Adarsh's Showstopping blog

2011-07-08T11:50:00.011+05:00

Whatsup Guyz!!!...Long time....3 years:D:D....How r ya all...So ive been busy doing my MBA at Nagercoil...n i barely get time these days to be online:(.. So right now im on holidays...for 2months...so i was extremely bored being at home for 1 or 2 weeks...so thought abt attending a gaming event ( after almost an year , last was wcg 2010). So my friend Karthik ( eSports Solutions/ATe-Gaming) invited me to be a part of the event named DGL 2011 ( Dfuze Gaming league 2011). Dfuze 2011 was supposed to be one of the biggest tournaments in India...having prizes over 3L for CS 1.6, Fifa , CoD 4 and Dota...and all the top teams were expected to visit it..especially ATE...

So i reached Chennai at 11:00 am , 1st July 2011. Stay was supposed to be in a hotel named Mallika Residency which was supposed to be a " Business Class Hotel" . They had an attractive website layout..and i was pretty impressed...just 700 bux for a AC double room , internet access , amazing hospitality and reception it seemed ...But when i went there...oh my god..it was like some rural shit godown... they had just deceived us..by using fake pictures on their site...i was so much angry i even felt like giving a complaint against them...but karthik asked me to relax..and we moved on to a nearby hotel named "Sherry Land" which was way way better.

We started our journey to the venue by 12 o clock n reached there around 12 :30..thanks to the heavy traffic in chennai. The event was being conducted at Citi Centre Mall which is one of the most popular malls in chennai ( correct me if im wrong ;p ). We went straight away to the tourney place...met the organiser ( Suresh) had some nice talks with him... We ( eSports Solutions) were having the plans to have live blogging , live hltv broadcast and score updates for the event...which most of the gamers desired ( those who cannot attend the event ). We were promised like a 4mbps line for the same. Day 1 was pretty boring ..nothing much 2 say..the organisers were busy doing all the setups n networkings related to gaming...n there was this lady named Sindhya who was like leading them in almost any work...she was so committed..you would rarely see a lady being so much involved in a gaming tourney like this...Appreciate u Sindhya!..... We were Just staying at the venue till evening 7 o clock doing nothing...and went back to the hotel...

With my friend NomercY:]

THE DGL VENUE;]

By around 11 in the night i get a call from Karthik that Team ATE has arrived...n i went to their room to meet them. only 3 Members of the team namely Wuzz , PeXXeR n Ritz had arrived. Ben and Kappa were supposed to reach only on 2nd. Met The 3 ate members n had some talks for a while...people like Wuzz and Pexxer , i knew them from almost 3-4 years but never met in personal..so i was like really happy to meet them. Ritz was indeed a special character , he was having fun mocking n teasing us around ( especially me )..keeping on calling me MidhunDa Midhunda ...haha...really funny guy..yet insane ingame :p

Day 2 :-

We reached the venue by around 12 in the noon...N God..it was sooo crowded...i guess more than 400 people atleast.....Every1 were busy doing registrations and chit chatting around with each other . Teams like inV , zR, Vi , 3D etc were also at the venue...inV, 3d n Ate were supposed to be the favourites for CS 1.6 , i have no clue abt the other games..sorry for that. Then, we met the Coolermaster Regional head n was having some talks with him abt CM sponsoring Ate n many other things related to gaming...Such a cool Person!. Coolermaster was one of the major sponsors for the event , which promised 5 CM cabinets as 1st prize for Cs 1.6 winners . We then later met up with Ben ( Mickey ) and Nirmal ( FrixN) and 1 media guy from Gamebashing . We had lunch 4m McDonalds .....guess what , we were accompanied by the great "titus" :).... After lunch we went back to the venue again....teams like inV , 3d, Ate made easy advances to the next rounds...Next match was between ZR and Epic Fail.... The match went on upto 6 overtimes..n ZR at the end came out victorious...epicfail put in a great fight..but it was almost like a 2men army ( jackson and prakz) and disappointing performance from rest of the people. Next match was ours ( Tmkc Mix). The lineup was me , Katalyst, mickey, nomercy and zoooink (game bashing). We were playing just for fun sake as we were meeting up almost after an year....We won the ct pistol round , went overconfident n lost next 3-4 rnds...but we had fun coz every1 were playing their own individual game n enjoying..:p we were even mocking opponents on public chat. Karthik ( katalyst ) was owning like almost 17-3 or something like that :p. 1st half score was 4-11 to us . We won the T pistol round and we were having so much fun...later on we took the match to over time. HIGHLIGHT was nomercy got 3 kills in 1 nade ( blooper or frag highlight??:p u name it )... it went on to 3 overtimes i think and later we lost...neways he had great fun H@H@@ karthik:)...

The biggest disappointment was we were not provided broadband was promised and hence we couldnt nt even do live blogging or score updates , leave the hltv broadcast...All of us(esports solutions n ate ) were extremely disappointed by this action of the organisers...Cmon its lame..u gotta keep up the promises.!!...We had no other choice but to ignore it...we were even planning 2 take interviews of some people..but thanks to the amazing coordination by the organisers..it was not possible!!!.......

As usual we left the venue by around 9 in the night...had lunch...off 2 sleep...karthik n ate people were having fun in their room...im not gonna comment abt this here..haha:p

THE CROWD AT DGL

ME WITH COOLERMASTER REGIONAL HEAD NAQUI AHMAD ( AT CENTRE)

Day 3 :- We reached the venue by Around 11 in the morning.... the matches were all delayed....I was supposed to leave by 5 in the evening..so i wanted to atleast meet the ate people n CM guy n have a talk around with them b4 i leave. ..By this time..Team ATE had arrived at the venue...n Ben and Kappa were also there ... I met ben( r4id) and had few talks with him...hes the coolest n knowledgeable Indian Gamer ive met till date....one of the best assaulters n consistent player in India ( cs 1.6) . The matches were again delayed..so we went out for lunch in KFC ..( Me, mickey, nomercy, katalyst, friction, Gamebashing guy and Titus.) . It was almost 4 in the evening and no good matches had happened yet..Ate was busy playing cs source alternatively and owning the opponents..some amazing rounds by Wuzz and PeXXeR. I had to leave by 5 in the evening..so i was saying goodbye to karthik...and he wanted to have a meeting of all the ATE people with CM guy..so we were off to the balcony..and took some ATE group pics..along with the Coolermaster Head:).... I left the venue by around 5 :30...Train was at 6:30..so i went straight away to hotel , packedup everything...left to the railwaystation...got in straight away into the train, berth n started sleeping:p i was so damn tired ....reached TVM by morning arnd 11 , reached home by 12 , and off to the usual things:)....

With Fndz:]

With Team ATE the CS champs of India ;]

Conclusion about Dfuze gaming tourney

Expected to be great , GREAT effort n commitment 4m side of organisers , BUT they failed to keep up the expectations... VERY disappointing from a spectator/gamer point of view..coz i had to wait 8-9 hours for a match to start...and gamers were whining abt it..which wouldnt have happened if the organisers coordinated properly with the gamers...

Lot of prize scams seem to have happened...prizemoeny promised for cs 1.6 was 40k, but only 15k was given for 1st , CoD 4 prizes were supposed to be 30k , but they got 7.5k which aint even half of the promised prize money......

Regardless i appreciate the effort of the organisers , they have put up so much of their time , effort and money to keep the gaming scene in india alive..

But 1 advice...when u make promisehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs on prizemoney n other things such as ( 4mbps line, hltv broadcast etc) please try to ensure that and live upto ur reputation..if u lose ur credibility means..uve virtually lost everything...GL for DGL 3 ...!!!

Thanks guys..feels great blogging after 3 years..Take care!!! THE PICS OF THE EVENT CAN BE FOUND AT http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.235871936432470.64686.100000289961316 and its open to all:] HFFF

You can visit me/us at :-
http://ate-gaming.com/
http://www.facebook.com/Ate.Gaming
http://www.e-sports.co.in/
adarsh@ate-gaming.com

Finally a UT2004 Tournament !!

2008-06-09T14:56:00.004+05:00

lol , my last blog was regarding quitting UT right ... this one is about the current UT2004 scene in europe.. Since the release of UT3 ...we havent seen an UT2k4 tournament for like 5-6 months . . few days ago i was just going through the Unrealnorth forums and came to know that there is an UT2k4 online tournament this weekend ..and they are providing UTV also ( just like HLTV in cs, you can spectate the matches ) . Ive been really bored of UT these days and havent seen a proper UT2k4 demo for last 5-6months..so thot abt spectating this tournament matches . First match i got to spectate was Skaven vs iceman i think . It was fun chatting around with a lot of KNOWN UT2k4 gamers in spectators list ..more than the match the spectators were having fun sharing opinions .and all regarding whos gonna win, whos better ,why and all:D . Coming back to the Skaven vs iceman.. we were shocked by the skill level of skaven . THis guy is a kid !! ..just 15 years old and he was owning this iceman like anything . 1 and a half minute of the match over..and skaven was having the lead with 6 frags !!! ... He had got 5 headshots in a row within 1minute in rankin ..im not KIDDING...5 headshots in a row..yea thats RIGHT ... The match got boring in between since it was totally one sided .. by the end of the rankin map..skaven had won easily..having arnd 40 frags or something..and a total of 14 headshots in the match !!! .. The best ive seen is 16 headshots by luxxiz in rankin vs yNz and skaven was very close to beating that record ... n1 kid . The next map was ironic i guess..that too was pretty one sided match with skaven dominating iceman. The next match i got to spectate was AsTz vs sm1else..forgot the name :D ....that was just like the skaven match ..was one sided with astz winning both the maps easily .

Next was the semi-finals ..Astz Vs Crowie

Ok a lot of you may not know crowie much .... He is a finnish ( finland) TDM player , who is pretty good in 1on1s also . This was expected to be a very close match . It started off with the rankin map .... first few mins of the match were very competitive ... with just 1 or 2 frags difference....but later crowie managed to win the map by a good margin .

Next map was Ironic...it was do or die for astz....if astz lose this, hes out, and if crowie wins this..he goes to finals ... well basically i love astz' play..so i was cheering for him only ... In this game we witnessed some mind games by crowie . Well hes a really good player with the bio rifle ,so he started picking up the bio and started irritating astz with it lol... everytime astz gets 150 shield and a ot of health.. 1 bio hits him..and hes down to very low health with full shield gone . Saw some extraordinary bio skill by crowie ...some really awesome shots . THe match went into overtime ...and even in overtime we saw crowie using just the bio rifle and trying to take away as much health as possible...At a point we saw astz having 150 shield and 160 health something..and crowie gives a bio shot..and astz full shield is gone and hes down to 75 HP...after a lot of fight..the match finally comes to an end with astz winning the map

The Final map --- campgrounds . Crowie is a master of this map..and we saw him messaging this to astz in warmup lol.. "Ive never lost a match in campgrounds and will never lose " ...the match started ...crowie getting the upper hand in the match with this EXPERIENCE and skills in the campgrounds map...yet again we saw crowie using bio rifle very well and taking awaya lot of hp of astz... the spectators were having fun, but ive got 2 say that this match was VERY VERY intensive..astz wasnt ready to give up the match , he started playing very seriously..and once again..we saw this map also go into overtime... THE MATCH became much more intense .. crowie still using the bio rifle to take away a lot of health ... around 6 mins of overtime now..and astz having 150 shield and 140 health... we were expecting the match to get over by now if astz made a quick attack on crowie..but that wasnt the case...we witnessed an AMAZING combo from crowie..which took down astz Health to 45 and 0 shield ....astz nearly lost the match..coz after the effect of combo..he nearly hit a self rocket against the tower near bio area in campgrounds . BUT he dint HIT the rocket..thank god..again the match became more intense...both of them are without shield and low HP ... we could see that their hands are shaking.... VERY VERY intense game...and finally after 9mins of overtime..astz manages to BEAT Crowie and qualify to the finals .. PHEW..this surely was one of the best 1on1 matches ever in UT2004 . And Crowie said that this is his 1st defeat in campgrounds since he started UT ( im not sure if this is true tho ) .

I really recomend you people to watch these demos..ESPECIALLY TO DUTTAN..since hes a bio freak i recomend him to watch the way CROWIE plays with bio :) ..both duttan and crowie are amazing with bio imo :)

Wasnt able to watch the semi finals n finals of that tournament since i was engaged in a few matches vs spawn and imposter ... S kaven won the tournament beating astz in the finals..winning both the maps they played.. Congrats to Skaven .

UT2004 Days are Over :(

2008-03-03T11:42:00.006+05:00

hey wtsup ppl...long time eh?

So i have decided to blog again after a long time..since theres been a lot of changes in my gaming n real life since the past few months ! :D . My Gaming life has changed a lot these days , finally i decided to stop UT2004 ( yeah , not like any random guy saying i stopped ut for exams , and starting ut the next day ) , i seriously stopped it !! . Should have stopped a lot earlier tbh !!! . Already experienced some symptoms of it sometime ago..but anyways its over now . Really man ...i miss those days playing with GREAT players like Fnatix, Duttan , Stryker and all.. when the game was COMPETITIVE !! n fun TOoo . During the last 2-3 months , ive been playing Counterstrike on steam , attending a few lan tournaments , hoping to attend more LAN tournaments, Thinking abt Attending ESWC Too for Counterstrike , need to form a good team tho ! There have been a lot of things which made me lose interest in the game (UT2004), one being ..very less no of opponents , Not Much people playing these days ....rare people like SpawN and Ryan ( ryan also quit now) . Another reason is the attitude of the players, most of em never seek to improve, but try to win a match SOMEHOW . using shieldgun full time and running away , thats the reason why i always hated playing on others server, they use shield even when im having like 90 ping !! :| . Also After they r dead , i go for respawn kill , and they stand still and type not letting me "GO For the double kills " which wouldve helped me improve my respawn frag accuracy . But since the number of gamers are very less ..like say 3-4 ppl.. if i have to play UT..i can play only vs them..so whatever they do ingame, i have to agree with it , so that i could play . People like duttan suraj n all must be knowing that i used to be an insane demo watcher.. Watching demos every now and then eh? .. Well that was one symptom which i observed in me recently . I dont feel like watching any demos man..be it be even of international players !!! ..earlier i used to watch like a 15mins demo FULLY without forwarding . Even for Moviemaking purpose i used to watch so much demos..but nowadays it feels like..i watch 2mins of a demo..if there are no good frags or anything i just delete it from my computer..whereas i used to BACKUP all the demos sometime back !!... i find demos boring these days :( . ANother thing that showed my lack of interest in the game was respawn frags. Earlier i had SO MUCH URGE to go to respawn spot and get the respawn kills ..doublekills n all . Like that i learned the respawn spots of all the tournament maps fast. Dont think im being a bit arrogant , maybe due to too much of match practise, from my inside i know where the enemy is gonna respawn , still THESE DAYS i dont have any URGE to go to respawn spot for the kills . I started feeling like ..bah SAME SPOT, SAME OLD KILL.

I felt that i needed a map change ..and tho ut3 sucks..i would try ut3 once i get my graphics card upgraded... FOR a MAP CHANGE !!.

So these are some incidents which made me realize myself that i have lost passion and interest in the game and i need a break !! . So guys i have stopped UT due to lack of interest in the game , and also some real life reasons like ..my bcom final year exams are coming up ..i need to do well for that , Thers a hardware course named A+ which is pending , I need to finish that asap and try for new courses like MCP and CCNP too ..But first i need to finish A+ i hope that it happens soon . I would Like to Thank every1 who has played with me and supported me throughout my UT2004 Career.. Especially to Duttan who introduced the game to me , been always nice to me , playing with me frequently n help me improve , give tips etc and help me Meet New People , helping me play some tournaments in which i wasnt allowed initially. So my ut2004 gaming days are over guys , But i have 2 pending ut2004 fragmovies..

I dont have enough frags for Unreality 2 , so with the available frags of spawn, fnatix, stryker, duttan, Bl1k , and Samarth i would be making a mix fragmovie :) ..abt the 2nd movie..i will try to make a fragmovie featuring myself if i find enough frags :) . Thats it guys , Bye Bye To UT2004,

would be trying UT3 after a gfx upgrade + if there are enough ut3 gamers in india :)

"I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE...

2007-09-05T17:45:00.000+05:00

ok..recently a lot of my frnds got infected by this worm...although there are a lot of solutions mentioned ..i thought i would still include it in my blog also.. Hope it helps someone:)

w32.USB Worm

This worm spreads through usb drives...When your system is infected by this, when you open firefox... It shows messages like

"I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE..."

"USE INTERNET EXPLORER U DOPE"

"Orkut is banned you fool, The administrators didnt write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!!" with title ORKUT IS BANNED

How it works

It runs a exe file which is name MicrosoftPowerpoint.exe which is located in the USB disk. The autorun.inf runs this file when double clicked. Once this program is run you are infected. It hides all your hidden folders, runs the process in the memory, makes the worm to start with windows and pops those annoying messages. This worm doesn’t destroy any system files. It just infects other USB drives and spreads to new hosts.

So disabling autoplay would be a good idea to avoid it from getting installed accidently (through double clicks)

How to Disable Autoplay

1. Click Start---> Run

2. Now Type Regedit and press Enter Key.

3. In the Registry Editor, locate and click the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\CDRom

4. Modify the value of the Autorun to 0 (zero) so that CD-ROMs and Audio CDs do not run and
start automatically when inserted.

5. Next navigate to the following registry subkey

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

6. Modify the value of the NoDriveTypeAutoRun entry to 0xb5 value to turn off the AutoRun feature for CD-ROMs by right-click NoDriveTypeAutoRun and then click Modify to type B5 in the Value data box. Select Hexadecimal, and then click OK.

7. Quit Registry Editor and Restart the Computer.

Removing the Malware

Manual Method 1

1. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL and go to the processes tab

2. Look for svchost.exe under the image name. There will be many but look for the ones which have your username under the username

3. Press DEL to kill these files. It will give you a warning, Press Yes . Repeat for more svchost.exe files with your username and repeat. Do not kill svchost.exe with system, local service or network service!

4. Now open My Computer , In the address bar, type C:\heap41a and press enter. It is a hidden folder, and is not visible by default. Delete all the files here

5. Now go to Start –> Run and type Regedit

6. Go to the menu Edit –> Find

7. Type “heap41a” here and press enter. You will get something like this “[winlogon] C:\heap41a\svchost.exe C:\heap(some number)\std.txt”

8. Select that and Press DEL. It will ask “Are you sure you wanna delete this value”, click Yes

9. Close the Registry Editor

Manual Method 2

Now to rectify this go to Start Menu>Run and type regedit . In the Registry Editor browse to this entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\

CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWALL and in the “Checked all” key reset it back to 1 from 2. Now you can change the settings in the folders option. Now delete the folder C:\heap41a and clear all the key entries from this registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\

CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer\Run which says heap41a.

Now the malware infection is removed 100%. Before you are done make sure you format the usb drive it doesn’t infect other systems too.

Now the virus is gone. But be sure to delete the autorun.inf file and any folder whose name ends with .exe in the Usb flash drive.

Automatic Method

You can also try this Fix which will automatically remove the malware from ur system.

http://slynux.org/downloads/Worm-fix.exe.zip

Hope this helped u :)

Yahoo Messenger Virus

2006-10-06T17:06:00.000+05:00

A lot of my friends got infected by this....found a solution while browsing a forum..thought abt sharing it wid u ppl.

This started. when someone started forwarding links in yahoo messenger.. starts wid nsl-school.org(dont go to that link)..and 1nce u click on that link..u get affected by the virus..it maybe also appear in the form of forwards like..protect ur computer against viruses..etc..so beware.

If you are infected with it what is going to happen ?

1: It sets your default IE page to nsl-school.org, you can’t even change it back to other page. If you open IE from your comp some malicious code will automatically executed into your computer.

2: It will disables the Task manager / reg edit. So you can’t kill the Trojan process anymore.

3: Files that are gonaa installed by this virus are svhost.exe , svhost32.exe , internat.exe.

you can find these files in windows/ & temp/ directories.

4: It will sends the secured & protected information to attacker

How to remove this manually from your computer ?

1: Close the IE browser. Log out messenger / Remove Internet Cable.

2: To enable Regedit

Click Start, Run and type this command exactly as given below: (better - Copy and paste)

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableRegistryTools /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

3: To enable task manager : (To kill the process we need to enable task manager)

Click Start, Run and type this command exactly as given below: (better - Copy and paste)

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableTaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

4: Now we need to change the default page of IE though regedit.

Start>Run>Regedit

From the below locations in Regedit chage your default home page to google.com or other.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

HKEY_ LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

HKEY_USERS\Default\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

Just replace the attacker site with google.com or set it to blank page.

5: Now we need to kill the process from back end. Press Ctrl + Alt + Del

Kill the process svhost32.exe . ( may be more than one process is running.. check properly)

6: Delete svhost32.exe , svhost.exe files from Windows/ & temp/ directories. Or just search for svhost in your comp.. delete those files.

7: Go to regedit search for svhost and delete all the results you get.

Start menu > Run > Regedit >

8: Restart the computer. That’s it now you are virus free.

Description of SVHOST32.EXE
Process that is downloaded, installed, and run by several different viruses, worms, and trojans.

Trojans are programs that can appear to serve a legitimate purpose but actually have an unwanted or harmful effect.

A large segment of trojan programs download other harmful software components to a user's PC without his/her knowledge.

This application is most likely downloaded and installed by another application that is considered to be adware or spyware.

** Send this URL to all of your friends through messenger so that they can get rid off this virus. **

2006-05-30T13:21:00.000+05:00

SK|Gitzzz ...He is my favourite ut player and so was just searching google abt him and blah blah ..and ended up getting to a site where i found this interview on Gitzz. this was taken very long time ago..in 2003 i think..anyway thought of sharing it with ut players and gitzzz fans..:D .here it goes....

olosatiy: What's your name, how old are you and where do you live?

SK|GitzZz: My name is Christian Hoeck. I am 19 years old and live in Germany (Bavaria (yeah, right, where the great beer comes from ;p))

Polosatiy: Have you ever been at stadium for Bayern's soccer team playing? Do you like soccer?
SK|GitzZz: Thank god i was never in a football stadium. i dont like this sport very much. i have been playing it for some years when i was younger, but now i got enough of it. following this damn ball makes so sense to me ;)

Polosatiy: Germany will be a country of Soccer World Championship in 2006 year as you probably know? Do you have in your life a goal called something like "I should visit a final match of soccer world cup"? I do for example :)
SK|GitzZz: As said before im not that interested in soccer. if i would be i would rather play the game than just watch it. the only sport which is fun to watch is boxing imo.

