Actually, searching for Psychonauts and coming up with Brutal Legend in the results is totally relevant. Both games are headed up by the same studio. The searches results are usually ranked by popularity as far as I can tell. If you did a search for, say, Resident Evil (you wanted info on the very first one) the results would first show up with RE5 since it's the latest. spazzx625

I've noticed before that when searching for games on Gamespot it often gives results which are completely unrelated before what you're actually looking for. But I just have to say that when I type in "psychonauts" and get a result of "Brutal Legend" then there is something completely broken about Gamespot's seach engine. At least it did find the game I was looking for, but it was #3 on the list which makes no sense. This should be fixed!

PS. I have the screenshot but it also seems that Gamespot forums don't allow up-loading of images.... sigh.

I've played both the original, and then through again with the expansion pack. If I were the OP then I'd just install the expansion pack and play that (it only really opens a few new areas and leaves the rest of the story intact). When you first start out in this game expect a steep learning curve though. Overall I loved this game.

I played Halo 1 on both PC and the console. I have to say that I enjoyed the PC version better. Overall Halo for the PC was a decent game, it'll never be the "all-time best ever PC game", but it's also not complete crap.

On the distribution side of things I really like the model that gog.com is using (and maybe steam, but I haven't used them so can't comment). They have a great and growing library of older games which you download easily and they're very cheap to purchase. I've bought more games from them in the past 6 months then I have major modern games in the past 3 years. It's because of the price $4-10 and that I have the game DRM-free to be used on any computer I own. I really don't like shelling out ~$70-90 on a game and I have to be damned sure I'm going to like it before I'll do that.

Are you absolutely sure the CPU usage was lower before you changed your monitor? I really can't see how changing the monitor would cause such a problem. I'm assuming you've updated all your drivers and installed the correct driver for the new monitor?

superchronik

The monitor or video cable should not affect the performance. Put back the original resolution to confirm.

For video playback, the CPU does almost all the work, not the video card. An Athlon XP is not adequate for this type of resolution.

Gog

Watching videos at that resolution is quite CPU intensive so yes it's likely your old CPU can't cope.

superchronik

Is this the case even when watching in a window which is only 1/4" of the full desktop size?

Hi All;

I've recently upgraded my old computer slightly by picking up an LCD monitor to replace my old ginormous CRT. My new monitor is a 21.5" Acer and I'm quite happy with it, however I've now noticed that under certain circumstances my comp now chugs at 100% CPU load. This occurs when I try to watch movies in the .avi format and some .mpeg formats, or when I have visualization software running with my music. My processor is quite old (Athlon 2200+) but my graphics card is modern enough (ATI X1650) and I have enough RAM (1.5 GB) for running my Win XP.

My question is, could the new higher resolution (1920X1080) vs. the old 1024X768 be too much for my CPU to handle? Also, could it be related to using DVI instead of VGA? I had thought that the graphics card would be handling most of the load but maybe that's not the case?

I'm going to experiment by lowering the resolution and seeing how it behaves, but just wondered if anybody has any thoughts in the meantime.

Urrrrrghhh,, that's totally tickling my memory,,, but I just can't grasp it.. I hope somebody else comes through.