Getting the most out of your Games

Don't tell me you don't play games. You may not be a hard-core gamer, but everyone
needs a bit of play time, and some of these games are amazing. We play WOW (World
of Warcraft), a game that is so resource intensive we've had to upgrade our
computer in many areas and tune it so the game plays like it should. I'm going
to talk about some of the changes we made and what you can do to get the most
out of your game experience.

Some of these changes we can do for free, some are hardware changes that will
be well worth the money if you have the means. You will be amazed at what you
are not seeing. I have a friend (George Rothrock) who use to be one of the game
producers for RedZone Interactive (the guys that use to make GameDay for Sony),
and something I learned from him was that the designers and artists all use
the latest, greatest, hardware available at the time. So if you are running
medium quality video cards, you are only seeing top layers of the game.

Let's start with the easy stuff. The first thing you want to do is make sure
that you have the latest DirectX running on your system. You can get the lastest
version from Microsoft on their website (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.mspx).
Download, install and restart. Having the latest version will help the game
run smother, and faster.

You can't really go wrong with RAM. Adding RAM is always a good thing, but
if you are trying to decide between a new Video Card and more RAM, then go for
the Video Card and get a good one.

High End Video Cards have RAM and processors on them, which takes much of the
load that games put on the system, so that your system RAM can be used more
efficiently. The NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512 M is an assume card and I would
expect that the new NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX XXX Edition 512MB gDDR3 is going
to be amazing as well. When we installed ours, we noticed that the water in
WOW has fish in there... as well as several other details we simply couldn't
see without a high-end card. The speed of the game jumped to a point we didn't
know was possible, and lags we thought were server lags or network related,
were clearly our system trying to render the complex settings of the game world,
because they no longer happened.

Again, having a Gig or more of RAM in your system is going to help the computer
over all, so if your job is related to resource intensive programs, then you
will probably want to get the RAM, but if the game is your only requirement,
go for the video card.

There are other high-end video cards out there. I would like to say I knew
enough about them to give you a run down, but I don't. What we did is check
with the Blizzard people, and the gaming forums to find out which one would
work best for the game we played, and I would suggest you do the same. Perhaps
it will be the GeForce, it might be the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX. If you can find
out what the developers used for their machines then you are on the right track.

If you are playing a game that is Internet related, such as WOW, then cleaning
up your network connections is going to help a great deal. Get rid of any network
drivers you don't need for your connections. If you need help with deciding
which ones you don't need, click over to our Help Forum and we'll try to help
you with that.

Close all unrequited programs and services, turn off screen savers, and remove
desktop background images. In other words, don't run or have in memory anything
you don't need to run or have in memory. Especially any IM clients you might
have, because those little guys use more resources and network chatter than
you realize, even when they are just sitting there, doing nothing.

Make sure your trash is empty and you have cleaned up the system's temp folders.
What you are really doing is cleaning up the disk so that you have room on there
for the swap files. Have at least a Gig or two of free space on your drive,
so the swap files have plenty of room.

Have fun!