Polosatiy: OK, I've got your point of view. What are you doing then?
SK|GitzZz: I just finished school. Got some free time now then im up to do my civil service. I dont know yet what im going to do after civil service. time will tell :)

Polosatiy: What's your story of gamer? First PC bla bla. Why and how you in SK?
SK|GitzZz: My gaming carreer started with a little game boy on which i played super mario land and stuff. My first pc was a 200 mmx on which i played UT1 for the first time. I had like 20 frames or something but it worked =). I had no special plans for championship there already ;) My first clan was SSF which i founded with a reallife friend. We had no clue how to lead a clan but we just tried. We weren't that successful of course ;) My second clan was IGX (intergalaxy). Pretty unknown in the beginning, a little bit known in the end. We gave mTw a pretty hard game once and didnt loose that often ;) After IGX i joined Shuuk with a really convincing squad. We were one of the best UT1 clans out there i would say. Names like Br3z3l, Frag^m or Flocutus are known i think. Then finally the whole shuuk.ut squad joined SK at the end of 2002. UT2003 was already published and i just had to play WCG 2002 until i could start with UT2003. After WCG 2002 i totally changed to UT2003 in which i had much to learn yet because most people have been playing it for 3 months or something. Due to a computer problem i couldn't train until 2 weeks before CPL in USA. And with two weeks of training i dont think i should already join a championship =) Now i think im quite good in shape. Maybe with twm (the weapon mutator) playing is more fun again.

Polosatiy: What's it twm? i just heared about it, but didn't try?
SK|GitzZz: Twm changes some little things in UT2003 concerning the weapons. It weakens the bio rifle the shieldgun and the assault gun a bit.

Polosatiy: OK, let's talk about TTM? Im sure you good in it so... Maybe you can tell about some things you want to change or see in next versions of TTM?
SK|GitzZz: Actually im quite satisfied with ttm. The only missing thing remaining was the unbalanced weaponsystem but i hope this is mainly fixed with twm now.

Polosatiy: Did you see unbalanced weaponsystem in first UT? Flak, ASMD etc.
SK|GitzZz: Unreal Tournament was unbalanced, too. There were some almost useless weapons like the ripper or bio. The rocket launcher which was able to load up to 6 rockets and killing everyone no matter what health he has seemed to be quite ridiculous but if u have a closer look its not the same with the bio in UT2003. 1.the rockets were really slow 2.it made a loud noise loading up the rockets but the bio rifle in ut2 is neither slow nor does it make a sound running arround with it. You can camp anywhere and give your opponent a damage of 250 with just 1 single shot which is faster than a rocket and any else projectile in ut2. The shaft was incredible strong in ut1 much stronger than in ut2. Some people disliked that style but i liked it i liked aiming and instant hit weapons like sniper/pulse/minigun. This made ut1 a quite good controlable game. If u had armoradvantage and you are about that good like your opponent you normally wouldn't loose a fight. Except he uses rockets six pack, bio or flak which could do more damage a second than the shaft but the rate of fire was quite low of these weapons so you had the chance to spamm your enemy to death with rockets or something or you run upon him several times and try to get his armor down to finally kill him or you hide and try to snipe snipe him;).

Polosatiy: Flocutus has won germany wcg qualifiers in 2001 year and you was just third. The Korean final was your first big victory?
SK|GitzZz: Yes it was. I was damn nervous at the qualifying for wcg 2001. I never took part in such a big event with prizemoney. I even lost on deck (my favorite map) against Crush who was known for his good shaft. But shaft isnt so important on deck16, more is the sniper but my hands were shaking so much that aiming was just not possible. So i got 3rd but still a ticket to Korea =)

Polosatiy: You came to Korea as unknown gamer in 2001. Who was your strongest opponent there or maybe several guys?
SK|GitzZz: Sadly i cant remember all games i played but as far as i remember there were two hard games. One against a korean guy, bz-sin, and against my german friend Flocutus :) I played bz-sin on Curse which is really no good 1on1 map so i cant really tell if he was good in something else than minigunning. Belt was off so there were just tigh pads which didn't give you such a big advantage (50 armor) ;p. So is was just about running around with any weapon and try to see the enemy earlyer and start shooting. There was no mapcontrole on this map. The game against Flocutus was a real quality game. It was on Agony, a good controlable map. So it was that i got controle at first and score was like 10-0 for me. Then he fragged me and the score became close to 10 - 9. I couldnt get controle back. All the time i thought i would have already lost the game with 1.5 minutes remaining and he in controle but then happend the unexspected. I bio rifled him ;). He died and i got the armor he tried to defend. With just 1 minute to go he had to strike back very quickly but he always failed because of my armoradvantage. So i could enlarge the difference to 14-9 or something. That was the probably hardest match at wcg 2001 for me.

Polosatiy: Did he say to you something like "you lucky bastard" or something like this after game?
SK|GitzZz: We were (and still are) in the same clan. If he did it wouldnt have been serious. We just became enemies in the game, not in reality ;). He was a bit sad because it was just the bio rifle frag which decided the match. I would have been sad too or maybe a bit angry ;) loosing because of such a shit ;)

Polosatiy: Does Flocutus plays utk3?
SK|GitzZz: No, when we started playing ut2k3 he played it once or twice. He didnt like it. There was no ttm in that time and the game was even more lucky than it is now and Flocutus mainly likes competitive games ;) He switched to warcraft3 then and is still playing it i think.

Polosatiy: Do you play any games except UT2003?
SK|GitzZz: Ut2k3 is the game i play for competition. Of course there are some games i play beside ut2, depends on which i like atm. I played some wc3 tower defense recently, might and magic - world of xeen ( a 5 year old game) or dungeon siege.

Polosatiy: Why GitzZz? What does it mean?
SK|GitzZz: Haha, yeah the evergreen-question. It means nothing. Actually its my real life nickname. Gitz. I got it from a little child who couldnt say christian correctly. He said something like gitzian... so gitz =) Gitz is my real life nickname since im 10 years old or something.

Polosatiy: Why zZz then? are you always sleeping? :)
SK|GitzZz: lol :) no that was just because gitz was so short =) so i added 2 "z". seemed cooler ;). Maybe i should have just added one. So it would be GitZz. I didn't think about it too much.

Polosatiy: Why Unreal? Have you ever tried quake? Don't you like it?
SK|GitzZz: Good question :) i came in touch with unreal first i think. it had something like a aura or a spirit who kept me playing it. I heard about Quake 3 but i have played it for the first time when i was playing ut for about half a year. i didnt get the feeling in quake3 which i had in UT but afterwards i can say that quake3 is more professional than ut1 ;)

Polosatiy: Why? I know why but want to listen an answere from twice WCG champion by UT.
SK|GitzZz: I think that Q3 is more professional but i cant prove it because i havent played it competitive. I saw some demos and watched some top players like Stelam. It seemed all to be about controling, giving the enemy a shot here, a shot there. It wasn't like in ut1 where there was mostly one fight and someone died. Well.. maybe i just dont know :)

Polosatiy: So, if you tried Quake3, you should know as far as it is comfortable OSP mod. You can set any hud, any crosshairs and more more things and stuff you want to change? Don't you think UT2003 with TTM needed it?
SK|GitzZz: Of course ut2k3 needed it. You almost couldn't see the enemy just standing anywhere so bright skins is a really good development. Hitsound is also nice because with all the graphics you sometimes cant see if you have hit your opponent or not and its that what counts, right, how much damage you have given your opponent.

Polosatiy: Do you timing items?
SK|GitzZz: Normally im timing two items - double damage and 100 armor or 100 armor and 50 armor if there is no double damage.

Polosatiy: You do not overlook about time of items spawn during the important fights?
SK|GitzZz: No. If there is a fight going on im focusing on the fight of course; ) Im looking at the clock when nothing happens at the moment.

Polosatiy: Your config at Schroet.com is real one?
SK|GitzZz: Of course it is but maybe i should update it it about 3 months old =) hehe good point. There are no cheats in it ;D. just that what everyone uses.

Polosatiy: How you usually practise and who with?
SK|GitzZz: Learning by doing =). im playing 1on1 to get better nothing more. i practise with everyone, good and not that good players ;). When i wanna play i dont wanna search 2 hours for a player who wants to play. Im just asking in a public channel and the first one who answeres gets the match. when i want to play a special opponent im asking one of my mates most times.

Polosatiy: No LAN practise?
SK|GitzZz: I was able to get fastpath recently. with this optimation i get pings like 50 on german servers or even below. compared to my ping 90 before thats almost like LAN ;). And there is a little problem with lan practise. I cant play ut2 5 hours in a row. i dont know why. I just need to have a break after 1 hour of playing or something. It wasnt the same with ut1 there i played sometimes a whole afternoon just 1on1s.

Polosatiy: You lost a single game at WCG 2002? What's happend?
SK|GitzZz: Well.. im just human ;) The thing is that i always need some time to get in shape every day. My performance in the morning isnt that good as it is in the evening when i have played several games. maybe it was just casual but all my games that ended close or i lost were in the morning. but this is not meant to decrease the skill of the other players. Most of them did great at WCG and a few had bad luck again (Lauke). I still feel a bit sorry for him. he is amazing good but didnt reach a top3 place in both WCGs.

Polosatiy: Do you remember the game against guy Askold? You beat him 33:-1 and it was like a shock for russian ut community. Answere to all of Russia NOW - why Askold lost :)?
SK|GitzZz: Well, deck16 was my best map but i think it was also his best one. I was in mapcontrole from the beginning and didnt loose it. i think that was the deciding point. His aim wasn't worse than mine. he just never got a grip. He had almost no armor and i tried to surprise him often so he couldn't snipe me.

Polosatiy: What's countries you visited and which one you like more?
SK|GitzZz: Well.. I dont see much of the countries i play in, just the location. The countries I visited were France, Italia, Czech republic and Korea.

Polosatiy: Did you get a prizemoney for your first place at PGChallenge in Czech?
SK|GitzZz: No, not yet. Its about 1 year ago. up to now and i have written many e-mails to them. I dont know wether i will get the money but i will try hard.

Polosatiy: I think you will be a good businessman in a future. What's about 40.000 $ you won in Korea, did you spend it :)?
SK|GitzZz: I bought a little car (Ford Puma) of it. the rest is safed for later times ;)

Polosatiy: Is it hard to have driving license in Germany? because we have very gay cops and stuff who give you license in Moscow.
SK|GitzZz: You have to absolve a special amount of hours of driving with a drivingteacher. Then you have to a theory and a practical test. If u have done well in both you get your liscence. I think i payed about 1500 euros for it. for learning and test, for everything to get the license, the two damaged cars included. haha,no =), just kidding ;)

Polosatiy: What's kind of music you likes? You have Rammstain in Germany, so have you been any concert of them?
SK|GitzZz: Hehe no :). I like them just since a short time. i heard some songs of them just shouting around. i got a bit distanced to it but now i kinda like it =). There is no special kind of music i prefer. its all about the song. the flow =)

Polosatiy: Tell me. Matrix 2: reloading is a shit by your opinion?
SK|GitzZz: I think i share most people`s opinion. the effects were really good. some nice fights in it but the rest was just bullsh*t.

Polosatiy: I would like to back to WCG 2002. There are were alot nice triumphs by other gamers. Have you looked for any other competition and which one do you liked more?
SK|GitzZz: I had to share one big room with our counter strike players (mouze sports) so i had some talk with them every evening. Really nice people :). so i watched some games of them. i wasnt allowed to stand behind them but i asked for almost every result. After i have played my final match against Shaggy, the q3 final was going to be played: uNkind vs Akiles. I watched that game live in this so called "game arena". funny style unkind plays. Heard many russians play like that. i think also askold play that way. the keyboard on your knees and the mousepad right in front of your body.

Polosatiy: (c) Polosatiy :)
SK|GitzZz: Oh, I didn't know that =). Maybe i should play on the ground and call it gitzstyle (c) gitz then =)

Polosatiy: Maybe we could call some girls swordfish
SK|GitzZz: Swordfish ? X)

Polosatiy: The movie with girl suck under table :) with John Travolta ! :)
SK|GitzZz: Haha yeah i know :D. well, i dont think i could concentrate much then ;D.

Polosatiy: What do you think about WCG 2003 map choice: Ironic, Antalus, Compressed, Insiduous, Curse3, Grendelkeep?
SK|GitzZz: The first 3 are fine the following are shit ;). the best mappool would be ironic compressed and campgrounds imo. Antalus is too large for 1on1, grendelkeep is to open and i think i needn't talk about Curse and Insidious ;)

Polosatiy: What's your favorite sites?
SK|GitzZz: www.schroet.com, www.inunreal.de, www.esreality.com and sometimes i give look on www.cached.net a look.

Polosatiy: What's your PC?
SK|GitzZz: 2.700 @ 2.200, 512 mb ram, gf4 4200 ti.

Polosatiy: Alot of people watched your demos from Arene ESWC qualifiers and saw you used only one type of weapon - Bio Rifle. Are you train this weapon or just didn't want to show your real skill before LAN event?
SK|GitzZz: I will say it brievly. i wanted to show the people how overpowered this weapon is with just playing bio rifle and not timing anything, just running away and spamming bio. This had nothing to do with hiding of my real skills. i was just pissed of the luck of the game, thats all.

Polosatiy: Whats your impressions for ESWC? Who you think will favorites and what's about you? Ready to show skill like you had in UT?
SK|GitzZz: ESWC seems to be the second big event after CPL with big prizemoney. Will be exciting for sure to see so many topplayers compeeting. I got no real favorites. There should be a remarkable difference in skill to say who will win but most of these players or at leat 6 of them are all about the same level. I for myself dont know how far i can get. As said several times before the game is too lucky. I can get placed 1st or last. everything is possible.

Polosatiy: SK has alot of members. Are you have friendship with some?
SK|GitzZz: Im mostly in contact with the ut squad. I hardly saw anyone of the rest of sk in real life. a few wc3 players, thats all ;). so my friendship belongs to the ut squad of SK :)

Ok now the details i have provided below is an updated one.. these details are as per in 2005 i think( i mean ..his updated hardware)

Name: Christian Höck
Origin: Germany
Location: Baiersdorf, Germany
Mouse: Razer Diamondback
Mousepad: Steelpad Qck
Mouse skatez: Padsurfers
Headphones: Sennheisser HD 590
Monitor: Iiyama 19"
CPU: Intel P4 3,2
Memory: 1024 Corsair DDR PC400
Graphic Card: Geforce Fx
Soundcard: Soundblaster Live
Connection: T-DSL fastpath
rink: Coke, Redbull
Food: Rumpsteak/Pizza
Movie: Eurotrip !
Music: metal & hiphop
Song: changes almost every day ;)
Book: i hardly read books, sry there;)
Person: santa clause!
SK: GitzZz
Car: ford - puma
Sport: fitnesstraining
Game: Painkiller/UT2k4
Game Res: 800*600
Game Sens: 30 cm /360°
OS: Win XP

--------------ACHIEVEMENTS--------------

Unreal Tournament:

1st @ WCG 2001

1st @ Darkbreed PU 2001

1st @ PGCH 2001

1st @ WCG 2002

Unreal Tournament 2003:

1st @ ESWC 2003

Unreal Tournament 2004:

3rd @ The Summit 2004

1st @ Northcon 2004

2nd @ ESWC 2004

1st @ CPL Summer 2004 (4on4)

4th @ WCG 2004

An interview with Electry..the Maker of FINNISH IT

2006-05-07T19:34:00.000+05:00

Me: hi

Electry:hey

Me: A short intro abt u ?

Electry:I'm 17 years old now and I live in Finland in a town called Kuopio. I started a music school at third grade and now I'm in a music high school (so I suppose you can say I am a musician :P). I have played oboe for almost 9 years now. In my free time I usually hang around with my friends and I'm quite social in real life.
Me: how did it feel when u got popular after the release of finnish it?

Electry: Well ofc it feels just great.

Me: ur video has now become the most downloaded ut2k4 frag movie..comments

Electry : Tbh I never really tought it would become such a big succes. I knew it was good since I really really wanted to make a perfect movie that time and at the releasing point I was quite satisfied. And it's true that my movie is now most downloaded movie @ ut and I NEVER could have even imagined that I made it to the most downloaded movie in just 2 weeks. :) But yes it feels good even tough I now feel that I could have done something better. I get alot of pm's on irc (you can find me at #ut2004.fi @ quakenet ^^). Also when I play online ppl often grats me for the movie and its funny when people assume that I'm a really pro player but tbh I'm just an average player ^^ '

Me: ur ambition

Electry : Hmm... hard question. I wonder if anyone in my age knows what to do with ones life yet so I can't really answer that. Right now I just want to finish my school and get a certificate of matriculation. But in movies my ambition is to do a professional looking movie in all the areas there is in the movie making.

Me: Favt Frag movie?

Electry:Can't tell the no.1 cos I have so many movies on my comp and I like to watch em all. But maybe Virtuosity, Get Q3, CTLB, Mercurial and Tricking it2 are the most popular for me.

Me: Favt music

Electry :I always answer to that, that I listen GOOD music... (most ppl don't like the music I like :P) But if I name just a few fav bands: Muse, Carpark North, Mew, Sigur ros.... and so on.

Me: Favourite Movie?

Electry:Maybe the best movies I've seen is Memento and Fight club. Cant recall now any other movies cos once again there are lots of movies that are good :)

Me:How would u rate urself as a ut gamer?

Electry:I am not a very good ut gamer really! :D Everyone assumes that I own like god cos I do nice videos, but I'm just an average player. My fav weapon is propably bio and when I have the ownage day I usually pull quite nice frags with it (as you have seen in movies). But my skill depends the day and feeling I have.

Me: how did u get started with ut2004 and video editing?

Electry:That is the best question! I came to ut scene in the summer when they released the game and I bought the game and joined the channel. Actually I haven't played any other fps games ever so I started with ut2004 (when I got my new comp). But.. I wouldn't be here without 1 person: kor_. He is a Finnish moviemaker and when I first joined the scene and watched his movies, that was the real start for both my gaming and moviemaking! The frags of the movie were impossible in my eyes and I watched the movie with half of the speed. So that was the boost for me. I started litle projects with litle start help of kor_ but I studyed all the programs myself

Me: Abt ur clan?

Electry: Right now I'm playing in MXS (matrix squad lol) and there plays quite alot of ppl but some of them plays only tam, only ictf etc... MXS was created many many years ago and it was a ut1 clan, but only one guy kept it alive so now I play there :P I play TDM and TAM and my team is: "Ana:" was the guy who kept the clan alive for years "Jarnull:" He is the most nice guy and its fun to play with him, he neve whines and he is always positive. "degnic:" Also a good player and he has good aim since he plays ictf also. "Viküüri:" Maybe the best player in our team when it comes to TAM. He puls outstanding 1v3 situations to win! "kor_:" Joined lately and he is mostly a tdm player... Shock aim! "Lopo:" Plays tam time to time but he is mostly ictf player. + there is lots of other players in ictf ....

Me:Hobbies?

Electry :I play oboe and music is a big hobby for me. And ofc computer shit..

Me:Video editing as aprofession in future?

Electry:I dunno what I'm gonna do when I'm all grown up... but yeah 1 possibility is to get to the TV and be an editor there... I still have my school so I dunno what I'm gonna do yet.

Me:Favt ut player?

Electry: Hmm fav ut player... Maybe the best was crowie when he was online.. he is so fun guy and pulls out nice frags. I had maybe the best time of my life when I was playing with him one night :D

Me: inspiration behind making finnishit a great success...?

Electry: Hmm I have always kept video editing as my own thing and I don't think there is a particular reason for starting Finnish it.. I just tought it would be a good idea to beat those swedish guys with our frags lol :D:DD

Me:Dont worry..Indians are coming...run :P

Me: Ur system config?

Electry:I have very shity comp tbh: Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU 2.53GHz, 760 ram, (Drive 1) ST3160023A, 149.05GB size, 1 partition(s), IDE interface (Drive 2) ST360021A, 55.9GB size, RADEON 9800 PRO etc..

Me: Thoughts on UT 2007

Electry:I really really really hope that ut2k7 would be THE game! Quake 4 was all shit and 2k7 seems promicing now.And I hope that there is a better engine for us moviemakers :)

Me:Time spent on video editing?

Electry:Hmm editing per day... I don't edit like that... when I have the inspiration I spent all day editing and doing shit but some times there can be 2 weeks pause or so... Can't really tell how long per day.

Me:Future projects?

Electry:I'm doing a presentation video of the player devilmc atm and I can't say what will I do next.. I'l put all my effort in 1 movie at the time :)

Me:then..did u get any offers for making quake or any new ut fragmovies?

Electry: And yes many people have come to me and ask me if I could do a movie for them and they would pay me, but I do a video I like to do and I don't do videos for money.

Me: Ok dude thanks a lot for sparing ur time..and all the best for ur future projects : >

Electry : Oki ^^ ..was fun

An Interview with Cristal :- The maker of the famous Unrealnorth, CTLB and Malignancy

2006-04-27T18:23:00.000+05:00

Me : hi

Cristal: hi!

Me: lot of ut gamers here knows abt "cristal" the video editing professional... from the popular frag movies like CTLB, Unrealnorth..Malignancy etc..can u tell us more about you? : >

Cristal : im Viktor.. Im 22years old and i live in the middle-section of Sweden (cold !)

Me: abt your family members pls..

Cristal: Why do u wanna know man!? :D haha,…father, a mother, grandparents, uncles and aunts and stuff.. 0 brothers/sisters.

Me : about location, studies etc? :D

Cristal: At the moment im studying different medicine/nursing-courses at the university, one day i'll hopefully be a doctor :D Anyhow, im starting a new work in 1 week, gonna work as an AmbulanceMedic this summer + autumn, will rock! Besides that i like to work-out some and play a couple of ut2004 matches every now and then.

Cristal: I live in Sundsvall, Sweden. Its in the middle of our long country. In the northern parts of Europe

Me: How does it feel being a well know video editing professional in the fragmovie world?

