BioShock Demo hits the marketplace

Welcome to Rapture with the official demo to BioShock, the “genetically enhanced” first person shooter. BioShock is a shooter unlike any you’ve ever played, loaded with weapons and tactics never seen.

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New Record: World's Hottest Pepper

Spice used in India to cure stomach ills is named world’s hottest pepper. I need to get some of these for chili.

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21 Amazing Facts You Didn't Know About Pigeons

This site cracks me up. Everything you would ever want to (or not want to) know about pigeons is on this page. How old they are (3000 BC), value of pigeon poo, famous pigeons, and of course the answer to: 'Are pigeons intelligent'? :)

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It's Official: Halo 3 has four player, online co-op

Speaking at a Microsoft press conference in Amsterdam earlier today, Bungie has confirmed, once and for all, that Halo 3 will feature two to four player online co-operative play over Xbox Live.

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Eb Games.com offers game downloads and Game Guide downloads

Decent selection of games but their prices need some help.

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Sony PSP ONE OF A KIND God of War MOD

Very awesome mod done to a PSP. Fans of the game will definetly dig this.

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Dead Router......

Hehehehe........

I freaking Jinxed myself during the podcast last night(7/23/07)we were talking about Pc issues and how it sucks when they happen and I said that I have not had one for a while(since frying my system ram a few weeks ago) and what happens...I made the router smoke. So i had to switch this morning to my older than dirt netgear wired hub/switch for the time being. I could not get it back online last night since I had to wait for the smoke to clear.

Oh well At least the show keeped going..I hope.

Google Fear Hits AT&T Square In The Jaw

As predictable as daylight, AT&T isn't happy about Google's plan to bid on the 700MHz wireless spectrum. The telecommunications is poised to claw any competition out of the equation, and is hoping its traditional ally, the FCC, will have its back again.

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Windows Home Server 1.0 finished, code goes RTM

Windows Home Server has been christened 1.0, and the code has been released to manufacturing. System Builder versions as well as initial products from several ISVs are expected this September.

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Microsoft Announces 3-Year 360 Warrenty Extension

Finally MS taking care of the 3 Red Ring Circus of a Console.

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A Better 'Digg This' Button

This is an interactive digg counter/button that gives visitors a visual view of your story being dugg in real-time. In this example, Mario hits a coin box every time your story is dugg. The widget can be customized with several other presets, or you can make your own style easily. It's a fun way to attract more diggs to your story!

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Top 10 Uses For Used Coffee Grounds

10 great uses for used coffee grounds.

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Windows Vista and Gaming for us normal folk.

How bad is Windows Vista for us the normal Pc gamer? You know who you are, The guys that do not have the latest and greatest gaming rig out there but it is more than capable to keep High framerates on current games with the majority of eye candy turned on.

How come many people are having problems installing and running Vista on new and old systems? I know Nvidia has not released the best drivers yet(Have not tried Ati yet) but they are working on it(Latest 158.24) so I decide to finally install Vista(Ultimate) on my primary gaming rig which consist of a AMD x2 4400,1gb of Crucial Ballistix ram(Second gig is being replace by Crucial) a Evga 7900GT Superclocked video card(DX9) and a Evga Nforce4 Sli mobo(Nf41) a Audigy2 sound card and a 180gb Western Digital Hard drive(7200rpm) and a Sceptre 21 inch widescreen monitor with a default resolution of 1680x1050.

Well,according to the Vista system analyzer my rig scores a 4.2 with the max being 5.9. So I decided to go the dual boot option which would the easiest way to go short of adding a blank Hard drive,I dedicated 20gb of Hard drive space to Vista on my hard drive just for these test. The install went perfect except for the sound drivers which for some reason could not work correctly but that was a easy fix.
(Side note: Make sure you download all the drivers for ALL of your Pc's components,It would go a lot smoother)

P.s All the test I ran were run at the default resolution of 1680x1050 and max settings for video option and 4xAA and 16xAF(if supported)

So....first game from my shelf is from the Steam collection of games,Counterstike. This is one of my all time favorite shooters followed closely by the Battlefield series. I ran the built-in stess test tool as well as joined a online match that had 32 players online. Under Windows Xp the stress test gave up 146 FPS running max graphic settings at 1680x1050 resolution with 4xAA and 16xAF and playing online it gave me 90 fps average.
(Image)

Under Windows Vista the story was a bit different,With the stress test at the same resolution and settings as XP the result was......75 fps. Online the results were just as impressive,again same settings as XP......52 fps average. The differences are huge but the games are still very playable..even under heavy action.
(Image)

Next game I tried was Battlefield 2142.....It ran like crap at 1680x1050 with high settings on both XP and Vista which I can attribute to having 1gb of ram. So I will try this game later when I get my memory back.

Next game was Company of heroes under Xp this game ran beautifully at a smooth 60 fps and Under Vista it kinda chugged a bit but kept the framerate at a average of 30-35 fps.
(Image)

While I was at it I went ahead and Installed Shadowrun and Halo2.

Shadowrun really impressed me running on my machine with 1 gig when the recommend size is 2gb,And running those games at the max resolution and settings kept a smooth 52fps even under heavy action.
(Image)

Halo2 needs to be re-run with 2gb of ram because it ran like crap under 1gb...seriously.

I will update this post at a later date once I get my ram back,But from this quick test
on my 2+year old gaming rig which is still able to run a lot of games extemely well with Vista,but Vista does take a big bite of the cpu power which goes to show that you really need a dual core or quad core cpu. I want to also mention that I did not tweak Vista at all. Just straight out of the box setup under a clean 20gb partition on a pretty new hard drive.

Conclusion for now:Undetermined
Vista response is pretty snappy at the current system settings but it's still a work in progress.

*I need to redo the pictures because for some strange reason FRAPS decide to not take the screenshots when I wanted it too.

JesusM

The Molecular Art of Grilling

The science behind one of our favorite summer time activities.



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StencylWorks, a simple yet powerful Game Builder.

This project is still being built but looks be a very promising tool for Indie game design.



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