• 9Sep 09

  Who else plays Team Fortress 2?

  Hey, everyone.

  Just a quick blog to see if any of my friends on GameSpot play Team Fortress 2. If so, you should add me. My Steam page is:

  http://www.steamcommunity.com/id/dziggy

  You should also add me if you play Left4Dead because I'm going to get that soon.

  • Posted Sep 9, 2009 10:04 pm GMT
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 8Sep 09

  Playing pre-Windows 7 games on Windows 7

  Now that I've had WIndows 7 for a few weeks, I've had time to test it out a lot more. The only serious problem I've found i that older games tend to crash a lot. This problem happened a lot with Team Fortress 2 (because I play that game a lot). I haven't tested it a whole lot with several other games yet, but, from what I have played, I have noticed some problems with them as well.

  So, I'm just writing a short blog to tell everyone that if you're going to get Windows 7, you should probably change the compatibility settings for older games (released before 2009) to Windows Vista SP2 (or WIndows XP SP3 if it wasn't compatible with WIndows Vista). This seems to fix all of the problems, and I haven't had one crash since I did this. Although, on Team Fortress 2, the game did freeze for a few seconds, and I had to exit to the desktop (minimize it, not close it), then re-open it to get it working again.

  I'm going to test this out some more this weekend. I want to see if Team Fortress 2 will continue to run smoothly, and if other games run properly as well.

  On the bright side, though, the disc versions of Bethesda games (such as Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV) are compatible with the 64-bit version of WIndows 7! If you didn't already know, the disc versions of those games wouldn't install on Vista 64-bit operating systems (even if you changed the compatibility settings), so you had to get them from Steam if you wanted them.

  • Posted Sep 8, 2009 9:48 pm GMT
  • Category: Computers
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 31Aug 09

  I got WIndows 7 free and early (legally)

  My college has an alliance with Microsoft, which allows them to give us nearly every Microsoft software product made since 2003 for free. The only products that I notice aren't included are Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook, but, as I said in a previous blog, I do get like an 85% discount on Microsoft Office in my school's bookstore.

  One product I was surprised to see on the free software list was Windows 7 Professional. No, this is not a release client or beta version - it's the full operating system! So, naturally, the first thing I did was download and install it. I had a little trouble with it because apparently you can't use the upgrade version with Vista, so I had to do a clean install (which meant backing up nearly 1 TB of data!). Once I had that out of the way, I had no trouble installing the new operating system.

  The task bar, system tray, and start menu all have upgraded looks, folders look slightly better and are easier to organize, and the boot time seems a little shorter. My favorite change is defintely the new task bar. I love how it stacks similar windows, the live previews, and being able to scroll over the live previews to see it in full.

  The only problem that I have with the Windows 7 is that if I have a disc in either of my optical drives, it will autoplay it every time I turn my computer on or unlock it. In Vista, it would only autorun it if you insert the disc, or manually clicked the option. I really hope I can figure out a way to fix this problem, because it's really getting annoying.

  The other thing I really didn't like is that Grand Theft AUto IV didn't want to work so I had to re-install it. When I tried using the Steam backup file, it still didn't work, so I had to download it through Steam. I really hate downloading stuff through Steam because it's so slow! It took me over 30 hours to download the full game. Had I used Direct2Drive, it probably would've taken about half of that. But, on the bright side, I got it installed, and it properly detected my surround sound system (which Vista wouldn't).

  Overall, Windows 7 isn't too much different from Vista, though. It seems most of the changes are either cosmetic, or just small tweaks. But, I would definitely choose Windows 7 over Vista, and I can't complain about something that was free.

  Being the Professional version, this is supposed to have a Windows XP virtaul machine built in, but I haven't tried it yet because I haven't found a need to. Everything seems to be compatible so far.

  • Posted Aug 31, 2009 12:27 pm GMT
  • Category: Computers
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg

See Previous Blog Posts »