Cristal:First of all i really dont know if im _THAT_ wellknown :) But since i get a lot of emails, irc pm's etc some must know who i am :> To sum it up i would like to say it feels really good, because it gotta mean that i've done something right in my videos, thats basically whats keeps me going, that people like my vids (+ the fact that u get a lot of chicks from making fragmovies!..jes kiddin :P)

Me: How did u start off with video editing / UT2004 ?

Cristal : it started out with some ridiculous clips that were humurous , sent em to nakedape and matsen basically just for jokes.. then i found out it was actually alot of fun making em, and i made a few frags along with music.. then i started on making the foe movie because i felt there was a lack of good ut2004 movies and i felt i could make one someday

Cristal: back in 2004 i had played cs with my irl friends since 2001 i think.. I somehow found out that cs sucked donkey-ass, and since my friends friend (beliavski) played UT2004 and it looked like alot of fun i figured i should try it out, i got hooked instantly even tho i lost my first 1v1 against tevet with 52 - (-1):D

Me: Your hobbies?

Cristal: On my sparetime i usually workout, hang out with friends, watch my tv-series (Boston Legal, oth, oc, scrubs & prison break ) and try to spend time with Erika whenever she wants to :D (im her bitch oh yes)

Me: now apart from video editing..there is a "cristal" who is well know as a ut gamer too.. tell abt it :D

Cristal: About my own gaming within ut2k4 boundaries there aint really much to tell. I belong to one of the best clans in europe, but due to movies and the fact that im trying to have an irl i dont really play that much. Don is my team and will be for as long as possible. Tho im playing some with fzim at the moment cause of the fact that i simply dont belong in the really top at the moment.

Me: about ur ut clan members and a short intro abt them too pls ?

Cristal: My clan members, well that would be an essay for itself since i belong in 2 clans nowadays, both Don and fzim. A quick review tho about the people i spend the most time with. Don.Daze - Incredible player, both 1v1 and tdm-wise. Also a really nice+ funny guy. Don.Beliavski - a guy who relies on routine and simply rocks even though he aint the most “skilled” player around.

Cristal: Don.fargo - the clanleader, rocketwhore, timinggod u name it.. pretty similar to beliavski regarding routine etc… Great teamplayer.
Don.Brancovf - the most skilled guy i've ever seen, honestly. Dunno what to say. Mr. D is also the most handsome guy i've met/seen over the internet.
fzim|Lasen - Also an editor with whom i spend alot of time chatting/playing with. Cute, aggressive and horny!

fzim|pingman - well.. what to say..HH , <3 class="MsoNormal">

Me: what about the former clan CTLB?

Cristal: Well, ctlb!? that aint a former clan. CTLB was the name of the video simply because our nicks created CTLB together (cristal, trwl, luxxiz, brutto). It aint a clan, just some friends playing some together for the fun of it :D

Me : oh ok:D

Me: recently u have won an award for the best ut frag movie "Malignancy"..how does it feel..

Cristal: I won the award for best ut vid yes! And of course it feels good. The golden llamas are the biggest achievements within computerrelated videomaking, BUT the ut-categorie aint really topnotch in my opinion. Wait to next year when me and fei will win some of the big categories together (Best picture etc ;) ) !

Me: are u gonna take video editing as a profession in future

Me: I mean there might be situations where people might seek u for making a fragmovie for them(paying u of course)

Cristal : Videogameediting is always developing,i dont see myself doing it as a profession.Because of the simple fact that i only do movies because i like it / want something to say/express. This kinda answers your next question too, i've gotten ALOT of offers doing videos for money, but i haven't done any yet, because i dont think i can bring my "a-game" into a video that i dont enjoy making. Would feel shitty to both myself and the guy ordering the vid.

Me: hehe

Me: Ur Favourite Fragmovies ?

Cristal : Requiem for demos, tricking it2, freeform, reaching aural nirvana & Choual history x

Me: Favourite Music?

Cristal : Dont know, switching each day :D Tho, d12-devils night is the best album ever created, gotta be because of lots of wicked memories with my friends in my younger days :D

Me: with the release of malignancy u showed the whole ut world the best out of one of the best ut players in the world currentlly..luxxiz , any such projects up this year??

Cristal: Nope , im working on a quake 3 defrag video (team tricking) at the moment together with fei. I was going to make unrealnorth 2 , but i cancelled that project due to that i will have very little time to edit this summer (job + sun). Tho i have recently finished of 30 seconds of unreal for a "get-together-vid", meaning that me and some other editors bring out some shit that we like and then put it together, dunno how it'll turn out.. :D

Me: Favourite movie?

Cristal: hard to say, tho "blood in blood out" have always been a movie that i really liked.

Me:Favourite actress?:D

Cristal: Jennifer love hewitt (im gonna marry her, tho she doenst know about it yet)

Me:favourite UT player?

Cristal : jesus & kiLLu + ayreon

Me: and when u started making fragmovies..were u really inspired by any particular frag movie maker

Cristal: No, i wasnt inspired by anyone in particular, i just wanted to show off some of my own + friends frags, i didnt really put alot of thinking into it. Tho there is one guy who is inspiring me nowadays, its “mrks”. He's simply a genius when it comes down to videogame-related movies. I dont know how he does it, but he puts such a mood/feeling into his videos its insane (not in a technical way). But, im not trying to become his, because i know i cant. mrks is the best editor in the world, and he will forever be!)

Me: mrks movie maker?

Cristal: yes.. mrks is a moviemaker, he's also in #shaolinproductions along with me

Me: For people to contact u..do u have a dedicated channel on irc for urself

Cristal: i always hang out in #shaolinproductions on quakenet , people can feel free to join that channel and chat with me, im pretty kind. I answer most of the people pm'ing me :)

Me: could u tell ur system config?

Cristal: I got a shitty computer tbfh :P xp2200+, 768 mb ram, gx 5900xt, 400 gb hd.. BUT i got 100mbit hah! :D

Me: Mouse , gaming surface and headset?

Cristal: MS intelli 3.0, func pad, Sennheiser headset

Me: cool

Me : around how much hours do u spend a day on ur projects?

Me: do u do them continously to finnish them off as soon as possible or do u take some breaks in between

Cristal: thats so changning.. one day i can spend 6-8 hours editing/capping.. then i wount do shit for like a week :) Cant really say how much/day i spend.. so variating..

Cristal: i take breaks, many and long ones :D haha

Me : > ut2007 is coming up..ur thoughts and expectations?

Cristal: I dont know, i dont really like specualting either, only results in dissapointments / unneccessary thoughts! :> Im just hoping it'll be good, i doubt epic will let us down....

Me: ok man thanks a lot..for sparing ur time: even during ur busy project time … :) Have a nice time… All the best for ur current and future projects . ..it was cool meeting u.

Cristal: hihi thanks, was fun

Cristal : u2

Quest 06 Gaming

2006-03-14T17:02:00.000+05:00

Whew....got my sys back yesterday. All of us...me, dutt fox auster balaji deno etc had took our system for Multiplayer gaming @ kanakakunnu palace. The games for competition included counterstrike 1.6, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Need for speed most wanted . There were only 3 clans for counterstrike. 1st clan was lead by Kiran rajachandran (dont know name of other members)..they were average players..n gave azote's clan a good enough challenge ( scor e was 3-3 at a time)..but they got raped later by azote's clan:D. Finals was between Sajan's clan and Azote's clan. there was a big crowd spectating the match... hoping for a really challenging match. Sajan's clan included shiraz, wazim , , nithin and another guy called jayadev. azote's clan included snehath, arjun, aditya and vijay. I dont remember the score of the finals..will post it after confirming with fox. Azote's clan had won the finals by a pretty good lead ...there was also some entertaining stuffs in between like teamkills with grenade..team flashing etc ..lol .

Now coming to need for speed most wanted. The initial registration was low ...like only around 3 or 4 players..but later it was around 13 or 14 . Most of the players for nfs were noobs or 1st time players of this version of need for speed (most wanted).A guy called Sreekanth who was playing mostwanted for 1st time ..won nfs most wanted...and got a g15 gaming keyboard as prize.:).he also helped us a lot in setting up the LAN.

G15 Keyboard----->http://www.cooltechzone.com/Reviews/Peripheral_Reviews/Logitech_G15:_Keyboard_for_Gamers_200602062179/

Next Unreal Tournament 2004..We had expected a lot of gamers from ernakulam to come for the tourney..like ashwin, sreekanth(snake), suraj, korn ,sharath, spawn , varun etc. Spawn had come for playing >:).he was the special guest..:D. other than him ..none else from ernakulam had came for ut.Then there were some competitors from tvm like shyam , hari gopal, rohith ps, vishnu ,myself,ashwin(bleak hawk) and even shiraz( pro cs player).hehe. Finally a ut pro takes revenge on a cs pro..lol. Spawn had got godlike against shiraz in uT..hope the same happens when shiraz plays cs against spawn. Spawn and shyam easily cleared the prilims by raping noobs..and reached the semifinals. The semi finals was between spawn and shyam. It was a best of 3 maps. 1st map was Rankin..shyam beat spawn .the match was very close..only 2 frags difference or so. Then 2nd map was ironic..in that too shyam had won. Score was 10,5. Spawn played really well we were impressed by his aim ... he got a lot of shock kills and around 6 or 7 headshots totally..in the tourney. Then there was another semi between me and spawn . If i win..i go to finals ..if he wins he goes to finals.. Map was Ironic.the first 5 mins of the match was really thrilling..his shocks n lightnings were too good..he got 5 shock beams in a row n raped me >:P. But i played patiently and somehow managed to win over him at last .Score was 14,4.

Next the finals..between shyam and me...omg i was going crazy.hes the toughest opponent i have ever played with. Too much aim and tactics. Like the Semi finals..finals was best of 3 . Maps decided were Lea, roughinery and ironic. He asked to play Lea first..n i agreed. The game was spine chilling.He had got the 1st blood and maintained the lead for over 5mins or so.then i got 1kill against him n continued the momentum. It was a really great game.His hitscan with lightning n shock made me run for health every 20 seconds and so.Atlast somehow i managed to win..cant believe i still won .Final score was 7,1.

Next map was Roughinery. He Had got the 100 shield in the 1st min..once he gets shield n health..the match is over..that was sure. So in the desperation to gett him off 100 shield..i attacked him with rocket n started off with a selfkill myself :))..although i killed self..i took him off the shield n healths. Then i played patiently n started to get a few kills against him n carried on the momentum.The match was a good 1..he got an awesome flak kill in the end. I had won this map also somehow. Final score was 8,1. I got the 1st prize.. a g5 laser gaming mouse ..and he got 2nd prize 1000rs.

The tourney was finally over!! after 2 days.One major difference of this tourney was .. the prizes were valuable gaming hardware..instead of money..i guess everyone upcoming tourney in tvm might follow the same thing:D. Thanks to govind , santosh, balaji,aravind , auster ,rohith, shiraz n all others who took the pain to make this gaming event a success. Cheers to them !!

G71 is Nvidia's next generation high end chip

2005-12-31T16:18:00.000+05:00

32 pipelines at 90 nanometres

IT HAPPENS every four months. Nvidia set the new trend of releasing its new top end card every four months and it's not going to stop now. It just released its ghost Geforce 7800 GTX 512 product and the demand for it is incredible. A lot of people want it as it’s the fastest card around for Yule but you just can not get any.

G71 will end up with a new Geforce name, new number and probably GTX suffix but it's still too early to talk about the final name. It will have a very fast core, we still don’t know the number but it should be around 700MHz and it's obviously paired with super fast memory. The memory is not the problem and even Samsung memory running at 1700 MHz+ is not in tight supply.

The chip will have 32 pipelines and it's obviously faster than just arrived and not so available Geforce 7800 GTX 512 cards. It's expected in early February and Nvidia is already playing with these cards.

Nvidia is working hard on its 90 nanometre process and its investors are really concerned about it. We figure out that mobile part based around G72 chip is 90 nanometre or at least should be based on that, and Nvidia is in volume production with its C51 chipsets, also 90 nanometre based.

This card is meant to fight R580 ATI's new high end chip that is scheduled for a similar time. µ

Nvidia's G71 has 32 pipes and 16 ROPs

ATI BELIEVES that you need many more pixel operations per clock than the pixel itself. Nvidia disagrees. It believes in a totally different ratio. With the birth of the R580, ATI believes that you should have three to one ratio as R580 has 48 Shaders and 16 pixel pipelines. You don’t need much mathematics to figure out that ATI preaches a three to one ratio.

As the G71 will be able to process 32 pixels per clock, it will physically have 32 pipelines but will have just 16 ROPs. This is no surprise to us as Nvidia's G70, Geforce 7800 GTX actually has 24 pipelines and 16 ROPs.

This means that Nvidia and ATI will take completely new approaches, where Nvidia will try to convince everyone that you need more raw pixels than pixel operations.

The G70, Geforce 7800 GTX has 24 texture memory units and 16 ROPs and can theoretically draw eight pixels with each, having three textures per clock. G71 will be able to do even more pixels per clock - it's as simple as that.

ATI's R580, on the other hand, will still be able to push sixteen raw pixels per clock but will be able to render 48 pixel operations per clock. So ATI will insist on more per pixels operations before you actually draw the pixel. This kind of makes sense when you need more maps and calculations per pixels.

I would fear the very successful and expensive "The way it's meant to be played" program which Nvidia spent some $160+ million dollars on last year. With that kind of budget it's much easier to convince developers and publishers that Nvidia's marchitecture is the best. We can surely say that 2006 will be just as full of marchitecture wars as 2005 was. µ

Bot Accusations

2005-12-22T09:10:00.000+05:00

One of the most cherished past-times of a strong player is to go into a public free-for-all server and get accused of botting. It happens quite often, and while most good players say nothing, it doesn’t help the community when the accusations fly. It’s always been a fun topic in-game however when people make bot accusations they don’t really know what they’re talking about. I always figured someone had to educate these fools, so here’s my chance!

Bot accusations are a common occurrence on public servers because people just aren’t used to having someone come in and beat them by such a large margin. People have a hard time understanding how someone that played the same game they do, could get so much better then they have. If this were just the case, they’d normally leave the server but a few years ago bots were introduced and this changed everything.

Basically the way I see bots among the general public (ie: public free for all players), is like a virus. Not the bots themselves, but the concept of what a bot is. It’s like a virus in the fact that it spreads so rapidly throughout servers though instead of sex or needles this virus gets spread by ignorance. Though there are truckloads of bot accusations I’d say maybe 1 percent of these accusations are accurate.

The First Time I Saw a Bot

I remember hearing my first story about bots. Someone said they had a quake 2 demo from someone’s perspective that was cheating. Obviously I was extremely skeptical because being a professional gamer, I knew that people were always quick to point fingers at things they couldn’t explain. The main thing I remember was the phrase ‘an impossible rail’. I simply thought ‘well if someone got railed, it had to have been possible or it wouldn’t have happened.’ Then I loaded up the demo.

This player soon became immortalized for using a bot. The unfortunate thing is that the player was good, and may have just been testing out the bot to see what it was capable of, but he ruined his reputation forever and in the process pretty much banned himself from any competitive gameplay. His team had to live with this stigma for a very long time. That player’s name was Desys.

The demo basically showcased Desys playing his personal friend Symbolic in a 1 v 1, while a spectator recorded a demo from Desys’ perspective. It was extremely obvious that the vertical sensitivity was insanely high and that it would stay focused on the other player very consistently. The horizontal sensitivity seemed to be normal and didn’t differ too much from what I used at the time.

After not really understanding why his vertical sensitivity was so high, the demo went on and he eventually jumped over a large drop and then I saw the impossible rail. While he was in mid air simply jumping over a ravine the crosshair immediately aimed straight down, railed his opponent and immediately adjusted straight forward again. This happened at such an unbelievably fast pace I would have missed it if I wouldn’t have been focused on the screen. Ironically enough, I don’t think Desys realized what happened either.

I watched the demo a few more times just because it was the only thing I had seen like it. I also wanted to understand how it worked so that if I came along a bot on a server, I could effectively call it out while not looking like an idiot.

Since then and now I’ve been accused of being a bot probably over 200 times. This is nothing special since most people in my circles go through the same thing whenever they go on a public server. Every once in a while I’m pulled into a discussion about it and I try to de-credit their points of why they think I am a bot. After realizing that it isn’t possible to reason with an irrational person I usually stop.

Also, in 10 years of my professional gaming career (keep in mind I did not play counterstrike) I’ve ran across less than 10 bots.

To this day however, I have never used a bot, neither out of curiosity or to cheat. To my knowledge, none of my teammates ever have either. A lot of the reason was after the Desys’ ordeal, I never wanted to have my name associated with botting especially when I was competing so heavily.

How to Spot a Bot

Now that I’ve gone through a very lengthy background on my history with botting I’ll go into what a bot actually does and how you can determine whether that really good player on the server is botting or kicking ass.

The irony about bots is they usually don’t win games. Bot users are usually the people who don’t know how to play at all, so they get these bots and just figure it’ll help out. The problem with this is those players have no understanding on what areas to focus on, when to use what weapons and how to really do anything. So these players generally want to get that 1 weapon, be it railgun, shock rifle or lightning gun. As they run from their spawn to these guns, they usually get killed very quickly because they don’t know how to dodge or move, and sometimes the only thing they know about the map is where to find the hitscan weapons.

Another funny thing about players who use bots, they usually have no clue how to move around. They don’t use a lot of fancy dodging or strafe jumping. They just aim really well. So if you are moving around like a bat out of hell and this guy never misses a shot, though he gets hit by every thing you throw at em, he could be a bot. While you learn to play, your aim increases more or less at the same rate your movement abilities increase. If someone’s aim is amazing, yet their movement is horrible, there is an obvious imbalance. This is not an exact science because I know people who have horrible aim, but can dodge extremely well.

What a bot actually is, is a third-party program that runs at the same time as your game. This program can see other players while you play your game. You can adjust how much of an fov the bot has (field of vision), which means that if your bot has an fov of 0, then he wont be helping you aim, but if he has an fov of 30, he’ll find any players that are within 30 degrees of your crosshair (this can be set for vertically or horizontally). Now if the bot has his fov set on 360 degrees, his crosshair will lock onto any player that is visible no matter where he is in location the player (even front). The higher fov the easier it is to notice that the guy is a bot, just because he tends to spin around in circles a lot when he shoots. The reason why a bot’s sensitivity may look higher then normal, is because his crosshair has to instantly lock on to the opponent. The reason why it appears that the sensitivity is higher then normal is the bot has to instantly put the crosshair on the opponent, and if that opponent is far away from the crosshair, the mouse sensitivity appears to increase as the crosshair locks on to the player.

Some game types have kills and deaths visible on the scoreboard. Since bots only do one thing very well, which is aim, they usually never really get a great ratio on the scoreboards. They may get a great deal of kills, but they’ll die plenty of times because they really don’t know what they’re doing as far as defense. So when a player wins a game and gets an outstanding ratio such as 50-3, that player probably isn’t a bot, because bots are good for offense, not defense. With 50-3 that player had to have timed power-ups and hoarded armor to finish the game in such a manner.

As for the very talented players who play competitively… I haven’t seen a bot in that crowd for years. Simply because anti-cheat software has gotten much better, game companies are making their games a little more air-tight and for the simple fact that the competitive gaming community has grown very tightly knit. Everyone knows what everyone else is capable of doing, so using a bot is pretty obvious.

The Ultimate Bot Accusation

Maybe it’s partly because I’m a programmer, but when I beat someone up on a server and they promptly say ‘You are a Hacker!’ I have to regain composure from disbelief and usually get killed in the process. Not only is that player ignorant of bots and playing the game, but also just plain stupid for pulling out the h4x0r card.

Yes, those pesky hackers who bypass the world’s toughest security systems to get into private areas and often deface and vandalize property have banded together to make a mighty Unreal bot! That’s right, they’re time finding leaks in security systems wasn’t valuable so they thought it was better spent coding a bot.

Programmers make bots! Hacker’s are too intelligent to waste their time with such insignificant things! Hackers have a negative connotation and so do bots, so I suppose that’s the connection between the two. However, this by far, is the single most ignorant type of bot accusation on the planet.

In Summary

When a player cries ‘bot’, usually all that player is doing is showing his ignorance. While there is a valid chance that someone could be botting, the chances of this happening nowadays are very slim (perhaps minus counter strike). Even if his speculation is completely correct, you do nothing more than make the bot user happier with your ranting. If the bot user wanted anything more out of you than anger and angst, he wouldn’t be botting in the first place. Your reaction just fuels him to stay on the server that much longer.

So as the world turns and ignorant players flatter the better players with bot accusations, I bid thee farewell.

Source:-
Author:- No game

MALICIOUS PROGRAMS (PART 1- VIRUS)

2005-12-04T14:42:00.000+05:00

A virus(Vital Information Resource Under Siege) is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents.Extending the analogy, the insertion of the virus into a program is termed infection, and the infected file (or executable code that is not part of a file) is called a host. Viruses are one of the several types of malware or malicious software.However, a basic rule is that computer viruses cannot directly damage hardware, but only software.

It must satisfy 2 criteria to qualify as a virus..they are :-

1.It must execute itself.
2.It must self replicate itself to other executable file or disk that user access.

A virus is a type of program that can replicate itself by making (possibly modified) copies of itself. The main criterion for classifying a piece of executable code as a virus is that it spreads itself by means of 'hosts'. A virus can only spread from one computer to another when its host is taken to the uninfected computer, for instance by a user sending it over a network or carrying it on a removable media. Additionally, viruses can spread to other computers by infecting files on a network file system or a file system that is accessed by another computer.

Viruses can infect different types of hosts. The most common targets are executable files that contain application software or parts of the operating system. Viruses have also infected the executable boot sectors of floppy disks, script files of application programs, and documents that can contain macro scripts. Additionally, viruses can infect files in other ways than simply inserting a copy of their code into the code of the host program. For example, a virus can overwrite its host with the virus code, or it can use a trick to ensure that the virus program is executed when the user wants to execute the (unmodified) host program. Viruses have existed for many different operating systems, including MS-DOS, AmigaOS, Mac OS and even Linux; however, the vast majority of viruses affect Microsoft Windows.

