puzzle? If so, and you've definately ruled out the display causing the problem , its almost certainly a fault with the GPU... most likely the chip that encodes and outputs rendered video, rather than with the main 3d accelerator core. One other thing you could try: Disconnect one display at a time, and seeing if the games work with only one or the other monitor connected. If its the output chip, theres a slim chance it will work with just one, connected to one or other of the outputs at the back. Not sure what else I can suggest really, other than trying your luck with the manufacturer... they might be feeling generous, or be able to fix/replace it cheaply.

First, just in case, have you tried connecting the card to a different display device? Sometimes artifacting can be caused by a malfunctioning chip in the display... and in some cases, its only specific video modes (resolution/refresh rate etc.) that are affected. Assuming it is definitely not the display, what is the nature of the artifacting? E.g. Is it all the time, from the moment you boot, in BIOS and windows? If so, its likely that the card is buggered. You could try the card in a different system to be sure. If you can boot to windows, or in safe mode, then it might be a driver problem, which is usually solvable by downloading the latest ones, or finding an older one by trial and error. How old is the card? It could well have just burned out at the end of its "natural" life. I've had at least 5 cards burn out in my time, and unfortunately that is the most likely scenario. If returned to manufacturer it might be repairable (although it might just be cheaper to replace it... in the UK I've got lucky a few times, and they've just sent me a newer model for free).

So, I've just turned my entire house upside down, whilst looking for my passport. I've turned over all the sofas and chairs in the living room. I've rifled through every file in my filing cabinet. I've gone through each and every box of miscellaneous shit in my attic. I've looked under all the beds, on top of all the wardrobes, and behind every bit of furniture. I've checked all the kitchen cupboards, behind a loose bit of skirtingboard, and even in the fridge. I've tried every nook and cranny in the entire house. I breifly went out into the garden, before realising that was completely preposterous. Only once I've looked almost everywhere, did I think to look in the most likely place it would be: The drawer where I keep that sort of thing. Turned out it was in there. Eugh. Gotta tidy the house up again now.

I can't believe how uninterested everyone is in this. The original UFO - Enemy Unknown (AKA "XCOM - UFO Defense") is the best strategy game I've ever played. If you check out pretty much any gaming site / magasines "Top 100 All Time Best" games lists, it will definately be on it, and usually in the top 20. Seriously guys? Are you all too young to remember the original or something? It was badass (your soldiers die, and stay dead, and you don't get many of them). It was difficult (assuming you weren't playing on super easy mode). It was fucking scary (especially when a fucking muton jumped out at your guy with a melée weapon and carved his face off). And you have to protect the whole damn planet!

Excellent news! Yeah... sorry, I use the words "might" and "probably" a lot. I'm a little bit anal retentive about verbal accuracy, and I can never say "will" and "definately" even if I'm 99.9% sure about something! When I have worked as a programmer, it makes my coworkers absolutely furious. Conversation usually goes like this: Me:---- "Oh... I've got a little snippet of code that does basically what you want... I'll send it to you." Them:- "Did you test the code and will it work?" Me:---- "Well, it never went through a rigourous test, but I've been using it in this little tool for months and its not broken yet... its probably fine, but you should test it before deploying to a live environment." Them:- "Probably? I don't like the sound of that, are you 100% sure?" Me:---- "No... like I said, I only use it in this tool, but it basically works... take it and test it, and you can be sure." Them:- "Basically? I don't like the sound of that.... I'll go and write my own code." Me:---- "Suit yourself." Ungrateful fuckers never want to test the code, so they spend fucking days writing something almost identical (but usually with more bugs in) just because I wouldn't test it for them!

Thats excellent... You might like this one: The singing voice is classic!

Specific network drivers are one of the things that often aren't included in windows XP installs... Typically, you'll have a seperate network driver disc (or it'll be part of the motherboard driver disc normally included with a purchased mobo/pc system). If you've tried again and got a good install, and its only your network driver missing, then you should be on the home stretch. If you find the driver disc, and it all works, great! If not, let us know again, and we can take another look. Its possible that your XP disc is fucked, but its usually no problem to get hold of another copy and still use your original key, so if needed we can probably help you with that. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you! - Cutts

Hmmm... I'm not sure but I had a quick google... Here is a microsoft help article that might shed a bit of light: [url=http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311755]http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311755 There are a couple of methods listed that might help. Looking at Method 3, are you using a burned copy of the disc (incidentally this is not illegal, so long as your license key is valid)? If you are, its apparently possible to get this message. If you can't get hold of an original, or a better copy, you might have to try one of the other 2 methods listed. If you need any more help, let me know, and I'll see if I can dig out anything else! - Cutts

I want this game so badly now! Loved the originals, and it looks like they've really kept the essense of them!

Heheheh.... they'll never get , he's far too cool to be shot down!

I need a hero!! Yeah! Excellent stuff!

I've never really understood how something like boxing can have "judges". If its a fight, either one guy wins, or the other one does. Seems to me that 2 guys go into the ring, and they should keep fighting until one of them is knocked out, chickens out, or dies. There should be none of this "whoever has the most points after X rounds" nonsense, or "lets take this to the judges" bullshit! If a referee wants to end the fight, then he can maybe recommend it, but if they two fighters both want to continue, then in my opinion its nothing to do with the ref. Yes, it'd be more brutal that way, but when the sport is basically "men punching each other very hard", what is the point in judges? Yes, it would probably result in more fighters dying, but in my opinion the responsibilty lies entirely with the fighter... they have made the choice to participate in a deadly sport, so who are we to stop them? If people REALLY want judges, then the only fair way of doing it, is getting the judges to line up in front of both fighters, who then proceed to smack each judge in the face as hard as possible. At least then the judges would have a pretty good idea of who the actual winner was!

Hmmm... I've not used AMD cards for a long time (bit of an NVidia fanboy myself). Looking at the specs of the HD 4250 though, it should be powerful enough to run source games, but not necessarily very well. Question asked on valve forums... consensus is that it'll work, but not great One of the main issues with any onboard GPU is shared memory. They tend to cannibalise the system memory, which is much slower, first because the GPU has to operate at the bus-speed of your motherboard (usually much slower than the internal rate of a dedicated card) and secondly because the GPU is also contending with the CPU for access to that memory, lowering speed and available system memory. Tweaks: 1) In general, stop as many background processes and services as you can, to free up CPU cycles and memory. 2) Also, maybe take a look in your BIOS, to see what settings are available to do with your onboard GPU... you should be able to configure it to have a larger dedicated slice of system memory, and there maybe some other settings specific to your motherboard that can help to get a bit more performance. Overclock (not recommended, but possible): Some BIOS's allow you to boost the voltage and clock speed of an onboard GPU, to overclock it seperately from the rest of the system. If such options are not available, you maybe could overclock your frontside-bus, which I believe will result in overclocking any integrated graphics, but it would also basically overclock the entire system, so I really wouldn't recommend it as the performance gain would be tiny, for massive risk of burning components out. I would always recommend reading a lot of info about this before attempting it! My main recommendation would be to get hold of a cheap dedicated replacement card. For only $50 you can probably find a new card, 2 or 3 generations later than the 8800gtx, such as something in the NVidia 4XX series. Or for a bit more cash, the 5XX or 6XX series is available. Anything like that should play source games at max settings, no problem.

For some reason, I'm reminded of this: Happened right outside the front door where I used to live!