Replication Strategies

In order to replicate itself, a virus must be permitted to execute code and write to memory. For this reason, many viruses attach themselves to executable files that may be part of legitimate programs. If a user tries to start an infected program, the virus' code may be executed first. Viruses can be divided into two types, on the basis of their behavior when they get executed. Nonresident viruses immediately search for other hosts that can be infected, infect these targets, and finally transfer control to the application program they infected. Resident viruses do not search for hosts when they are started. Instead, a resident virus loads itself into memory on execution and transfers control to the host program. The virus stays active in the background and infects new hosts when those files are accessed by other programs or the operating system itself.

Nonresident viruses

Nonresident viruses can be thought of as consisting of a finder module and a replication module. The finder module is responsible for finding new files to infect. For each new executable file the finder module encounters, it calls the replication module to infect that file.

For simple viruses the replicator's task is to:

1. Open the new file
2. Check if the executable file has already been infected (if it is, return to the finder module)
3. Append the virus code to the executable file
4. Save the executable's starting point
5. Change the executable's starting point so that it points to the start location of the newly copied virus code
6. Save the old start location to the virus in a way so that the virus branches to that location right after its execution.
7. Save the changes to the executable file
8. Close the infected file
9. Return to the finder so that it can find new files for the replicator to infect.

Resident viruses

Resident viruses contain a replication module that is similar to the one that is employed by nonresident viruses. However, this module is not called by a finder module. Instead, the virus loads the replication module into memory when it is executed and ensures that this module is executed each time the operating system is called to perform a certain operation. For example, the replication module can get called each time the operating system executes a file. In this case, the virus infects every suitable program that is executed on the computer.

Resident viruses are sometimes subdivided into a category of fast infectors and a category of slow infectors. Fast infectors are designed to infect as many files as possible. For instance, a fast infector can infect every potential host file that is accessed. This poses a special problem to anti-virus software, since a virus scanner will access every potential host file on a computer when it performs a system-wide scan. If the virus scanner fails to notice that such a virus is present in memory, the virus can "piggy-back" on the virus scanner and in this way infect all files that are scanned. Fast infectors rely on their fast infection rate to spread. The disadvantage of this method is that infecting many files may make detection more likely, because the virus may slow down a computer or perform many suspicious actions that can be noticed by anti-virus software. Slow infectors, on the other hand, are designed to infect hosts infrequently. For instance, some slow infectors only infect files when they are copied. Slow infectors are designed to avoid detection by limiting their actions: they will not slow down a computer noticeably, and will at most infrequently trigger anti-virus software that detects suspicious behaviour by programs. The slow infector approach doesn't seem very successful however. Viruses that are common in the wild are mostly relatively fast to extremely fast infectors.

Host types

Viruses have targeted various types of hosts. This is a non-exhaustive list:

* Binary executable files (such as COM-files and EXE-files in MS-DOS, Portable Executable files in Microsoft Windows, and ELF files in Linux)

* Boot sectors of floppy disks and hard disk partitions

* The master boot record of a harddisk

* General-purpose script files (such as batch files in MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, and shell script files on UNIX platforms).

* Application-specific script files (such as Telix-scripts)

* Documents that can contain macros (such as Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, AmiPro documents, and Microsoft Access da
tabase files)

General Virus Behavior

Viruses come in a great many different forms, but they all potentially have two phases to their execution, the infection phase and the attack phase:

1. When the virus executes it will infect other programs. What is often not clearly understood is precisely when it will infect the other programs. Some viruses infect other programs each time they are executed, other viruses infect only upon a certain trigger. This trigger could by anything; it could be a day or time, an external event on your PC, a counter within the virus etc. Some viruses are very selective about when they infect programs; this is vital to the virus's survival. If the virus infects too often, it is more likely to be discovered before it can spread far. Virus writers want their programs to spread as far as possible before anyone detects them. This brings up an important point which bears repeating:

It is a serious mistake to execute a program a few times -- find nothing infected and presume there are no viruses in the program. You can never be sure that the virus simply hasn't triggered its infection phase!

Many viruses go resident in the memory of your PC just as a terminate and stay resident (TSR) program such as Sidekick(R) does. This means the virus can wait for some external event such as inserting a diskette, copying a file, or executing a program to actually infect another program. This makes these viruses very dangerous since it's hard to guess what trigger condition they use for their infection. Resident viruses frequently corrupt the system software on the PC to hide their existence.

2.The second phase is the attack phase. Many viruses do unpleasant things such as deleting files or changing random data on your disk, simulating typos or merely slowing your PC down; some viruses do less harmful things such as playing music or creating messages or animation on your screen. Just as the virus's infection phase can be triggered by some event, the attack phase also has its own trigger. Viruses usually delay revealing their presence by launching their attack only after they have had ample opportunity to spread. This means that the attack may be delayed for years after the initial infection. The attack phase is optional, many viruses simply reproduce and have no trigger for an attack phase. Does this mean that these are "good" viruses? No, unfortunately not! Anything that writes itself to your disk without your permission is stealing storage and CPU cycles. This is made worse since viruses which "just infect", with no attack phase, damage the programs or disks they infect. This is not intentional on the part of the virus, but simply a result of the fact that many viruses contain extremely poor quality code. One of the most common viruses, the STONED virus is not intentionally harmful. Unfortunately the author did not anticipate other than 360K floppy disks, with the result that the virus will try to hide its own code in an area on 1.2mb diskettes which causes corruption of the entire diskette.

BOOT SECTOR VIRUSES

These are viruses which plant themselves in your system sectors. System sectors are special areas on your disk containing programs that are executed when you boot your PC. Sectors are not files but simply small areas on your disk that your hardware reads in single chunks. Under DOS, sectors are most commonly 512 bytes in length. These sectors are invisible to normal programs but are vital for correct operation of your PC. They are a common target for viruses. There are two types of system sectors found on DOS PCs, DOS boot sectors and partition sectors (also known as Master Boot Records or MBRs).

System sector viruses (also commonly referred to as boot sector viruses) modify the program in either the DOS boot sector or the partition sector. Since there isn't much room in the system sector (only 512 bytes), these viruses often have to hide their code somewhere else on the disk. These viruses sometimes cause problems when this spot already contains data which is then overwritten. Some viruses, such as the Pakistani BRAIN virus mark the spot where they hide their code as having bad sectors. This is one reason to be alarmed if CHKDSK or Scandisk suddenly reports additional bad sectors on your disk. These viruses usually go resident in memory on your PC, and infect any floppy disk which you access. Simply doing a DIR on a floppy disk may cause it to be infected. Some viruses will infect your diskette as soon as you close the drive door. Since they are active in memory (resident), they can hide their presence. If BRAIN is active on your PC, and you use a sector editor to look at the boot sector of an infected diskette, the virus will intercept the attempt to read the infected boot sector and return instead a saved image of the original boot sector. You will see the normal boot sector instead of the infected version. Viruses which do this are known as stealth viruses. In addition to infecting diskettes, some system sector viruses spread by also infecting files.

File Viruses

In terms of sheer number of viruses, these are the most common kind. The simplest file viruses work by locating a type of file that they know how to infect (usually a file name ending in ".COM" or ".EXE") and overwriting part of the program they are infecting. When this program is executed, the virus code executes and infects more files. These overwriting viruses do not tend to be very successful since the overwritten program rarely continues to function correctly and the virus is almost immediately discovered. The more sophisticated file viruses modify the program so that the original instructions are saved and executed after the virus finishes. Just as system sector viruses can remain resident in memory and use "stealth" techniques to hide their presence, file viruses can hide this way also. If you do a directory listing, you will not see any increase in the length of the file and if you attempt to read the file, the virus will intercept the request and return your original uninfected program to you. This can sometimes be used to your advantage. If you have a "stealth" virus (such as 4096 or Dir-2), you can copy your program files (*.EXE and *.COM files) to files with other extensions and allow the virus to automatically disinfect your files! If you "COPY *.COM *.CON", and then cold boot your PC from a known good copy of DOS and "REN *.CON *.COM", this will disinfect the renamed files.

Be aware that many file viruses (such as 4096 which is also known as Frodo) also infect overlay files as well as the more usual *.COM and *.EXE files. Overlay files have various extensions, but ".OVR" and ".OVL" are common examples.

Macro Viruses
There is particular type of file virus that that many people don't understand. These are the files from the MicroSoft Office applications (e.g, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Access, etc.). These programs all have their own macro languages (a BASIC like language) built in. The associated files (MS Word documents or templates and MS Excel spreadsheet files) are usually thought of only as data files so many people are surprised that they can be infected. But these files can contain programs (the macro language) that are executed when you load one of these files into the associated product. The program inside of these files is interpreted by the MS Office application. What is now a language originally began as a very simple macro language that the user could use to combine keystrokes to automate some routine function. The macro language in these products has since grown substantially and now is a fully capable language based on Visual Basic (VBA). Since anything that contains a program can potentially be infected by a virus, these files can harbor viruses.

Read about the the threat of MS Word macro viruses (e.g., Concept) or MS Excel Macro Viruses.

What gives these viruses a chance to execute is the fact that Microsoft has defined special macros that will automatically execute. The mere act of opening an infected MS Word document or an infected MS Excel spread sheet can allow the virus macros to be executed. (One simple prevention for this type of virus is to use the freely available (from Microsoft) viewer programs to rather than MS Word or MS Excel to view these type of files. Even MS Access database files (*.mdb files) can contain macro viruses. Read about: MS Access Macro Viruses.

Macro viruses have been very successful because most people regarded spreadsheets and documents as data, not as programs (and because many anti-virus programs were very slow to address this threat). If you use a mail reader or Web browser, it is very important to use a viewer rather than the full MS Office program (i.e, MS Word or MS Excel) if you want to automatically open downloaded MS Word documents or MS Excel spreadshee

Avoiding bait files and other undesirable hosts

A virus needs to infect hosts in order to spread further. In some cases, it might be a bad idea to infect a host program however. For example, many anti-virus programs perform an integrity check of their own code. Infecting such programs will therefore increase the likelihood that the virus is detected. For this reason, some viruses are programmed not to infect programs that are known to be part of anti-virus software. Another type of hosts that viruses sometimes avoid is bait files. Bait files (or goat files) are files that are specially created by anti-virus software, or by anti-virus professionals themselves, to be infected by a virus. These files can be created for various reasons, all of which are related to the detection of the virus:

* Anti-virus professionals can use bait files to take a sample of a virus (i.e. a copy of a program file that is infected by the virus). It is more practical to store and exchange a small infected bait file, than to exchange a large application program that has been infected by the virus.
* Anti-virus professionals can use bait files to study the behaviour of a virus and evaluate detection methods. This is especially useful when the virus is polymorphic. In this case, the virus can be made to infect a large number of bait files. The infected files can be used to test whether a virus scanner detects all versions of the virus.
* Some anti-virus software employs bait files that are accessed regularly. When these files are modified, the anti-virus software warns the user that a virus is probably active on the system.

Since bait files are used to detect the virus, or to make detection possible, a virus can benefit from not infecting them. Viruses typically do this by avoiding suspicious programs, such as small program files or programs that contain certain patterns of 'garbage instructions'.

A related strategy to make baiting difficult is sparse infection. Sometimes, sparse infectors do not infect a host file that would be a suitable candidate for infection in other circumstances. For example, a virus can decide on a random basis whether to infect a file or not, or a virus can only infect host files on particular days of the week.
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Stealth

Some viruses try to trick anti-virus software by intercepting its requests to the operating system. A virus can hide itself by ensuring that a request of anti-virus software to read an infected file is passed to the virus, instead of to the operating system. The virus can then return an uninfected version of the file to the anti-virus software, so that it seems that the file is "clean". Modern anti-virus software employs various techniques to counter stealth mechanisms of viruses. The only completely reliable method to avoid stealth is to boot from a medium that is known to be clean.
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Self-modification

Most modern antivirus programs try to find virus-patterns inside ordinary programs by scanning them for so-called virus signatures. A signature is a characteristic byte-pattern that is part of a certain virus or family of viruses. If a virus scanner finds such a pattern in a file, it notifies the user that the file is infected. The user can then delete, or (in some cases) "clean" the infected file. Some viruses employ techniques that make detection by means of signatures difficult or impossible. These viruses modify their code on each infection. That is, each infected file contains a different variant of the virus.
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Simple self-modifications

In the past, some viruses modified themselves only in fairly simple ways. For example, they regularly exchanged subroutines in their code. This poses no problems to a somewhat advanced virus scanner however.
[edit]

Encryption with a variable key

A more advanced method is the use of simple encryption to encode the virus. In this case, the virus consists of a small decrypting module and an encrypted copy of the virus code. If the virus is encrypted with a different key for each infected file, the only part of the virus that remains constant is the decrypting module. In this case, a virus scanner cannot directly detect the virus using signatures, but it can still detect the decrypting module, which still makes indirect detection of the virus possible.

Mostly, the decryption techniques that these viruses employ are fairly simple and mostly done by just xoring each byte with a randomized key that was saved by the parent virus. The use of XOR-operations has the additional advantage that the encryption and decryption routine are the same (a xor b = c, c xor b = a.)
[edit]

Polymorphic code

Polymorphic code was the first technique that posed a serious threat to virus scanners. Just like regular encrypted viruses, a polymorphic virus infects files with an encrypted copy of itself, which is decoded by a decryption module. In the case of polymorphic viruses however, this decryption module is also modified on each infection. A well-written polymorphic virus therefore has no parts that stay the same on each infection, making it impossible to detect directly using signatures. Anti-virus software can detect it by decrypting the viruses using an emulator, or by statistical pattern analysis of the encrypted virus body. To enable polymorphic code, the virus has to have a polymorphic engine (also called mutating engine or mutation engine) somewhere in its encrypted body.

Some viruses employ polymorphic code in a way which constrains the mutation rate of the virus significantly. For example, a virus can be programmed to mutate only slightly over time, or it can be programmed to refrain from mutating when it infects a file on a computer that already contains copies of the virus. The advantage of using such slow polymorphic code is that it makes it more difficult for anti-virus professionals to obtain representative samples of the virus, because bait files that are infected in one run will typically contain identical or similar samples of the virus. This will make it more likely that the detection by the virus scanner will be unreliable, and that, as a result of this, some instances of the virus may be able to avoid detection.
[edit]

Metamorphic code

To avoid being detected by emulation, some viruses rewrite themselves completely each time they are to infect new executables. Viruses that use this technique are said to be metamorphic. To enable metamorphism, a metamorphic engine is needed. A metamorphic virus is usually very large and complex. W32/Simile consisted of over 14000 lines of assembly code, for example. 90% of it is part of the metamorphic engine

ANTIVIRUS

Anti-virus software consists of computer programs that attempt to identify, thwart and eliminate computer viruses and other malicious software .

Antivirus programs use different methods to scan for viruses .Some of them are:-

1.String search:-It seeks out an unique piece of code or data within files that may contain virus.

2.Algorithmic Search:- It observes certain parameters that commonly appear in infected files and then determine whether a file has been infected.

3.Vaccination:- This keeps a record of File characteristics and then compares it against later versions of the file to determine whether the file was modified illegally.If yes, it would imply a virus attack.

4.Investigation:- This method test the virus inorder to determine its infection capacity.This method is more efficient to unknown viruses that are active in memory but not detected by a scan.

5.Anti-stealth:- This method prevents other applications from manipulating system resources by controlling the system before another application can modify the original application code.

REMOVAL OF INFECTED FILE
Steps in the removal of infected file are :-
1.Removal of the virus code
2.Quarantine the infected file
3.Deleting the infected file
4.Physical removal of the infected file
5.Seeking help

Half-Life 2: Survivor

2005-12-03T08:22:00.000+05:00

HL2: Survivor is a Japanese arcade reinterpretation of Half-Life 2 for, erm, Japanese arcades. There are some new screens showing what the guys producing it at Taito have come up with. There have unsuprisingly been some major changes, including rebels in Nova Prospekt, a complete redesign for the finale to Ravenholm, low-violence zombie models, and a crazy-looking deathmatch gametype with a translucent UI covering most of the screen, a minimap right in the middle, and pint-size female Combine (below).

CLICK ON THE PICS FOR A LARGER VIEW

SLI Is Reborn In NForce4 SLI X16

2005-11-30T21:21:00.000+05:00

There’s no doubt that SLI is a niche technology. But it’s oh so hot, especially in games such as F.E.A.R.,which pushes graphics cards to their max.SLI’s first generation—Nvidia’s rendition, not 3dfx’s—was quite impressive. Sure, it required two matching boards from the
same manufacturer and split one x16 PCI Express pathway into two electrical x8 connections.Resulting performance flew
through the roof, though, in titles Nvidia’s driver team profiled. Months later, ATI’s CrossFire looks like an even better solution. Unfortunately, the best CrossFire hardware you can buy (in limited quantities, no less) is the older X800-series stuff. Why pay for two of these when you can get one GeForce 7800 GTX or ATI Radeon X1800 XT? Enthusiasts call that too little, too late. Given ATI’s execution track record of late, it’s pointless to
even speculate when X1800-class CrossFire equipment might pop up on store shelves. What ATI did succeed in doing was kick-start Nvidia’s think tank into innovatin further.Thesecond generation of SLI core logic is consequently rolling out, looking a lot like the high-end nForce Professional chipset with its dual x16 connections electrically wired to run at full
speed. Thanks to some significant driver work, you can now use cards from different makers if they sport the same core.You can also enable SLI without rebooting. And on certain mainstream cards, the SLI bridge isn’t even necessary. Nvidia deserves kudos for the refinement.Third-party motherboard makers also deserve credit. They’re designing stable
platforms and selling them at palatable prices. Asus is a model example. It already services AMD and Intel enthusiasts with the A8N-SLI Premium and P5ND2-SLI
boards, which both leverage older SLI silicon to cut an x16 pipeline into twin x8 connectors. Now, Asus is rocking with AMD- and Intel-based nForce4 SLI X16 products, too. The most obvious evolutionary change is 16 extra lanes of PCI-E connectivity. For AMD enthusiasts this means no more single-chip nForce4 motherboard layout. Asus’ A8N32-SLI Deluxe employs a SPP (System Platform Processor) and MCP (Media and Communications Processor) to drum up 38 lanes. There’s less room on the board compared to previous SLI offerings,
but Asus still includes dual GbE ports, a FireWire controller, an extra SATA 3Gbps
chip, and heatpipe technology cooling the chipset components. Because Nvidia’s nForce4 SLI IntelEdition includes a memory controller, it’s already organized in a northbridge/southbridge arrangement. The nForce4 SLI X16 chipset apparently generates more heat, though, seeing as Asus adds separate heatpipe arrays to each piece on the P5N32-SLI Deluxe. You do get most of the same specifications: dual GbE, eSATA, FireWire, high-quality audio, etc. Our only real layout gripe is a tight installation when you connect a SATA hard drive and plug in a second GeForce 7800 GTX, as the two physically
rub against each other. Given the price difference between Asus’ standard nForce4 SLI boards and these new nForce4 SLI X16 offerings, you must be wondering about real-world benefits. The most readily identifiable is game performance. Enabling two x16 PCI-E pipelineshelps boost speed, particularly in graphicslimited games. Remember that you’ll only
see those gains with two cards installed.Asus also claims major thermal improvements due to its eight-phase power implementation. Indeed, both the A8N32-SLI Deluxe and P5N32-SLI Deluxe get away with completely passive cooling. Overall, both boards are top-notch. Gaming on an AMD platform is still more attractive, hence the higher rating, but Asus put much effort into the Intel offering, too. Prices on the pair are pegged at about $250, but for the gamer unwilling to compromise performance, the boards deliver.

MicroPC from SIZKA

2005-11-24T08:38:00.000+05:00

A Japanese company, Sizka has unveiled a micro PC which weighs just 500 grams. The micro PC measures 112x51x09mm and is powered by a 64Bit AMD GEODE LX 800 CPU. You can add a 2.5" HDD and 256MB of RAM.

PC for free!

2005-11-24T08:33:00.000+05:00

A Hong Kong based website, Asiatotal launched iT which is a stripped-down personal computer that will be distributed free of cost to small businesses and people from lower income groups.

The PC includes a keyboard, mouse, a 7 inch LCD monitor with speaker, smart card reader, mouse pad and all necessary cables. Now you would be wondering from where will they generate money? Well, they are totally dependant on their sponsors.

The hotkeys (14 of them) on the keyboard gives the end user what he wants and the sponsors, the leads to their website. The 10 keys will be solely owned by the sponsors. When the user presses the hotkey, they will be directed to the sponsor's website. And the remaining four keys are generic, it means that sponsors will be able to buy or lease a hotkey. The four generic hotkeys are cinema, music, finance and health.

The weapons of UT2004

2005-11-13T18:35:00.000+05:00

It is important that you know your enemy, but it´s even more important to know which way is the best to crush him. We have done a complete overview of the weapons available in Unreal Tournament 2004. Ever wondered how much damage a headshot with Lightning Gun does? or perhaps you need some tips on how to use the different weapons, then this article is for you. Take a couple of minutes to learn what weapons you have available for the noble purpose of disposing your enemies.

Shock Rifle
The Shock Rifle is an energy weapon with a primary attack that fires an energy beam. This beam deals out quite a hard knockback in addition to the damage that is dealt. The secondary attack sends an energy ball through the air, the ball itself is not harmless, but the real finesse lies in what is called "shockcombo". After firing away the energy ball you shoot a primary shot through the ball and it all goes down with a boom, giving a lot of damage to anyone close enough to the blast radius. A good thing to know is that the shots from the shock rifle can be reflected by the shield gun, so watch out that you don't end up killing yourself. Another useful knowledge is that the shock ball actually "eats" other things shot into it, for example a rocket or a lightning gun-shot, but if two shockballs collide, both will disappear.

Usage
Learn to master the primary fire and you will see your enemies bounce just like rabbits into a stew. But the shock combo is where you can find the quickest damage, if you suspect someone might be coming around a corner, give him a surprise and let him taste the bitter taste of the combo. The rate of fire on the secondary fire is higher than the primary, so if you are watching to flee from a battle it might be a quite useful tactic.

Ammunition
At pickup: 20
Maximum: 50

Damage (primary)
Damage per shoot: 45
Shots per second: 1.6
Damage per second: 72

Damage (secondary)
Damage per shoot: 36 - 40
Shots per second: 1.9

Damage per second: 68-76

Damage (combo)
Damage per shoot: The exact number is unknown but it ranges from anywhere between 1 and 200 dependning on how close the explosion is.

Link Gun
The primary fire of the Link Gun shoots plasma projectiles in a rapid pace, each hurting the target quite severe. With the secondary fire you have what can be described as a constant plasma beam following your crosshair. Not only does it hurt your enemy, but its strongest property is the ability to "lockdown" the victim. Someone being the target of the secondary link can not jump nor dodge, but is instead drawn towards the ground making it very hard to flee. A small limitation on the secondary fire is that it can only reach a certain distance. The name "Link gun" comes from the ability to link up with a team-mate also carrying a link gun. Just fire secondary attack up on your mate and keep aiming and "shooting" on him and he will have the benefit of a quite noticeable boost in damage. In the game mode "Onslaught" the secondary fire can also be used for repairing vehicles and nodes.

Usage
The primary fire gives a lot of damage when it finds it target in a nice spree, but not many can use it with high enough success to make it worth the while. And with the secondary fire having the lockdown-property it is mostly the preferred choice when it comes to the link gun.

Ammunition
At pickup: 70
Maximum: 220

Damage (primary)
Damage per shoot: 30
Shots per second: 5.5
Damage per second: 165

Damage (secondary)
Damage per shoot: 9
Shots per second: 9
Damage per second: 81

Minigun
There?s not really a lot of "mini" about it, it can take away anyone?s health in a matter of seconds if used properly. On many maps this is a piece of weapon you want to get your hands on, at least so that your enemy doesn't. On long distance the spread of the shots can be too much to still be considered the weapon of choice, but on a medium distance to close it is a real monster. Primary fire is the mostly used one, it fires more bullets and gives a higher damage per second than the secondary. The secondary fire requires fewer bullets, has little less spread but has a little bit higher delay.

Usage
More or less an all-around-gun, it can not compete with high damage instant weapons but give it a second and it will have dealt the same damage anyway. Even if you do not like the gun you should still learn to use it at least for finishing off your enemies once you get his shield down.

Ammunition
At pickup: 150
Maximum: 250

Damage (primary)
Damage per shoot: 6-8
Shots per second: 16
Damage per second: 96-128
Damage (secondary)
Damage per shoot: 14-16
Shots per second: 5.5
Damage per second: 77-88

Flak Cannon
You are basically shooting metal on your enemy, and it hurts, a lot. You can either shoot it as shrapnel or in an explosive shell, both promise to deal a great deal of pain to anyone unwise enough to catch it. The primary attack continues forward until it hits something or someone, the spread of the shrapnel can be compared to a shotgun, the more distance the shrapnel travel the less concentrated they get, and the chance for a good hit decrease. It is very much the favourite of "spammers", just shoot into a corridor and see if you hit someone. You don?t want to be on the wrong end of the explosive shell either, because when it explodes it also releases a couple of shrapnel in all kind of directions, if you get lucky you hit both with the shell and the resulting shrapnel.

Usage
The primary attack bounces against walls and floors use it to your advantage if you need to shoot around corners. Secondary fire is effective if you try to place them at the feet of the enemy and it is an easy fire mode to learn.

Ammunition
At pickup: 15/35
Maximum: 35

Damage (primary)
Damage per shoot: 117
Shots per second: 1.3
Damage per second: 152

Damage (secondary)
Damage per shoot: 90-120
Shots per second: 1
Damage per second: 90-120

Rocket Launcher
A standard weapon in all first person shooters, but in Unreal Tournament we got a little twist, of course you got the standard primary attack where you shoot a single rocket. Secondary fire is among the most powerful attacks if used in the right situation. What it basically does is that it loads up to three rockets into the barrel, and when it got three rockets they are fired away all at the same time. You can release the trigger at two rockets if time is short or if you do not want to waste too many rockets.

Usage
Aim at the feet, to be able to hit someone head-on with a rocket requires both experience and luck. If you fire at the feet you will hurt him with the splash damage from the explosion and it will give him some airtime to plan your next rocket.

Ammunition
At pickup: 12

Maximum: 30

Damage (primary)

Damage per shoot: 90-95
Shots per second: 1.3
Damage per second: 117-123

Damage (secondary)
Damage per shoot: 270
Shots per second: 0.5
Damage per second: 135

Lightning Gun What would a shooter be without a sniper gun; it got it all, zoom, headshots and a high damage instantly. No delay on the shot makes it to a "point and click"-weapon, but it isnt always as easy as it sounds. A good weapon for long distance shooting, but can sometimes be overpowered by the splash-damage weapons in close combat.

Usage A quick lightning bolt to the head and your enemy is fried, to successfully get a headshot you should aim at the face of the enemy or at least around that height. Otherwise a lightning on a long distance before the enemy got time to react can be enough to make him inferior in health status and give you the extra needed to win the battle.

Ammunition
At pickup: 15
Maximum: 40

Damage
Damage per shoot: 70 (headshot 140)
Shots per second: 0.7
Damage per second: 49 (headshot 98)

Sniper Rifle

It made its return from the first Unreal Tournament in this new release and it have been received with mixed feelings. It deals less damage and got no tracer so most people still prefer the Lightning Gun from Unreal Tournament 2003.

Usage
The Lightning Gun and the Sniper Rifle got most things in common except the damage, but a headshot is still a headshot, and it still hurts.

Ammunition
At pickup: 15
Maximum: 35

Damage
Damage per shoot: 60 (headshot 120)
Shots per second: 0.9
Damage per second: 54 (headshot 108)

Shield Gun
The only non-droppable weapon, it can deal a great deal of damage and the ammo recharge quite fast, so why isn't it the best gun in the arsenal? The answer is it's a melee only weapon, close or personal or you won?t be able to hurt your enemy. It is only the primary mode that deals damage, you charge it and at full capacity it throws your enemy away dealing a lot of damage. The secondary mode is how the weapon gets it name; it pulls up a green energy-shield that can save you from getting damage for some time and amount.

Usage
When you feel you need to start running this is your best friend, pull up the shield and it will be much harder to hit you, but shots can still get through from the back and at some weak spots in the front depending on the angle the shot comes from. The primary mode should only be used as a last line of defence, run around a corner and shock the enemy with a well placed shield gun-charge and he will be running away with his tail between his legs.

Assault Rifle
This is the basic gun that you probably sooner or later will start to hate. The primary fire is a standard automatic rifle, although the shots have quite a lot of spread. For the secondary fire you got grenades, annoying little bastards that can help you turn any fight to your advantage if you are lucky with the way they bounce. Added in UT2004 is the ability to carry two assault rifles and that of course doubles the firepower.

Usage This is not your "go-to-gun", and it will most likely not get you on top of the scoreboard, but don?t underestimate it. The grenades is where the real power in the gun can be found, learn how to manage them and you will give anyone grey hair. If you suspect that your foe can be taken out with a grenade you can either rush and hope that you get a hit, or you can just spam a few and then wish for lady luck. Do not depend on this gun to win you the match, because it won?t, so do what you can to grab a "real" weapon.

Ammunition
At spawn: 100 bullets and 4 grenades

Damage (primary)
Damage per shoot: 7
Shots per second: 7
Damage per second: 49

Damage (secondary)
Damage per shoot: 63
Shots per second: 1.2
Damage per second: 76

Biorifle
Also known as the "goo gun", it fires a slimy green blob, which seems kind of ridiculous, but don?t let it fool you. This is the weapon that can do the most damage in a single hit, and therefore it is the source of a lot of anger.

Usage If you are looking for a way to turn the fight around, this might be the most efficient weapon if used successfully, but it is not easy to master, and it is close to worthless on longer range.

Ammunition
At pickup: 20
Maximum: 50

Damage (primary)
Damage per shoot: 35
Shots per second: 4
Damage per second: 140

Damage (secondary)
Damage per shoot: 220
Shots per second: 0.4
Damage per second: 88

IBALL 1600 CPI LASER PRECISE MOUSE.

2005-11-03T21:36:00.000+05:00

INTRODUCTION TO IBALL LASER PRECISE MOUSE

The new iBall Laser Precise Mouse features in a 1600 CPI laser engine and offers 30 times more sensitivity to the surface details and tracking power than any optical mouse can deliver, the company said.

Laser technology responds to the very slightest hand movement with great accuracy and enables accurate cursor movements and controls. Unlike LED optical mouse, the laser tracking technology is capable of capturing the "Speckle Pattern Interferometery" from the laser light reflection. The images that laser sensor receives are much more detailed and have higher contrast. Thus, the sensor can precisely analyse the continuous "Speckle Pattern images" and determine the cursor direction. Yherefore the laser can track reliably on irregular pattern surfaces and reflect interference surfaces. Hence this technology provides 30 times more sensitivity to surfaces than LED optical mouse, the company stated.

iBall Laser Precise includes six buttons with office function. The sixth button offers office hot keys for most frequently used office short-cuts like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet, Email, My Computer, Volume Control, etc. Once in Word/Excel, the users have shortcuts - New, Open, Save, Copy, Paste, Undo, Print, Close etc. It works virtually on any surface - white or black, solid or patterned, shiny or matte, lacquered table tops, glazed ceramic tiles, un-textured plastic, metal surfaces, photo paper, laminates, opaque glass, and more, the company said.

iBalls' Laser Precise comes with combo interface of USB as well as PS2. It is useful to all users with special advantages for professionals like graphic artists, CAD engineers, medical technicians, gamers as well as business and home users. It supports different operating systems including Windows, MAC and Linux.

Auster aka Kickassso got his Iball 1600 CPI Laser mouse for 875rs from Logtech.He had bought the mouse to Duttan's house to have a closer look and play with it.He wanted to knew the opinion about the mouse from myself, duttan and shyam(stryker). I tried playing for the first time with it...i was stunned...it was too fast..then only i remembered that it was a 1600cpi mouse:D. Tried changing sensitivity from 1.00 0.8...still too sensitive..atlast changed to 0.3..which was comfortable for me.shocks n lightning were accurate and it was as accurate as any gaming mouse.But there was some mouse lag...when "REDUCE mouse LAG" feature in ut2004 settings was disabled. The main problem is that the mouse tracks even if its lifted off the pad!!! It tracks upto an inch above the surface. So since playing with it for the first time..i found it very difficult to shieldjump.Duttan too tried playing with the mouse and commented that it was good for reflex shots and accuracy was ok.Then shyam tried it ..at 0.3 sensitivity and he commented it was hard to turn around..then he changed sensitivity back to around 1.00 and then he said it was awesome for reflex shots.. he also commented that lightning accuracy was good.Today he(shyam) had practiced with that mouse and told me that he got awesome accuracy with shock rifle shots and he may most probably buy that mouse...

My opinion abt the mouse is that ...at rs 875 this mouse out performs the microsoft wheel optical mouse. It has got good accuracy. The 2 disadvantages or limitations of this mouse that i found was ...it operates only at 1600 cpi...no mouse resolution changing option...and the 2nd one is that which was already explained...the prob during shieldjumps in ut2k4....we need to get practiced to the mouse a lot to overcome that problem.All in all ...i would give it a 3 out of 5. But if u compare the price performance value..i would give it around 4.5/5.

Here r the pics..The one on the left is the IBALL laser Precise mouse (Auster's), the one on the middle is the MX 510 (DUTTAN'S) and the one on the right is MX 518(mine).

Resolution:---->1600 CPI (counts per inch)
Buttons: ------->6 Buttons with Internet Back/Forward and Office hot key
Scan Frequency:---->6700 frames/sec for maximum accuracy
Acceleration:----->20g accelerationf for amazing speed and accuracy
Accuracy: --->Laser technology responds to the very slightest hand movement with amazing accuracy

Cursor Control:---->Higher resolution enables more accurate cursor control on high resolution larger CRTs and LCD’s

Office Hot Keys:----->Office hot key with most frequently used office short cuts

Interface:------>USB/PS2 combo interface

Advantages:----->Very useful for Graphic Artists, CAD Engineers, Medical Technicians, Gamers and Business Users

A Hard Disk In A PCI Slot? ..The Upgradeware HD25-I/IS

2005-11-03T09:09:00.000+05:00

Creative engineers and product designers are constantly coming up with new ideas for interesting products. One company with plenty of inventive folk is Taiwan-based Upgradeware, which in the past made the news mostly because of its processor upgrades.

Their latest offering is a pair of PCI cards, the HD25I and HD25IS, which are adapters that make it possible to install a 2.5" hard disk in a conventional desktop PCI slot. Upgradeware doesn't put an extra hard disk controller on the board. Rather, it uses the PCI slot only as a location and energy source for the installation of the hard disk. The interface continues to be through the PC motherboard.

Installing a 2.5" hard disk in a desktop PC almost always requires an adapter. This is because not only are the connecting contacts for 2.5" hard disks smaller than the pins for normal 3.5" desktop models, the drive's power is also supplied by the connectors. This is contrast to 3.5" drives, which depend on a conventional Molex plug for power.

The question remains, however: why does anyone actually need this adapter? Upgradeware quotes prices of $25 for the UltraATA variation and $35 for the version with a converter so the hard disk can be used on an SATA system. (2.5" hard disks with an SATA interface are not supported.) As a result, both versions are more expensive than corresponding 3.5" and 2.5" adapters.

One possible reason for using this device is to install an already available 2.5" UltraATA hard disk in a PC that doesn't have any ATA ports free, or one that only lets the drive be used as a slave, which isn't an option with notebook drives. The PCI adapter cards can also let you take advantage of available space for installing another hard disk if the system case has no more space for drives. After all, almost every user has at least one or two free PCI slots. Another application would be a mini-barebones computer, which doesn't offer the user any other option for installing an additional hard disk.

This is not an entirely new idea. In the mid-1980s, Plus had its HardCard, a 10 MB hard disk on an ISA slot for the first generation of PCs.

HD25-I: UltraATA/100

The HD25-I is the UltraATA variation of the Upgradeware adapter. It is so simple that we thought the asking price of $25 dollars was too much, even with an 80-wire ATA cable included in the package. In the end, the adapter only serves the purpose of physical installation and power supply via PCI, which, in light of the low power consumption of 2.5" hard disks - usually just a few watts - shouldn't pose any problems.

The hard disk is simply placed on the board before the interface pins are connected with the matching baseboard. The hard disk should then be secured with at least one screw on the back of the board, because the interface itself doesn't offer sufficient stability should the computer ever be moved.

Our performance measurements led to the exact same results as those for a hard disk used in direct operation via a conventional adapter.

HD25-IS

The serial ATA variation is similar to the one just presented. Here, as before, a 2.5" UltraATA hard disk is installed. A converter chip (called a bridge) takes care of interfacing the UltraATA/100 of the drive to serial ATA 150 for the PC. Command Queuing and 300 MB/s transfers are not supported.
However, our benchmark results first showed an unpleasant drop in performance. Instead of the expected 34 MB/s for our Western Digital WD800VE, it only had a maximum measurement of around 15 MB/s. We believed the bridge to slows down the drive's transfer rate considerably, but using an nForce4 system instead of our reference test system solved the problem.

Test Setup And Benchmarks

Hardware
Processor -----> Intel Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz
256 kB L2 Cache (Willamette)

Motherboard---> Intel 845EBT
Intel 845E Chipset
BIOS BT84520A.86A.0024.P10
Memory -------->256 MB DDR/PC2100, CL2.0
Micron/Crucial

Controller----->i845E UltraDMA/100-Controller (ICH4)
On-Board USB 2.0 (ICH4)
On-Board FireWire
Silicon Image Sil3114 SATA-I

Graphics card ---->ATI Radeon SDRAM, 32 MB
Network ---->3COM 905TX PCI 100 MBit
Operating system------->Windows XP Professional 5.10.2600 ,SP1

Benchmarks & Measurements

Performance measurements---------->c't h2benchw 3.6
I/O performance------------------->IOMeter 2003.05.10

Drivers & Settings
Graphics driver ----->5.1.2001.0 (Windows XP Standard)
DirectX version---------->9.0c
IDE driver------------->Intel INF Drivers 5.02.1003
Resolution ------->1024x768, 32 Bit, 85 Hz

Benchmark Results

Conclusion: Somewhat Overpriced Niche Product

Both adapters functioned without any problems during our test and enabled the installation of a 2.5" hard disk on a desktop PC via a PCI slot. Because an already available UltraATA or SATA controller is used, the adapters are affordable at $25 and $35. Upgradeware throws in the necessary cable.

While the performance data of the HD25-I (UltraATA) exactly matches that of the separately tested hard drive, the variation with the serial ATA converter (HD25-IS) was somewhat disappointment first, showing a transfer rate of only 15 MB/s with certain systems such as our reference machine. However, any recent computer showed the SATA version to perform as fast as expected.

Upgradeware's idea, as expressed in this adapter, is certainly interesting in certain cases, such as a compact desktop PC that offers no drive bays for installing a hard disk. If you want to go this route, however, then only the UltraATA version is recommended, because the SATA version's drop in performance is unacceptable. If you have room for a conventional interface adapter though, that is the better choice.

SOURCE---->tomshardware.com

Ricoh Updates Its CryptDisc Protection For CD-R

2005-11-02T10:19:00.000+05:00

Ricoh has updated its CryptDisc protection software for CD-R discs. CryptDisc encrypts all data stored on the CD-R and allows read only by individuals with proper access authority.
The CryptDisc makes no extra demands of the burner it is in - all normal CD-R burners are capable of working with it. The only demand CryptDisc has for the burning process is the installation of CryptDisc custom software also needed for user authentication when disc contents are accessed. With this software the user obtains a unique key file assigned to each unique disc that enables the contents of that disc to be read.

The CryptDisc is a hybrid CD-R (CD-R where the ROM part and the recording part co-exist) and conforms to the CD-R Orange Book, meaning that it is compatible with all CD-R burners. The encryption software which encodes and decodes your data is stored (pre-recorded) in the ROM part of the disc, allowing users to burn their data on the remaining recordable space. In order to encode or decode your data, you should use the authentication key stored in a USB memory, making the disc harder to be copied.
Ricoh's new version of CryptDisc protection features specific enhancements to ensure that your data are safe.

The CryptDisc Ver.2 includes better management of your data. Compared to the first version of the software, it allows users to access (open) directly their files without needing to copy them to the hard disk first. In addition, the decoding key can be optionaly stored in a USB flash memory or in any medium. Furthermore continuing the initialization and data entry of the disk, it is designed in such a way that it can do. User can also select to burn and encrypt additional data on the disc more than once, as soon as the disc is formatted by the CryptDisc software.
The software will be available in the Japanese market next week. The authentication software costs 3,150 Yen (US $27), and the CD-R discs will be priced at 88,200 Yen (US $758, 50 pack).

Harddisk setup guide

2005-10-30T20:08:00.000+05:00

This article will help you to install a new hard drive,partitioning it and high level formatting it.

Introduction to Jumper Settings

Each IDE controller can support up to two devices attached to a single cable, meaning for each IDE connector on your board, you can have two hard drives, or a hard drive and a CD drive, or any other combination. The controller has to have a way to tell these drives apart though, which is where the preparation comes in. Each IDE drive must be identified as either a master or a slave device. One master device and one slave device can be attached to each IDE connector. Hard drives and CD drives must be configured manually to be either a master or a slave. This is accomplished by means of jumpers located either on the rear or the bottom of the drive.

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Otherwise, the chart will be somewhere on the body of the drive. Depending on the make and model of the drive, there may be up to four options:

Master: This indicates the jumper position necessary to make the drive the master device on the cable.

Slave: This indicates the jumper position necessary to make the drive the slave device on the cable.

Slave present, or 'master, slave present: If your drive has this setting, and you plan to make it the master drive and add another hard disk or CD drive as the slave, you must set the jumpers to this position. Newer drives generally do not have this setting, which is simply covered by the 'master' setting instead.

Cable Select: This setting enables the IDE controller to determine which device will be the master and which the slave depending on their position on the cable. It's better to set your drives manually to be certain which is which, so avoid this. Set the jumpers before actually installing the drive into the case. You may need a pair of tweezers to move the jumpers if you are a fingernail biter.

There is no performance advantage derived from your new hard drive being in either the master or slave position, so how you set the jumpers should be merely a question of where you are fitting the drive into your system. If you have a single hard disk or optical drive already attached to an IDE cable and you want to add your new disk to that cable, set it to the 'slave' jumper position. If you are adding your new drive as the first IDE device on a new cable, then set it to master, etc.

Once you have the jumper set correctly on the back of the drive, it's time to install your new IDE hard disk into your computer case.

Introduction to SATA and IDE Hard Drives

As far as Windows is concerned, both types of hard drive are identical, but their physical installation needs differ. If you are planning on installing an additional hard drive, you need to know which type you have before continuing.he simplest and most reliable way to determine whether a hard drive is a Serial ATA or Parallel ATA device is look at the back of the unit where the connections are. A parallel ATA, or IDE drive has a 40-pin parallel ATA connector, jumpers, and 4-pin molex power socket. The drive is 3.5" wide, and a little less than 1" thick.

Serial ATA hard drives are physically the same shape and size, and differ only in the type of electrical connectors they require to interface with the motherboard.Note the small, flat, keyed power and Serial ATA connectors. Some serial ATA drives also have a 4-pin molex power socket as IDE drive.

Recently purchased computer motherboards should have both serial ATA and IDE connectors on board, but older boards will have only IDE connectors. Once you've verified which type of hard disk you are using, the next step is to power off your computer and open it up to ensure that you have the necessary connectors free for the new hard drive.

Each SATA port can support a single SATA drive, while each IDE connector can support two IDE hard drives or optical drives (technically, this means a total of two IDE devices per channel). IDE data cables have three connectors; one connects to the motherboard and the other two attaching to the drives.

Physical Installation of a IDE Hard Drive

Find a free 3.5" drive bay in your case. Most computer cases will have a row of covered 3.5" drive bays directly below the floppy drive. If there is no floppy drive, they should be below the CD drive bay.
If you are installing a second hard drive, it's a good idea to leave a space between your old drive and your new one if you can afford to. Hard drives can get rather hot while operating, especially 7200 RPM drives, and this can affect their lifespan.

Slide the drive carefully into the free bay with the connector end of the drive facing into the body of the computer, and screw it in tightly on both sides. Hard drives generally use larger-threaded case screws like the ones pictured below. These are identical to the screws used to secure the body panels of most computer cases.

The IDE hard drive needs a four pin Molex connector for power, as well as the 40 pin IDE cable. Locate a free molex power connector coming from your computer's power supply.
Modern IDE hard drives use an 80-pin UDMA cable, while older hard disks and most optical drives use the 40-pin cable.Note that the 80-pin and 40-pin names denote the number of wires in each type of cable, though both types still physically connect to the motherboard through a 40-pin connector.

Each IDE cable (both 40-pin and 80-pin types) can support two IDE devices, either hard disks or optical drives or a combination of the two. Depending on how your computer is currently configured, you may have an available space on an IDE cable that you can attach your new drive to, or you may need to add a second cable.

Attach the IDE and power cables(molex) to the drive.Some old IDE cables would get fit either way..but the new ide cables would get fit by one way.To make sure, the coloured stripe (typically red) on one side of the IDE cable should always be facing the power cable.

IDE cables connect to the motherboard through the IDE (Integrated Disk Electronics) controller interface, which provides the means to transfer data to and from the drives. An average PC will have a pair of IDE controllers, of various colours, each represented by one 40-pin connector.

The long end of the IDE cable should be attached to one of the IDE connectors on the motherboard. If the hard disk you are installing is the only hard drive in your PC system, then the IDE cable must be plugged into the 'primary' IDE connector. To determine which connector is which, consult the surface of the motherboard or your motherboard manual. If you are installing a second hard disk, you do not need to discriminate between connectors.

On older motherboards, the IDE connectors are not always keyed to fit nicely with the IDE cable. If this is the case, you want to have the stripe on the IDE cable facing pin 1 of the connector. Look closely at the area surrounding the IDE connector on the motherboard, and orient the cable towards the number.

Rest to be continued.....dinner:D

Physically Installing a Serial ATA Hard Drive

SATA drives need much less preparation than IDE devices, since only a single drive can attach to a single SATA connector on the motherboard. Hence the word "serial" instead of "parallel" in the name. Each SATA hard drive uses a small 8mm wide data cable which are distinctively different from the cables used by older IDE drives.

The Red one is the SATA cable and the blue one is an ide cable.

SATA data cables plug into SATA connectors on your motherboard.The actual connectors and cables will come in several different colours and can vary in general shape, but inside each and every one will be the same "L" shaped 7-pin connector.

If you come across any devices which support Serial ATA 2 (SATA-II), keep in mind that it is backwards compatible with first generation SATA devices. The only difference in the connectors is a little locking mechanism that SATA-II cables feature, but other than that the cables and motherboard connections are interchangeable.

Each SATA drive needs its own SATA data cable. For power, SATA drives use either a 15-pin Serial ATA power connector (in black below) or the same 4-pin Molex connector (white) used by IDE hard disks and optical drives. If the SATA hard drive you have has both power connections, use only one.

Physical Installation of the SATA Hard Drive

Find a free 3.5" drive bay in your case. Most computer cases will have a row of covered 3.5" drive bays directly below the floppy drive. If there is no floppy drive, they should be below the CD drive bay. Note that many 'big box' retailers like Dell place hard drives in alternate locations, so your experience may vary.

If you are installing a second hard drive, it's a good idea to leave a space between your old drive and your new one if you can afford to. Hard drives can get rather hot while operating, especially 7200 RPM drives, and this can affect their lifespan.

Slide the drive carefully into the free bay with the connector end of the drive facing into the body of the computer, and screw it in tightly on both sides. Hard drives generally use larger-threaded case screws like the ones pictured above. These are identical to the screws used to secure the body panels of most computer cases.

Now it's time to plug in the SATA power and data cables. Connect either end of your serial ATA data cable to the corresponding plug on the back of your new drive. The cable is keyed to only fit one way.

Now connect your SATA or Molex power connector to the back of the drive. Again, the cable is keyed to only fit one way.

Finally, plug the other end of the SATA data cable into one of the SATA connectors on your motherboard. That's it, there are no master or slave settings to fuss with for SATA drives since each hard drive has its very own cable.

Confirming the Installation of a Hard Drive

With the drive connected, it is time to confirm that the physical installation was done correctly. There are a couple different ways to go about this, depending primarily on the operating system and age of your PC.

With the new hard drive installed, reboot the computer and watch the POST(power on self test) screen (the first screen you see upon restarting your computer) for your new drive's model to flash up. If you installed a SATA drive, it may appear on a different screen during the boot process also. If you see your drive listed in the POST screen, we can move forward.

If the hard drive is not listed, and the computer has the Windows 2000 or Windows XP operating system, boot up the computer and right click on 'my computer', choose 'manage.' In the management window, click on 'disk management' and check in the lower pane of the disk management window to see if the new drive is detected. If it is the second hard drive in your computer, it will be listed as 'disk 1,' if it is the third, 'disk 2' etc. It should appear as unallocated space.

If you do not have WindowsXP/2000 installed and need to confirm that your new drive has been installed correctly: Reboot the computer and press the DEL key at the POST screen to enter BIOS configuration.

Depending on your motherboard, either go to 'basic CMOS setup' or 'auto-detect IDE devices' if this option is available. With either option, your new drive should be visible in the position you installed it (i.e. Primary master/slave, secondary master/slave).

Now that the harddrive have been installed physically...there are 3 more steps remaining in the preparation of the harddisk which are...1) low level formatting , 2) Partitioning , 3 ) high level formatting.

Low-Level Formatting

Low-level formatting is the process of outlining the positions of the tracks and sectors on the hard disk, and writing the control structures that define where the tracks and sectors are. This is often called a "true" formatting operation, because it really creates the physical format that defines where the data is stored on the disk. The first time that a low-level format ("LLF") is performed on a hard disk, the disk's platters start out empty. That's the last time the platters will be empty for the life of the drive. If an LLF is done on a disk with data on it already, the data is permanently erased.
Zero filling is a way to overwrite all data on a hard drive.Zero filling removes the data on a HD 100%.This is especially useful in preventing data being stolen from your HD .After doing a zero filling, (apparently) no tool can retrive data from your HD and everything is permanently deleted.

Most harddisk which are available now are already low level formatted by the manufacturers.So when we buy a new harddisk frm the shop..it will be already low level formatted...we just need to install the drive physically, partition it and high level format it.
Some situations in which low level format is done are :-

1.The drive has a boot sector virus and you cannot access ,clean it off the drive.
2.The drive has begun to develop numerous bad sectors and they are increasing, (usually seen when running Scan Disk).
3.The drive has had Linux, WindowsNT or another operating system installed creating a Fat System on the drive incompatible with the new operating system to be installed.

PARTITIONING

Partitioning in simple words is the process of dividing the physical drive into logical drives ( like C:, D: etc...)Partitioning is one of the necessary steps to prepare a drive for use. It is the process of defining certain areas of the hard disk for the operating system to use.All hard drives must be partitioned, even if they will have only one partition.When we buy a new harddrive...it will be already low level formatted.It wont be containing any partitons by then.We should partition the drive and then format the drive to use the harddisk.A partition program writes a master partition boot sector(MBR- MASTER BOOT RECORD) to cylinder 0, head 0, sector 1. The data in this sector defines the start and end locations of each of the other partitions. It also indicates which of these partitions is active, or bootable, thus telling the computer where to look for the operating system.The most utilities used to partition are FDISK (FIXED DISK) and Partition Magic.FDISK is the most commonly used out of these 2...but nowadays most people r moving from fdisk to partition magic because it provides more features than fdisk ,partition magic is also more userfriendly and newbies might find it easier than fdisk.Anyway i still use Fdisk :D.

Partitioning using FDISK

Insert a bootable windows 98 cd.Then go to bios and set the "first boot device" option to CDROM.Save the changes and exit.system will restart and then start booting from cd.After a few secs you can see some options on the screen like "start computer with cd rom support" , "start computer without cdrom support".Select the option "start computer with cdrom support". and press enter.After sometime u will get a command prompt window starting with A:\.Type the command "FDISK" and press enter.

Fdisk will start and if you will get a message screen like this"Your computer has a disk larger than 512 MB. This version of Windows includes improved support for large disks,resulting in more efficient use of disk space on large drives,and allowing disks over 2 GB to be formatted as a single drive."
Do you wish to enable large disk support (Y/N)?

Give YES...Press the "Y" key and then press enter...You will get a screen like this

FDISK Basics

Let's get started. The first partition of a hard drive is usually a *Primary* partition. It's normally labeled as your C: drive, especially when it's configured as the primary-master. There is normally only *one* Primary partition per hard disk [more are possible with special tricks].

The maximum number of Primary partitions allowed per hard disk is 4. Again, you will normally only have *one* Primary partition per hard disk.

If you have only one hard disk in your system, then you will *need* a Primary partition on that drive.

But if you have more than one hard disk [two, three, four, etc.] in your system, you don't need any Primary partitions on the second, third, fourth (etc.) disks.

Extended partitions are required for hard drives with more than one partition. Only *one* Extended partition is allowed per hard disk. You can't do anything with an Extended Partition, without first creating a Logical DOS drive *in* the Extended Partition .. which leads to our next point.

# Logical DOS drives are created in Extended partitions. They are handy, since you (normally) have only one Primary & one Extended partition per hard disk, giving you the ability to create more than two partitions per hard disk. For example, they would be your D: drive, your E: drive, etc. Each Logical DOS drive gets its own drive letter. You can create more Logical DOS drives on a hard drive than you'll ever need.

For example, you could use FDISK to partition an 80-GB hard drive like so:

* one 20-GB Primary partition = C: drive
* one 60-GB Extended partition, containing two 30-GB Logical DOS drives [D + E]. You could also create three 20-GB Logical DOS drives here.

Initial FDISK SCREEN
the initial FDISK screen looks like this

Click on the picture to get a bigger view:)

1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition [Your C: drive is usually your active partition]
3. Delete Partitions or Logical DOS Drive {Brand new drives won't have any partitions to delete]
4. Display partition information [Use this option to verify your work]
5. Change current fixed drive [For systems with more than one HDD]

Hopefully you've already backed up any data, if the drive is not brand new. Repartitioning will cause you to lose any data contained on the repartitioned drive(s). If you have four IDE/ATA hard disks in your system, FDISK will report them in the following order:

* Disk drive 1 = Primary-Master
* Disk drive 2 = Primary-Slave
* Disk drive 3 = Secondary-Master
* Disk drive 4 = Secondary-Slave
Assuming the drive is not new, we first need to remove existing partitions.

Select item #3. ie "3. Delete Partitions or Logical DOS Drive" [If you have a brand new hard drive, you won't have any partitions to delete.]

THE FDISK DELETE SCREEN

The delete screen contains these options:-

1. Delete Primary DOS Partition [Delete this partition last]
2. Delete Extended DOS Partition [Delete this partition next]
3. Delete Logical DOS Drive(s) in the Extended DOS Partition [Delete these first]
4. Delete Non-DOS Partition [These can be difficult to delete with FDISK]
In FDISK,always delete partitions in the *reverse* order you create them.
While removing partitions in Fdisk, we should always delete the last created partition first... that is ...we should first delete the logical drives which are created in the extended partition, then we should delete the extended partition and atlast the primary partition :).

After all partitions have been removed/deleted, return to the first screen [ESC]. Now we'll create our new partitions. Select item #1: "1.Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive".

The FDISK Create Screen

The create screen looks like this...see below

Partitions have to be created in a order.Like..we have to create the Primary partition first, then created extended partition and then create logical drives in extended partition.

Note: you don't necessarily have to create a Primary partition. Your drive will work fine with no Primary partitions, long as it's not the only hard drive in your system. You need only one Primary partition per system. All other drives can be comprised entirely of Logical DOS drives in Extended partitions. With that said, each hard drive normally has one Primary partition.
Creating a Primary partition can change your drive-letter designation configuration on pre-existing hard drives, which can generate problems. If your system thinks a certain file is located on a certain drive letter [say for example: D, and your D drive changes to E], and that drive letter changes, your system won't be able to locate that file.

Now lets start creating the primary partition :D.Ente choice [1]. and press enter..ie CREATE PRIMARY DOS PARTITION.On pressing enter a screen will come asking u whether the total space in the harddisk should be used for primary partition. GIVE "NO".Assume that ur harddisk is 80gb.If you had given "YES" the entire 80gb would be used for primary partition alone and u cant create logical drives.80gb will be assigned to a single partition.

The first partition on your first hard drive should automatically be set to Active partition. If not, FDISK may ask you, or you may have to select item 2: Set active partition from the main menu. The active partition is usually the C: drive. Even if you don't install your operating system to your C: drive, your O/S will still install key boot files [such as boot.ini] to your active partition.

While it is possible to have up to 4 Primary partitions per hard disk, only one can be active at any one time. You can change which partition is active, altho you will probably never need to do this.

When entering data for partition sizes, you can enter either absolute values [in MB, 30000 MB = 30-GB], or you can enter percent values [25% of a 120-GB hard drive = 30-GB]. FDISK will not allow you to enter a value greater than 99999 MB [99-GB]. You would have to use a percent value in this case. This is no problem. You need to include the "%" character.

Extended Partitions

Next we create the Extended partition. Recall that each hard drive can only have one Extended partition. Use *all* remaining space. Repeat, use all remaining space to create your Extended partition. If you don't, you'll wind up with unused space on your hard drive [a common noobie problem].

FDISK should automatically advance to the next step -> creating Logical DOS drives. It should give you a message that says (something like), This drive has no Logical DOS drives. Would you like to create some now? Enter the amount for the size you want to make the first Logical DOS drive/partition.

If you only have one hard disk in your system, this will be your D_drive. If you only want two partitions on this drive [one primary and one logical DOS drive], then you would enter all remaining space contianed in the Extended partition for the size of this logical DOS drive.

After you create the first Logical DOS drive, enter the remaining space for the third partition .. or make it however big you want, and add however many Logical DOS drives you'd like. Now we're finished with FDISK, so exit out.

Formatting
All partitions that were created need to be formatted before you can use the drive.
Insert the windows98 bootble cd into cdrom drive and then go to bios settings and make cd rom as the 1st boot device.save settings and exit.It will start booting from cd. first, enter FDISK again [by typing: FDISK at the command prompt (A:\>) and hitting the key].First we're going to check the status of the partitions we made.In particular, check the Logical DOS drives that we made.Make sure the number of drives is correct and note their drive letters. Ensure everything looks the way that we expect it to be.After u have made sure that the partitions that we created earlier are fine....then now its time to format the partitions :).he larger the drive, the longer it'll take to format.We cannot use a particular partition/drive until it is formatted. Formatting is different from partitioning. Formatting does not use FDISK.

We have to decide between FAT32 and NTFS. If we want to format say our C: drive with FAT32, then we should type "format c:" (without the quotes) at the command prompt, and then hit the key. We need to make absolutely sure that we are formatting the right partition/drive..or else we will endup losing data if we format the wrong partition..so be careful.

Repeat this outline until you have formatted all the partitions you created. After formatting all the partitions/drives you created, reboot & you're ready to use you new drive. Most people usually install their operating system at this point.

Ok thats all for now...I will post how to parition using partition magic later..Pls leave ur comments ..thanks:).

RAM

2005-10-27T17:23:00.000+05:00

All of us have a good idea abt what a RAM is and its use .In this article ill post about basics about RAM, different types of RAM and their features etc :).

RAM(Random Acess Memory)

RAM (random access memory) refers to whose contents can be accessed in any (i.e., random) order. This is in contrast to sequential memory devices such as magnetic tapes, discs and drums, in which the mechanical movement of the storage medium forces the computer to access data in a fixed order. Random Access Memory (RAM) refers to a read/write memory device that can read data from or write data to any of its memory addresses, regardless of what memory address was last accessed for reading or writing.

RAM is typically used for primary storage (main memory) in computers to hold actively used and actively changing information, although some devices use certain types of RAM to provide long-term secondary storage.

Because RAM chips can be both written to and read from, the term RAM is often used to mean read-write memory

Computers use RAM to hold the program code and data during execution. One defining characteristic of RAM is that its accesses to different memory locations are almost always completed at about the same speed, in contrast to some other technologies that required a certain delay time for a bit or byte to “come around”.

RAM comes in 2 major classifications. They are :-

1.SRAM(Static-RAM) 2.DRAM(Dynamic RAM).

1.SRAM

The word "static" indicates that the memory retains its contents as long as power remains applied.SRAM should not be confused with read-only memory and flash memory, since it is volatile memory and preserves data only while power is continuously applied.

Random access means that locations in the memory can be written to or read from in any order, regardless of the memory location that was last accessed.SRAMs store data in flip-flops, which retain data as long as the SRAM is powered up.Each bit in an SRAM is stored on four transistors that form two cross-coupled inverters. This storage cell has two stable states which are used to denote 0 and 1. Two additional access transistors serve to control the access to a storage cell during read and write operations.The symmetric circuit structure allows the value of a memory location to be read much faster than in a DRAM. Another difference with DRAM that contributes to making SRAM faster is that commercial chips accept all address bits at a time. As opposed to this, commodity DRAMs have the address multiplexed in two halves, i.e. higher bits followed by lower bits, over the same package pins in order to keep their size and cost down.SRAM is not used as a system's main RAM because of its high cost and lower density.SRAM is faster than DRAM and is used where speed is the most important requirement.SRAM is widely used in cache applications for the microprocessor and in digital signal processing circuits , since these are speed-sensitive applications that the SRAM is better suited for. Slow, low-capacity SRAMs are used where low power consumption and low cost are the most important requirements, as in battery-powered backup RAM. SRAM is less dense than DRAM (fewer bits per unit area) and is therefore not suitable for high-capacity, low-cost applications such as PC extended memory.

The power consumption of SRAM varies widely depending on its speed. Fast SRAM is much more power-hungry than DRAM, and some ICs can consume power of the order of a watt at full speed. Slow SRAM, such as the battery-powered "CMOS" RAM on PC motherboards, can have a very low power consumption, in the region of a microwatt.

2.DRAM

DRAM is a type of random access memory that stores each bit of data in a separate capacitor.DRAMs store data in cells that depend on capacitors, which need to be 'refreshed' continuously since they are not able to retain data indefinitely even if the device is continuously powered up.
The number of electrons stored in the capacitor determines whether the bit is considered 1 or 0. As the capacitor leaks electrons, the information gets lost eventually, unless the charge is refreshed periodically. Because it must be refreshed periodically, it is a dynamic memory as opposed to SRAM and other static memory. Also, since DRAM loses its data when the power supply is removed, it is in the class of volatile memory devices. DRAM is also in the class of solid-state memory.An important feature of DRAMs is called address multiplexing. This technique splits the address in half and feeds each half in turn to the chip on the same set of pins. Many microprocessors include control logic for DRAMs, relieving the circuit designer from the need to provide address multiplexing logic.

TYPES OF DRAM

SIPP AND DIPP

Used long time ago. SIPP had 1bit bus width and DIPP with 8bit bus width.

Single inline pin package and Dual inline pin package.There were a large number of slots in motherboard where these modules were to be added.Abt 8 or 9 such modules would make it 1MB of memory--> the case of SIPP.Disadvantages were it was difficult to upgrade memory and becoz of many slots ..the motherboard was very large.Also since the modules contained pins or legs on two sides..so putting them into the slots ...removing ..putting again during upgrading...in such cases there was large chances of the pins or legs getting damaged...which was another diasdvantage of the SIPP.

Different types of RAM. From top to bottom: DIP, SIPP, SIMM 30 pin, SIMM 72 pin, DIMM, RIMM

30 pin SIMM

30 pin SIMM (Single In Line Memory) Modules were the first major type of memory chip that I rember being widely available.

They had no 'notches' down the length of them.

They were generally available in sizes between 1Mb and 16Mb. Each one (obviously) has 30 pins, and provides one byte of data (8 bits) plus 1 additional bit for parity on parity versions of the chip.
Used generally in '286' and '386' processor type PC's. First appeared in 1991

72 pin SIMM

Typically came between 4Mb and 64Mb in siz, they provided 4 bytes of data at a time (32 bits) plus 4 bits for parity (ECC) versions.

EDO (Enhanced Data Out) variants are 10% faster than regular SIMM's - known as Fast Page Mode (FPM).

72 pin SIMMS could be single sided or double sided, the 4Mb and 16MB ones being single sides - whilst 8, 32 and 64Mb were usually the double sided ones.

Generally used in 486 PC's (and later Pentiums), with some motherboards having slots for 30 and 72 pin SIMMS, but you could only use one type - not a mixture.

There were also 144 pin "SODIMM" memory modules (for laptops), and 100-pin DIMM's as well, but I have never seen any of these!

First appear in 1995.

Fast page mode DRAM

Fast page mode DRAM is also called FPM DRAM, Page mode DRAM, Fast page mode memory, or Page mode memory.

In page mode, a row of the DRAM can be kept "open", so that successive reads or writes within the row do not suffer the delay of precharge and accessing the row. This increases the performance of the system when reading or writing bursts of data.

Static column is a variant of page mode in which the column address does not need to be strobed in.

Nibble mode is another variant in which four sequential locations within the row can be accessed.

Extended data out (EDO) DRAM

EDO DRAM is similar to Fast Page Mode DRAM with the additional feature that a new access cycle can be started while keeping the data output of the previous cycle active. This allows a certain amount of overlap in operation (pipelining), allowing somewhat improved speed. It was 5% faster than Fast Page Mode DRAM, which it began to replace in 1993.

Burst EDO (BEDO) DRAM

An evolution of the former, Burst EDO DRAM, could process four memory addresses in one burst, for a maximum of 5-1-1-1, saving an additional three clocks over optimally designed EDO memory. It was done by adding an address counter on the chip to keep track of the next address. BEDO also added a pipelined stage allowing page-access cycle to be divided into two components. During a memory-read operation, the first component accessed the data from the memory array to the output stage (second latch). The second component drove the data bus from this latch at the appropriate logic level. Since the data is already in the output buffer, faster access time is achieved (up to 50% for large blocks of data) than with traditional EDO.Although BEDO DRAM showed additional optimization over EDO, by the time it was available, the market had made a significant investment towards synchronous DRAM, or SDRAM.

Synchronous Dynamic RAM (SDRAM)

SDRAM is an improved type of DRAM. Whilst DRAM has an asynchronous interface, meaning that it reacts immediately to changes in its control inputs, SDRAM has a synchronous interface, meaning that it waits for a clock pulse before responding to its control inputs. The clock is used to drive an internal finite state machine that can pipeline incoming commands. This allows the chip to have a more complex pattern of operation than plain DRAM.

Pipelining means that the chip can accept a new command before it has finished processing the previous one. In a pipelined write, the write command can be immediately followed by another command without waiting for the data to be written to the memory array. In a pipelined read, the requested data appears a fixed number of clock pulses after the read command. It is not necessary to wait for the data to appear before sending the next command. This delay is called the latency, and is an important parameter to be considered when purchasing SDRAM for your computer.
SDRAM was introduced in 1997, and by the 2000s had replaced plain DRAM in modern computers, because of its greater speed.

SDR SDRAM is Single Data Rate SDRAM,. The term is used to contrast with Double Data Rate SDRAM, or DDR SDRAM, but since single data rate SDRAM was the only sort available when SDRAM was introduced, it is more commonly called "ordinary SDRAM" or something similar, rather than "SDR SDRAM".

SDR SDRAM comes in either 66 MHz (PC-66), 100 MHz (PC-100), or 133mhz (PC-133) 168 pin DIMMs for desktops, or 144 pin SODIMMs mainly used in laptops.

Picture of a 168 pin SDR SDRAM

Double data rate (DDR) SDRAM'

DDR SDRAM or double-data-rate synchronous dynamic random access memory is a type of memory integrated circuit used in computers. It achieves greater bandwidth than ordinary SDRAM by transferring data on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal (double pumped). This effectively nearly doubles the transfer rate without increasing the frequency of the front side bus. Thus a 100 MHz DDR system has an effective clock rate of 200 MHz when compared to equivalent SDR SDRAM, the “SDR” being a retrospective designation.
With data being transferred 8 bytes at a time DDR RAM gives a transfer rate of (memory bus clock rate) × 2 (for dual rate) × 8 (number of bytes transferred). Thus with a bus frequency of 100 MHz, DDR-SDRAM gives a max transfer rate of 1600 MB/s.
DDR is still the main memory standard, but DDR2 is now supported by some chipsets and is beginning initial adoption. DDR2 is expected to become the major standard by now, while DDR-3 is under development.The difference between DDR, DDR2, DDR-3 is mostly in differing supply voltages, different speed classes, as well as some changes in the exact specification of the interface.

•DDR: supply voltage VDD = 2.5 V
•DDR2: supply voltage VDD = 1.8 V
•DDR-3: supply voltage VDD not yet standardized (draft specifications call for 1.2 to 1.6 V)

Chip specification (DDR 1)

•DDR-200: DDR-SDRAM memory chips specified to run at 100 MHz
•DDR-266: DDR-SDRAM memory chips specified to run at 133 MHz
•DDR-333: DDR-SDRAM memory chips specified to run at 166 MHz
•DDR-400: DDR-SDRAM memory chips specified to run at 200 MHz

DDR SDRAM DIMMs have 184 pins (as opposed to 168 on SDRAM), and can be differentiated from SDRAM DIMMs by the number of notches (DDR SDRAM has one, SDRAM has two). DDR operates at a voltage of 2.5 V, compared to 3.3 V for SDRAM. This can significantly reduce power usage.Some new chipsets use these memory types in dual or even quad channel configurations, which doubles or quadruples the effective bandwidth. In the dual-channel configuration it is recommended to use a matched pair of memory modules to optimize performance. The modules in a pair have the same size, speed, and latency timings, enabling the chipset to interleave accesses with maximum efficiency.DDR is slowly being replaced by DDR-2, which has some modifications to allow higher clock frequency, but operates on the same principle as DDR. Competing with DDR-2 will be Rambus XDR-DRAM. It is expected that DDR-2 will become the standard, since QDR (Quad Data Rate) is too complex to implement, while XDR is lacking support.

Picture of a 184pin DDR SDRAM

Direct Rambus DRAM (DRDRAM)
Direct Rambus DRAM (DRDRAM), often called RDRAM, is internally similar to DDR SDRAM, but uses a special method of signaling developed by the Rambus Company that allows faster clock speeds. RDRAM chips are packaged on modules called RIMMs, which are not compatible with the DIMMs used for plain SDRAM. Intel licensed the Rambus technology and introduced chipsets with RDRAM support. Early P4 systems could only use RDRAM, but as prices remained high, Intel finally introduced support for DDR. (The company VIA had a DDR chipset for the Pentium 4 before this, but legal threats put motherboard manufacturers off using it. VIA then decided to make their own boards with the chipset but these didn't gain much traction either) RDRAM all but disappeared in new systems around 2003, due to the availability of DDR chipsets for the Pentium 4 and the lower cost of SDRAM. Sony used RDRAM in its PlayStation 2 video game console, and announced it would use Rambus's XDR memory in its PlayStation 3, expected in 2006.t has been used in the Nintendo 64, the Sony PlayStation 2, and a line of Cray supercomputers. Intel originally advocated the use of RDRAM in desktop PCs. Due to fears that Intel was trying to control the memory market through Rambus Corp., most of the main memory manufacturers sought to replace RDRAM with an alternative standard, DDR (Double Data Rate) DRAM. Better manufacturability led to DDR prevailing over RDRAM in the cost-conscious PC market. Rambus's successor to RDRAM is XDR DRAM, used by IBM’s "Cell" processor technology and the PlayStation 3.

The Direct RDRAM, or RDRAM, features an architecture and a protocol that were designed to achieve high bandwidth. The Rambus channel architecture has a single-device upgrade granularity, offering engineers the ability to balance performance requirements against system capacity and component count. The narrow, high-performance channel also offers performance and capacity scalability through the use of multiple channels in parallel. In addition, the validation program created by Intel and Rambus promotes system stability by ensuring that devices and modules conform to published specifications. Although RDRAMs have a low pin count, a single device is capable of providing up to 1.6 GB/s bandwidth. Memory systems that use RIMMs (Rambus inline memory modules), also known as RDRAM modules, employ a narrow, uniform-impedance transmission line, the Rambus Channel, to connect the memory controller to a set of RIMMs. Low pin count and uniform interconnection topology allow easy routing and reduction of pin count on the memory controller. While a single channel is capable of supplying 1.6 GB/s of bandwidth, multiple channels can be used in parallel to increase this number. Systems that use, for example, the Intel 840 chipset have two parallel Rambus channels, and are able to handle up to 3.2 GB/s.

Providing high bandwidth from a single device also allows memory systems to be constructed from small numbers of RDRAMs. The Sony PlayStation 2 uses two RDRAM channels, each with a single RDRAM, to achieve a total of 3.2 GB/s memory bandwidth.

In order to ensure stability of RDRAM memory systems, design guidelines and a validation program have been put in place that surpass requirements set for previous memory technologies. Intel and Rambus have defined system specs to ensure robustness of RDRAMs and of the channel to the memory controller. In addition, they have created a rigorous validation programs for certification of RDRAMs and RIMM modules.

Due to the way RDRAM is designed, early implementations suffered from much higher memory latency when compared to contemporary SDR SDRAM and DDR SDRAM designs. While RDRAM's very high bandwidth allowed this effect to be masked to a certain degree, randomly accessed memory cells would suffer large performance drops with RDRAM, making SDR SDRAM or DDR SDRAM a better choice. Latency became worse as additional RIMM's were added to the system, further hurting performance.

Later designs mitigated the latency issue to the point where it was mostly competitive with DDR SDRAM, but by then RDRAM's parent company Rambus had largely alienated hardware manufacturers due to its litigious nature. Consumer sentiment turned against Rambus in the same manner and also because of RDRAM's higher price compared to other memory types. As of 2004, Intel has essentially abandoned RDRAM entirely, with all new products using DDR SDRAM or DDR2 SDRAM.There are 184pins, 232 pins, 326pins RD RAM.Bus width of 184pins RD RAM is 16 bit, that of 232pins is 32bit and that of 326pins is 64bit

184 pins RD RAM
Picture of a RAMBUS RIMM MODULE

Pseudostatic RAM (PSRAM)
PSRAM is dynamic RAM with built-in refresh and address-control circuitry to make it behave similarly to static RAM (SRAM). It combines the high density of DRAM with the ease of use of true SRAM.
Some DRAM components have a "self-refresh mode". While this involves much of the same logic that is needed for pseudo-static operation, this mode is often equivalent to a standby mode. It is provided primarily to allow a system to suspend operation of its DRAM controller to save power without losing data stored in DRAM, not to allow operation without a DRAM controller as is the case with PSRAM.

Synchronous graphics RAM (SGRAM)
SGRAM is a specialized form of SDRAM for graphics adaptors. It adds functions such as bit masking (writing to a specified bit plane without affecting the others) and block write (filling a block of memory with a single colour).

Video DRAM (VRAM)
VRAM is a dual-ported version of DRAM formerly used in graphics adaptors. It is now almost obsolete, having been superseded by SDRAM and SGRAM. VRAM has two paths (or ports) to its memory array that can be used simultaneously. The first port, the DRAM port, is accessed as with plain DRAM. The second port, the video port, is read-only, and is dedicated to feeding a fast stream of data to the display. To use the video port, the controller first uses the DRAM port to select the row of the memory array that is to be displayed. The VRAM then copies that entire row to an internal shift-register. The controller can then continue to use the DRAM port for drawing objects on the display. Meanwhile, the controller feeds a clock called the shift clock (SCLK) to the VRAM's video port. Each SCLK pulse causes the VRAM to deliver the next item of data, in strict address order, from the shift-register to the video port. For simplicity, the graphics adaptor is usually designed so that the contents of a row, and therefore the contents of the shift-register, corresponds to a complete horizontal line on the display.

XDR DRAM
XDR DRAM is a high performance RAM Interface like SDR-SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM. The XDR solution was engineered to be effective in small high-bandwidth consumer systems as well as in high-performance main memory applications. Rambus owns the technology. XDR is the official choice by Sony for the Playstation 3 console.

Performance:

* clock rate at 400 MHz (600, 800 and 1000 MHz planned)
* 8 bits per clock and lane (ODR = Octal Data Rate) gives 3.2 GBit/s (4.8, 6.4 and 8 Gbit/s planned)
* 8 or 16 lanes per chip gives 3.2 to 16 GByte/s

Features:

* Bi-directional differential RSL (DRSL)
* Programmable on-chip termination
* Adaptive impedance matching
* 8 bank memory architecture
* Up to 4 Bank-interleaved transactions at full bandwidth
* Point-to-point data interconnect
* CSP packaging
* Dynamic request scheduling
* Early-read-after-write support for maximum efficiency
* Zero overhead refresh

Low power:

* 1.8V Vdd
* Programmable ultra-low-voltage DRSL 200mV swing
* Low-power PLL/DLL design
* Power-down self-refresh support
* Dynamic data width support with dynamic clock gating
* Per pin I/O power-down
* Sub-page activation support

Ease in system design:

* Per bit FlexPhase circuits compensate to a 2.5 ps resolution
* XDR Interconnect uses minimum pin count

Low latency

* 1.25/2.0/2.5/3.33 ns request packets

rest to be continued....tired now:(

Overclocked ATI Radeon'R' X1800 XT Breaks 1 GHz Speed Barrier

2005-10-27T08:31:00.000+05:00

An independent team of Finnish over-clockers has made world history by over-clocking a graphics processor to engine clock levels above 1 GHz. The record was set on the recently-announced Radeon® X1800 XT graphics processor from ATI Technologies Inc.

Noted Finnish over-clockers Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto achieved graphics engine clocks of 1.003 GHz and a memory speed of 1.881 GHz (940.50 MHz DDR (dual data-rate) memory clocks) with maximum system stability and no visual artifacts.

The team, optimistic that higher speeds could ultimately be achieved with the Radeon X1800 XT, attained the record speeds using a custom-built liquid nitrogen cooling system that cooled the graphics processor to minus-80 degrees Celsius. "We're just warming up," joked Kurri. "But we believe that the Radeon X1800 XT has even more over-clocking headroom, and in the coming weeks we expect to achieve higher clock speeds and even greater performance levels."

"It's impressive to see the Radeon X1800 XT architecture achieve 1 GHz core speed and approach 2 GHz memory speed, which far exceeds the specifications of the memory devices," said Stan Ossias, Sr. Product Manager, Desktop Products, ATI Technologies Inc. "Once faster GDDR-4 memory arrives next year, users can expect to see the hidden potential of ATI's innovative new memory controller design complement our powerful shader engines with massive additional memory clock scalability."

Radeon X1800 XT's extreme clock-scaling capabilities are made possible by a series of key innovations that include use of the state-of-the-art 90-nanometer semiconductor process technology, an efficient new Ultra-threaded Shader Model 3.0 architecture, and a revolutionary new 512-bit ring-bus memory controller.

Logitech MX610 Laser Cordless Mouse Review

2005-10-24T22:14:00.000+05:00

Two-way communication is an important part of any relationship, but it hasn't applied to the link between PC and mouse. Now Logitech offers a mouse that not only transmits pointer movement and button clicks to your computer -- no fewer than 10 buttons' worth of clicks, in fact -- but receives information in return, or at least monitors and reacts to the PC's status.

Buttons on the MX610 Laser Cordless Mouse light up to alert you within half a minute after you receive an e-mail or instant message -- even if you've carried the mouse into the next room, in case you're waiting for an important message but would rather get a sandwich or read a magazine than sit staring at the monitor.

Don't want to be summoned for mere spam? You can tell the mouse to light up only for messages from one or more specified e-mail addresses or IM buddies (with some limitations; see below). Don't look at your mouse that often? You can change how long the notification light stays lit.

The mouse also senses when the PC's turned off or in sleep mode and does the same, switching itself back on when you restart the system. Logitech says this helps the MX610 stretch its two AA batteries for up to three months before its top-mounted LED warns you that power's getting low. Add the extra-accurate laser tracking that Logitech pioneered with last year's MX1000, as well as a $60 price tag versus that model's $80, and the MX610 looks like a winner.

If It Feels Right

Like most upscale mice nowadays, the MX610 is sculpted for right hands only, with a silvery top between gray-black, rubbery-feeling sides. On the left, above a comfortable scoop for your thumb, are seven extra buttons: forward and back buttons for roaming through Web sites; green and blue buttons that glow to indicate e-mails and instant messages; and volume up, down, and mute buttons for controlling your PC's audio.

In our first hours with the mouse, we grumbled that the forward and back buttons were a few millimeters further back than ideal -- a simple flick of the thumb hits the forward button, but you'll want to slide your hand ever so slightly back to hit the (more frequently used) back button. Before long, however, we learned to lift the thumb a bit to click forward, a bit more to click back.

By contrast, you'll probably slide your hand slightly forward or at least extend your index finger to use the volume-control buttons. Looking at their tiny size, we were sure we'd mix them up, but they proved nearly goof-proof. (It helps that the volume up and down buttons are actually a single rocker switch.)

The main buttons and scroll wheel are smooth and sure. The latter includes Logitech's Tilt Wheel Plus Zoom technology, which (as we've written before) we prefer to Microsoft's bulkier tilt-wheel design when it comes to horizontal as well as vertical scrolling: The MX610's scroll wheel shifts effortlessly from vertical -- with the slight detents or "clicks" you're used to -- to horizontal motion -- with a gentle nudge left or right. Press the scroll wheel itself, and a magnifying-glass cursor appears on screen as vertical scrolling changes to zooming in and out of images or magnifying and shrinking text.

The mouse also lived up to Logitech's promise of a near-30-foot range for its 2.4GHz wireless radio receiver. The latter is a small USB stick that's synchronized with the mouse at the factory, so you can plug and go without the press-buttons-to-sync-signals rigmarole of older cordless mice. (Both a PS/2 adapter for the receiver and your first pair of AA alkaline batteries are in the box.)

Mostly for Microsoft

Like the MX1000's, the MX610's motion sensor uses a low-power, eye-safe laser instead of the more common LED light source, which delivers precise, accurate tracking on a greater variety of desk, table, or pant-leg surfaces with no mouse pad required; anything shy of a mirrored or clear-glass desktop should be fine.

That said, the MX610 doesn't claim to match the speed of hardcore gamer's mice such as Razer's Copperhead or Logitech's G7; while it didn't skip no matter how quickly we moved the pencil back and forth in Microsoft Paint, it did slew or skew off course once or twice when we whipped it as fast as we could -- totally not an issue in everyday use.

Gamers will, however, appreciate one tab in Logitech's SetPoint software control panel that offers a choice of either keeping your customized mouse speed, acceleration settings, and button/keystroke shortcuts or switching to Windows' perhaps more suitable defaults when you launch a game as opposed to a productivity program.

The forward, back, volume, and e-mail buttons work without installing the SetPoint driver, but zooming and horizontal scrolling don't. You'll also want to install the driver to get the e-mail and instant-messaging notifications and tinker with programmable button settings. The browser forward and back buttons, for instance, don't work in Mozilla Firefox as they do in Microsoft Internet Explorer, but (although we had to check Logitech's support site to learn it) you can reassign them to Alt- plus left- and right-arrow keystrokes that do the trick.

You can also assign the same button to different functions in different applications. Finally, Logitech has lessened its obnoxious product placement -- except for a check box that offers to install MusicMatch, SetPoint doesn't spam your desktop with ads for third-party products and online services as earlier Logitech CDs did.

Speaking of IE versus Firefox, we were disappointed to find that the illuminated e-mail alert works only with Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express -- it stayed dark when we received mail in Mozilla Thunderbird. (It also works only for mail that hits your Inbox folder, which could be a negative if you've created rules or filters to direct messages into other folders.)

Similarly, IM notifications work only with Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Yahoo Messenger -- a sizable snub to AIM and Trillian users.

We hope Logitech issues a driver upgrade (beyond our review unit's SetPoint 2.42a) soon; smarter software would burnish the Logitech's already admirable hardware.

But even if the message-alert feature is probably less significant than the battery-saving shutoff, there's nothing wrong with getting icing on top of a cake. For mainstream users, the MX610 is an appealing combination of price, performance, and pluses.

Duttan's Mx 510

2005-10-21T09:02:00.000+05:00

Duttan got his Logitech Mx 510-Performance-Optical mouse yesterday.I welcome him to the MX Gaming World:D .He had bought it from Suraj for 1.6k.This mouse is really good and im sure it will help him im improving a lot in fps games from now on .He has been using a logitech 2 button or 3 button ball mouse for a long time..and upgrading to this mouse would have pleased him a lot.He is already good with shock rifle n lightning in UT2k4 and with the help of this mouse it will help him improving them lot lot more.I recomend him to buy a good mouse pad to get the maximum performance out of this mouse.One of the pads underneath the mouse had worn off... that might not affect a lot...but the side pads(small black pads on left and right side of the mouse) i think they are called "mouse feet"... must be given good care..if those pads r gone...then the mouse may slip during fast movements while playing which can reduce the accuracy.The appearance of this mouse roxx.

Image Processing----5.8Mega Pixels/sec

Resolution -----800 DPI

Acceleration-----15g

Speed 40 inches /sec
No of buttons : 8

Hoping that duttan enjoys this mouse to the max performance :)..do get a good gaming surface too :)

Digital Life Tourney results

2005-10-19T13:08:00.000+05:00

UT2K4 - fnatic.lauke vs play.it DevilMC - LAUKE WINS
WC3 - Grubby vs Wizard
CounterStrike - Team3D vs compLexity 3D WIN

lauke n devilmc met in the UT2k4 finals of Digital life Tourney.

Lauke dominated the matches...he won all 3 of them..

Here are the results

DM-1on1-Roughinery Lauke wins 16,9
DM-Rankin Lauke wins 8,9
DM-DE-Ironic Lauke wins 7,2

Today's UT matches

2005-10-19T07:37:00.000+05:00

Tried to play Ut 2004 with suraj aka fnatix from ernakulam who also has a asianet dataline connection at home.His connection plan is 64Kbps UNLIMITED DATA TRANSFer @ 880rs per month.Usually we play during morning at 7 and lag seems to be fine.But after 12 in noon if we try to play lag is too much ...988 :)).if we try at evening or night also the result is same 998...same happened yesterday evening at around 6.WE just tried to play ...with no hope...Ping was around 100..he said "anyways play" and started.after 1 minute , ping started rising and reached 988 again ...rofl.So we planned to play 3or 4 matches today morning at around 7 o clock.The maps decided were DM DE Ironic, DM-Rankin, DM 1on1 Idoma, DM 1on1 Roughinery Fps. I got up late..around 7 30 only .and we started the match fast.First map was dm de ironic.Ping was fine.I got a good start and continued the momentum.every time he respawns n charges me ...he got fragged fast...mostly becoz he had nearly 100 health only and me around full shield and health.He was trying to frag me and charged a lot ..hit around 2 to 3 negatives ..which made sure that i would never lose this game.But damn it. In the last 1 min there was rise in ping.It went to around 80-90.But i was leading 16,0..I asked him if we should stop the match there..he said "finish this " and continued.And again he hit a negative (selfkill) against the wall near the Elevator in Ironic map.It was a great game in my pov...really enjoyed the match:).I said "GG" but as expected he was frustrated and got a "BULLSHIT" in reply.I think he went after that match...dint play the rest 3 maps :(.

Here is the screenshot... u can see ping as 80 ..thats wat i have mentioned above...ping was high in last 1 min.. Demos can be posted on request.

ATI-All-in-Wonder X800 XL

2005-10-18T18:12:00.000+05:00

RATPADZ GS

2005-10-18T08:30:00.000+05:00

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Need for a good gaming surface..

The right choice of mousing surface is very important for accuracy of your mouse. A friction free surface will also make your use of a computer much more pleasurable and healthy.Iif your cursor doesn't follow your mouse movements, stress can increase.

So what surface is best for your mouse? The way optical mice work requires that they be on a surface with a random pattern so that they can tell exactly which direction they are moving. Ball mice require a textured surface so that the ball grips and follows the exact movements of the mouse. What Ratpadz have done is create a surface that aims to be accurate with as little friction as possible, optimising it for optical mice.

GOT MY NEW GAMING SURFACE :)

Got my Ratpadz GS Mousepad today.GS stands for Gaming surface.I had bought it for 500Rs from my friend Alex.Man this thing just roxx!!...its soo smooth.I have seen pro players blast combos so fast ...even when they are in air..ie during the dodge jump :D jumpin...and blasting combos while they are in mid air ...doesnt that need some accuracy at this much pace?.I just experienced that with his new gaming surface...omg i never thought those things were possible by noobs like us ( we are just noobs compared to foreign ut players....their movements , pace and accuracy is too hard to match).I would recomend this pad to any good ut and cs player. also this pad is not of cloth....so its expected to last longer.Its a really comfortable pad.I dont have a cam with me now...so not possible to post pictures of my original pad...but i will post the pictures of this pad from some sites.. original pics will be posted after i get cam from any of my friends.

Faster Fox

2005-10-17T20:35:00.000+05:00

Fasterfox - Performance and network tweaks for Firefox. Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.

Prefetch Links
Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with Firefox's unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing.

Tweak Network
Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.

Block Popups
A popup blocker for popups initiated by Flash plug-ins is also included.

Install it.. then restart firefox..and go to options menu :)

Sorry guys...forgot to post the link of faster fox.Here it is .... check below

http://downloads.mozdev.org/fasterfox/fasterfox-0.7.4-fx.xpi

Making FireFox Faster

2005-10-17T20:27:00.000+05:00

There are ways to make FireFox render pages every bit as quickly, with just a few easy "tweaks."

To get started, type "about:config" in your FireFox address bar. The settings you're looking for are:

1.) network.http.pipelining
2.) network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
3.) network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
4.) network.http.proxy.pipelining
5.) nglayout.ititialpaint.delay

Set #1, #2, and #4 to "true". Set #3 to a high number, like 32. Set #5 to 0.

Enabling the pipelining features allows the browser to make multiple requests to the server at the same time. The "maxrequests" is the maximum number of requests it will send at once. Mostly, 8 is the most it will send at once, but setting it higher won't hurt, just in case. The initialpaint.delay is the length of time (in milliseconds) after the server response before the browser begins to paint the page.

Adjusting those settings will help pages render much faster in FireFox

The $500 Gaming Machine

2005-10-16T22:05:00.000+05:00

This article will help you build a reasonable gaming system that will get you through today's game titles without breaking the bank for around $500.This Config won't allow you to play Half-Life 2 at 1600 x 1200 at 16AF, but you may be surprised what you can do within a reasonable budget.When working out the possible configurations for a value gaming PC that you build yourself, you can embrace two camps of thought:

"Start out cheap and simple with room to grow knowing you will buy better stuff later on."

or

"This is all this system is going to be so go for the absolute best price/performance ratio available in the here and now." :D

The System - Decisions To Be Made

With the total budget of $500 set, we have adopted the "room to grow" mentality, which gives us a firm foundation to economically satisfy immediate needs but also allows us to expand and improve the system down the road.

The key starting place is to decide your platform (motherboard/chipset and CPU) because it sets the stage as to what other components you can consider. The strategy here is to scoop up technology one generation before oblivion but is still able to serve up decent performance so we get the best power to dollar ratio and some reasonable thought for the future. The perfect platform that fits into this sweet spot seems to be the AMD Socket 939. The Socket 939 CPU's will be relevant for some time enabling upgrade choices. The particular board we selected also gives us maximum support for various video and storage options.

Motherboard For Socket 939

The board that jumps out at us is the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard. Not only does this board provide the CPU generation support we think is best, but it also allows us the choice of either PCI Express or AGP video cards as well as SATA2. Giving us choice for all the economical components with support for future expansion at an impressive price point ($69) makes this an easy choice.

Athlon 64 Processor

Now that the motherboard platform has been decided upon, we need to select the processor. With our cap at $500, we chose the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ based on the Venice core which puts us at just under 2 GHz (1.8). There is an excellent chance that 2 GHz or more can be achieved easily with only moderate overclocking, should you be into this. Currently this CPU represents one of the best bangs for the buck. Venice is a mainstream core with 512 kB L2 cache. At $140, it is a good entry point for our CPU. There is no need to go for a CPU cooler when purchasing a boxed CPU kit.

Graphics Card

The image shows a GeForce 6600GT, while we chose the 6600 non-GT, which looks alike.

The right video card is the one of the most critical parts to consider in a gaming system. In fact, one of the reasons why we chose a motherboard with both AGP and PCIe was to free up some more money for the video card. Right now, for the budget, the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 based on AGP is probably the most cost-efficient performer providing most economical support for DirectX9.0 and SM 3.0 (as well as OpenGL 1.5).
.

The best bargain we could consistently find was a model from eVGA, the 256-A8-N340-TX GeForce 6600 with 256 MB of graphics memory and based on AGP, all for under $120. There are other cards in this GPU chipset family that can be had for less, but they are almost all equipped with 128 MB of RAM only, which we thought was a bit too slim and could leave you almost immediately wanting more. While 512 MB is overkill for even some of the hungriest game titles currently, 128 MB can become a limiting chokepoint. Thus, 256 MB is currently in the sweet spot with today's titles.

The upgrade path for AGP is the most limiting aspect as it will be fading over to PCI Express over the next few years. But new video cards are still be cranked out and you will have options for upgrading. Moreover, AGP cards tend to be very budget-oriented which works in our favor over the new PCIe slot-based cards.

It is important to note though, that almost all new cards being developed now are being engineered natively to PCIe and over time manufacturers will begin to stop bridging them back to AGP using bridge chip solutions. Fortunately, our choice of motherboard supporting both AGP and PCIe allows us to start out with the economical AGP solution, but gives us a smooth upgrade path to PCIe down the road.

This particular example from eVGA lacks aggressive cooling, so it probably won't prove to be an excellent overclocker. But, if you are inclined, third-party cooling is available and could be a very economical project down the road to squeeze every last bit of performance out of this card. There's no denying that a card with this memory and GPU at under $120 is a great bargain.

Branded Value Memory

Choosing the best memory is a matter of maximizing the supported architecture of the motherboard and matching with the lowest latency times, plus fitting into our limited budget. With our choice of the ASRock motherboard and our AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor, a lot of our parameters are already set. We just need to find a good match (for the money, of course). The motherboard and CPU we selected support dual channel DDR400 (PC3200). The best bargain we could find here was the Corsair Value Select 512MB kit at $52, which it's hard to beat.

Ideally, in a game system you would want 1 GB of RAM. We are starting to see more and more RAM-hungry titles like Battlefield 2 that are actually seeing a benefit of up to 2 GB of RAM. It's hard to comment whether this is due to inefficient software design or not, but a 15% improvement can be achieved in the case of Battlefield 2.

However, initially setting this rig up with 512 MB provides adequate memory that is inside our budget of $500. Expanding to more memory would be an easy and economical upgrade down the road. Spending the least amount of money on the products that are easiest to upgrade is a sound strategy.

Hard Drive Storage

The hard drive isn't as much of a critical element as all the previous components we have already listed in regards to gaming. Sure, faster transfer rates and low seek times can make a difference (mainly in level load times), but it rarely effects actual game play as the performance difference between today's models is getting smaller and smaller. Throw in the premium price associated with the features that produce only nominal performance boosts and it becomes difficult to justify the high performance drives available today given our budget.

Still, we need a decent amount of storage, and the Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80GB is in the higher end of what we would consider our needs for storage size. It comes with a SATA/150 interface, 8 MB cache and 7200 rpm spindle speed. You probably could settle for less but the economies of hard drive models make this an excellent buy for the money at $57.50.

The SATA drive market has matured to the point that we no longer have to pay the premium we did, say, a year ago when comparing them to the ATA models. Our motherboard also supports SATA I,II but SATA 150 represents the smartest performance to price ratio at the moment.

Optical Drive

We had envisioned a low-budget game system without any optical drives to free up money for parts to improve game play performance. However, some games require the install disk to be in the drive to be able to play, utilizing the all-too-popular form of anti-piracy technique called disk checking. Assuming you have a network for installing the game files was a bit of a stretch so we need to include an optical drive. Even still, in a strictly gaming system, the optical drive is seldom used compared to other components.

We selected the bare-minimum equipment. This DVD-ROM from LiteOn (SOHD-16P9SBLK) suits our purposes just fine. LiteOn has a good reputation for quality and at $21.00, it's a real bargain. You may be thinking that a CD-ROM drive would be the bare minimum, but more and more game titles are released on DVD instead. And the fact that DVD-ROM drives are on par with CD-ROM drive prices, it's a no-brainer to go DVD.

Many readers may jeer at the fact that no burnable optical drive was selected, especially as prices have dropped dramatically in the last year. This is not intended as a media system, this is a streamlined gaming system on a budget, so let's stay focused. While burning CDs and DVDs as backups is smart, it's by no means mandatory. Plus, adding a DVD burner down the road is probably the easiest of all potential upgrades.

Power Supply

iven the money we have available, you could really go on the cheap and get one of those case/PSU combo bargains--but we would advise against it. The goal is a fast and stable gaming system that will provide hours and hours of reliable game play (this is based on my own unrelenting personal research spent on Battlefield 2 alone). Just remember with those combo cases, you get what you pay for. Many people overlook the importance of stable power for their system and they pay the price in frustrating troubleshooting and random, power-related system failures.

We chose this 330 W model from Seasonic, the S12-330. It provides ample power and support for SATA drives. Priced at $59, it's economical too. Typically, once the prices drop below $50-60, the quality of choices tends to fade quickly. This power supply represents a choice halfway between the power supplies included in bargain cases and the top of the line power supplies that are overkill for our setup and budget. At the same time we need to underline that it won't be good enough if you plan on upgrading to a fast dual core Athlon 64 X2 processor and a high performance graphics card. Should this be a direction you might upgrade at some point, there is no option to going for at least 400 W.

CONCLUSION

This was an interesting exercise in both online retail bargain hunting and technical product knowledge to come up with a good combination with a low budget. Some of you may say "I'd go for a faster processor or video card" or upgrade to a larger hard drive in order to store MP3s and video files on it. But you may find yourself in trouble when you look at how much money you have spent and what remaining components are available for what you have left in your budget.

In many cases, we do this everyday as we upgrade our systems only at a piece at a time. Usually, you can get the best deal for any one component at the time and wait for the rest. Building a whole complete system is another matter.

Obviously, there are a hundred ways to skin this cat but the final conclusion is that you can build a respectable game system on a limited budget. It requires you to reprioritize your wants and desires for the latest and greatest products and consider the prior generation's products and the value they represent. You might be surprised at the system you can build.

The price of the components mentioned are as per the current US prices for those components.So pls check with ur dealers to know abt the correct price in ur location

Source of the Article---

Maxtor ups OneTouch external harddrive to 1 TByte capacity

2005-10-16T21:54:00.000+05:00

Maxtor today unveiled its new OneTouch III "Turbo Edition" external drives at the Digital Life Expo in New York. The device comes with with RAID 0/1 and file synchronization capability and extends the consumer OneTouch line of drives into high-end consumer and professional markets.

The OneTouch III will be offered in 600 GByte and 1 TByte capacity versions and will actually contain two individual Maxtor harddrives in one case. The devices support USB2.0, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 connections and enable the user to protect data by using either RAID 0 striping or RAID 1 mirroring. Striping allows for faster read and write access by splitting up the reads and writes to both drives, while mirroring puts an exact copy on the drives. With mirroring, no data is lost if one drive fails, but the downside is that effective storage capacity is cut in half.

Three new features will be added to set the OneTouchIII apart from its competition and the older OneTouchII drives. A "Sync" feature, will synchronizes files between two or more systems. Maxtor will also offer a system rollback function that will bring a PC back from a spyware or virus infection and "DriveLock" will password protect the drive. According to Maxtor, contents of the drives cannot be accessed with a password, even if they are removed from the housing.

Maxtor's closest competitors, Seagate and Western Digital also have external drive solutions, but they currently max out at 500 GByte and do not have on-drive password protection. LaCie, known for their high-end desktop storage products, currently offers a 2 TByte "Bigger Disk Extreme' for $2000.

The Maxtor One Touch III, Turbo Edition will be available in early December and will cost $550 as a 600 GByte model and $900 in the 1 TByte configuration.

Samsung PMP-ing at KES

2005-10-16T14:54:00.000+05:00

Those smooth criminals at Samsung unveiled a new PMP, the YM-PD1, at Korea Electronics Show. It features a 4” TFT-LCD screen that is extremely clear. It supports DivX, XviD, MPEG4, WMV, AVI, MP3, OGG, ASF, WMA, JPEG and BMP. And there is also a TV recorder and a TV-out feature that outputs to larger televisions surprisingly well. The 20GB model will go for around $382 and $477 for the 30GB model.

Samsung Anycall: Fingerprint Protected

2005-10-16T14:17:00.000+05:00

The one device that probably gets lost or stolen more than any other gadget is the cellphone. And with that misfortune comes the inevitable heartbreak of having lost all your contacts, as well as the potential misfortune of having your personal data misused. Samsung Korea, which appears to be barraging the world with news today in order to shift attention away from its $300 million price-fixing fine, has come up with a possible solution: the Samsung Anycall SCH-S370, a cellphone with a fingerprint sensor built right into the device. Now you can protect all that valuable information with one swipe of the finger, and won’t have to worry about thieves getting at all those secret Paris Hilton-type photos. It’ll accomodate up to 5 fingerprints, in case you want different users to have access to the phone (I guess this is good if you lend your phone out to people sometimes). The phone also comes packed with a 1.3 megapixel camera, an MP3 player, GPS functionality, and PictBridge compatibility. It’ll be out by the end of the year, though no idea if this will make it out of Korea.

Samsung SCH S370: for those who remain paranoid about security

Asus Extreme N7800 GT DUAL

2005-10-16T12:45:00.000+05:00

Asus recently presented us with an opportunity to evaluate a rather unique video card, namely their soon to be released Extreme N7800 GT DUAL. What makes the Asus Extreme N7800 GT Dual somewhat unique is that this card sports a pair of NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT GPUs and 512MB of GDDR3 RAM on a single PCB. The Extreme N7800 GT Dual essentially simulates a two-card GeForce 7800 GT SLI configuration with a single card. Both Asus and Gigabyte did something similar with NVIDIA's GeForce 6 series of GPUs, but the relatively quick release and availability of the GeForce 7 series overshadowed anything available from the previous generation. This time around though, Asus is ready with a dual-GeForce 7800 GT based card only weeks after the introduction of the Geforce 7800 GT GPU. Feast your eyes on this beauty.

A couple of things you should know about the card we have for testing, pictured in the shots above. First, this particular card is labeled "for media review only". We were assured the card is representative of full retail product but we did want to make clear that this particular card was obviously hand picked for us. Also, you'll note that the card has "limited edition 17 of 2000" engraved on the heat sink as well. Asus informed us that there will be only 2000 of these built world wide and these are special serialized models for the end user. Future versions of the card will be produced, with availability in the retail channel late this month, but cards may come in different packages and potentially a different game bundle. Our card also actually had a flyer in the box that said "available to bundle with Call of Duty 2 on 10/25/2005". We think that game title is a great pack-in for the card, as the current game bundle, which is identical to the one that can be found in the Asus Extreme N7880GTX Top, is a little week with a bunch of no name titles for all intents and purposes.
Physically the card is massive. It's length is every bit as long as the ATX form factor standard will allow. Once installed, the card spans the PCI Express slot all the way back to the edge of the other end of the motherboard. Our card also came with an "optional" external 80 watt power adapter, which certainly is a nice addition, taking the load off the PSU and in the process allowing your power supply to run that much cooler. However, optional doesn't mean your can buy a board without this adapter unfortunately but you can run the card on a standard 6 pin PCI Express power connector just fine, so we are told. Basic specs of the card are as follows:

* Dual Geforce 7800 GT GPUs
* 430 MHz core engine clock
* 1.2 GHz memory interface clock
* 512 MB DDR3 memory (256 MB per GPU)
* Dual DVI and Dual VGA outputs
* TV output, HDTV and ViVo support
* Chassis must be able to contain the size of the product - 14.5 cm (H) x 24.6 cm
* Estimated street price USD $799 - $819

That last bullet above may sting a bit for those of you who don't have copious amounts of disposable income or aren't bleeding edge graphics/gaming enthusiasts. However, doing the math, the Extreme N7800 GT DUAL is approximately 2X the retail price of a GeForce 7800 GT card, plus ~ $100 - $120 for that external power supply.

Mozillz Firefox 1.07

2005-10-16T12:34:00.000+05:00

Mozilla’s most popular browser has a new release.

Firefox 1.07 has been released:) and can be downloaded from here http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox

LG’s 102” HD TV

2005-10-16T12:00:00.000+05:00

Honestly, only the weak remain in double digits regarding the size of their television. LG unveiled this beast at the Korea KS 2005 fair. This television is a full 1920x1080 PDP HD TV that sports a contrast ratio of 5000:1 and has 1000cd/m2 brightness. What really takes the cake is the expression on the girl’s face that is 2nd from the left. Those Koreans really love their green peppers (Iron Chef anyone?). No price is set, but expect to pay at least 35 billion along with one of your kidneys.The TV Tuner has a 160Gb HDD for HDR or Hard Disk Recording purposes (well, what other purpose could it have eh?) AND a memory card reader. According to the manufacturer, you can record 13h of HD or 63h of non-HD video

Today's UT matches

2005-10-16T11:15:00.000+05:00

After blogging abt Suraj's mouse...i had a match against him in ironic ...10mins, WS OFF..Ping was good..around 56 maximum.lag was usually low during morning time...but when i play with suraj at evening or at night the lag is around 200-300 which at times goes upto 988:)).The match started off quite slowly but was thrilling, made each other run a lot for the healths......and finally first frag came in the 3rd or 4th minute of the match.The match ended with a score of 11,1. I had won the match.

Also played 2 games against Ashwin aka Gunner.Ping was really bad for him...but he said its ok and continued playing..It was a funny game ..lots of self kills n shieldgun kills...hehe...becoz of the lag the game was almost unplayable... so we just had some fun playing ...not at all a serious game. Hoping to have another match with him soon...with low lag.

Suraj's G5 laser Mouse

2005-10-16T08:05:00.000+05:00

My friend Suraj AKA Fnatix who is staying at ernakulam...got his new mouse yesterda...its a Logitech G5 Laser Mouse.Actually he had asked his father for a good gaming surface and Sennheiser headset.But to his surprise his father had bought a new Logitech G5 Laser mouse along with the mousepad and the headset.He had gone to Germany for an official visit and bought them on the way back.Suraj already owns a Logitech MX 510 with 800dpi..and now into logitech G5...must be a really kewl gaming experience with this new mouse.This mouse is real good..and with the new gaming surface he has got...it will rock!!

The G5 laser mouse is Logitech's first corded laser pointer.This hyper gaming mouse is capable of 2000dpi and 500 usb reports per seconds.It also features a unique adjustable cartridge weighing system, Polytetrafluoroethylene(PTFE) gaming feet, on the fly sensitivity adjustment, tilt wheel plus zoom and a bunch of programmable buttons.

More details abt the mouse

Product Name--Logitech G5 laser Mouse

Interface---USB

Number of Buttons----5 buttons

Wheel type----Tilt

Sensor Technology----Laser

Software---Logitech Setpoint....upto 5 custom sensitivity levels can be done using this software ..for example:- 1.400dpi, 2.800dpi, 3.1200dpi ,4.1600dpi , 5.2000dpi

Sensor Resolution---2000 DPI

Power Source----Bus Powered

Image Processing----- 6.4 megapixels/second
Max. Acceleration------- 20g
Max. Speed------ 45—65 inches/second (depending on surface)
USB Data Format------ 16 bits/axis

But the appearance of this mouse is not upto to the mark when compared to a mx 518 or mx 510.Another difference of this Logitech G5 laser mouse from Suraj's old Mx 510 is that ..his mx 510 had 8 buttons...but the logitech g5 has only 5 buttons... but on the performance basis ...G5>MX 510
Here are the pics :).Just click on the pictures to have a larger view.

NEW SMPS(SWITCHED MODE POWER SUPPLY)

2005-10-15T21:58:00.000+05:00

As usual, yesterday i had woke up at around 7 30 at morning.brushed my teeth, washed face...had a tea and went straight into my computer room.Switched it on...checked some new posts in College da and Duttan's Blogs and started watching a demo Between ASTZ and Killu in Ironic from a recent tourney by Clanbase...the demo was very exciting. good shocks n lightning by both players....around 10more mins remaining in the game...my computer got Powered off instantly.I thought it would have been some voltage probs... But when i tried to switch it back on ..it just wouldnt get switched on..GRR :-L .I checked if the power cords were connected properly.To find out if it was prob of UPS...i tried giving power to computer directly...still it wouldnt get switched on...took out memory and put i back again...checked if the smps power connectors were loose...but they were all placed perfectly.Called up Govind(AKA duttan or biosbhai) and asked what could be the prob...he said it could prob with smps or processor mostly and told me to call up 7tiles.I called up 7tiles ...tried all 3 numbers that was available..but none took the phone....GRR again.Then i took my computer to COMPUTER WORLD to check if it was prob of the SMPS....and yes it was the prob of the SMPS...they tried another smps....and the computer got switched on...HOORAY.I had bought the SMPS ( ZEBRONICS 350w) from Computer world on January...they said it has 1 year warranty...so i asked them for replacement...they said it doesnt have warranty and that i should buy a new SMPS.Was worried and went back home.I had classes today morning around 8-11 ...and after the class i went straight away to computer world...got new SMPS for 450rs and a cheap mouse pad for 30rs ...SMPS--->.PRIYA LIMITED 300w..this one also doesnt have warranty.I reached home...took out the old smps and threw it on the bed with a GRR:D and installed my new smps successfully.Checked if the MOLEX and other power connectors were connected correctly.Closed the cabinet...and Switched on my SYS...hoo haa it got switched on this time.....and rushed into windows to check for new forum posts & signed into messnger for chat.Hoping that atleast this SMPS dont get damged soon[-o

Getting Started

2005-10-15T21:16:00.000+05:00

Hi guys.....this is the 1st time im starting a blog...im not so good in english.. so please overlook any mistakes i may make in my subsequent blogs

My name is Adarsh, im 19 years old and i am currently doing a hardware professional course @ Tandem...called the A+ certification and also doing my Bcom 1st year.My hobbies are playing cricket, football, 8 ball pool, Multiplayer gaming, chatting, browsing and anything related to computer hardware, and i like to keep up with the latest tech news.I have got Asianet Dataline internet connection at home and after the classes, i spend most of my time on computer....chatting , playing unreal tournament 2004 or Counterstrike with friends etc.....