http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/ 2010-09-08T11:08:30-07:00 e107 http://e107.org/ e107 e107 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/e107_images/ DHAJ - admin_cgn@nospam.com CGN is a gaming community for Christians as well as non-Christians. We try to provide a clean place to play games. http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.222.6 2010-07-29T04:58:39-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

I'm very pleased to announce that Christian Gamers Network has joined forces with the World of Warcraft guild "The Fish and Bread Trick". We have plenty of space to go around, so let's make the new members feel at home. TFABT is a Christian Guild that plays mostly on the US-Ghostlands server in WoW. They've been around for about a year and are all a blast to play with and talk to.Over the next few weeks, you'll see lots of changes going on around the ole website. Forums have already been added and new links have been added to the main menu. Please bear with us while we add these changes. I believe that both groups can help further enrich each other in the gaming environment and continue to provide a Christian influence on the gamers around us.

2010-07-29T04:58:39-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.213.3 2010-06-30T04:49:48-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

This is part one of a seven-part video. In this segment, we meet a module called Weatley that had been told that if he detached from his rail that he would die. I could go on, but just watch the video for yourself. It's well worth it.

2010-06-30T04:49:48-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.212.3 2010-06-23T09:14:11-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

An update for Counter-Strike: Source was released today that includes support for the Mac as well as adding 140 achievements, lifetime stats, and an updated scoreboard to name a few. They basically updated the Source engine for CS:S so it's more current and using some of the features available in Team Fortress 2. Like TF2, CS:S now has player domination, death animations, and the ability to take kill cam shots.I played against some bots for a bit and the basic gameplay is basically the same. The scoreboard is now huge and has large text to emphasize things like the team's score and how many players each team has (total and alive). At the end of each round, it shows the MVP for the round which earns that player a little star next to their name. If you get more than one, you get a star plus the number of times you got MVP. At the end of the round, it also shows some mini-stats that change every time. For example, one round it showed who had the most kills on both teams. The next, it compared the best player's accuracy to the enemy team's overall average accuracy.The lifetime stats are rather interesting, though. The game keeps track of how many rounds you've played, won, and lost... starting right now. It also tracks how many kills you get with each weapon, your stats with the weapons, and displays your favorite primary and secondary gun. This really shows way too much information. I used to play CS:S quite often, but I've moved on to newer, better games. Yes, the gameplay is still fun but it gets old pretty quickly. I look at some of the achievements and know for sure that I've probably done that a time or two or have never even tried, but I just don't feel the urge to try to get them. It's not like in TF2 where you can upgrade that class by collecting the achievements or like in Killing Floor where working on your stats gets you better perks. With so many "upgrades" to an already established game, I just can't help but wonder how many addons and mods are going to be ruined...Oh by the way, CS:S is on sale for $6.80 for the next couple days... for anyone in the world who just started gaming in the last few weeks and hasn't automatically bought it yet.

2010-06-23T09:14:11-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.211.3 2010-06-16T11:18:35-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

+10 cool points if you can find the weighted companion cube in the vid... ...you monster.

2010-06-16T11:18:35-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.210.6 2010-06-08T09:27:58-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

In an effort to make our community and LAN Parties better, I just created a new topic in the forums about LAN Parties and their future. It's a pretty long post, but it will hopefully give some insights in the method behind my madness. It should also provide a focused outlet for you to voice your opinion on some upcoming changes and let you help decide how things will work out in the future. Remember, this is a community of gamers... so everyone has a voice. This is your chance to use it! Link to the forum post.

2010-06-08T09:27:58-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.220.2 2010-06-08T08:19:00-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Malygos' ex-consort, the Lich King's dragon pet, or very simply, the mighty Sindragosa fell to the might of The Fish and Bread Trick last night. After a night of wiping repeatedly to her ice tomb attack, we finally got into the swing of things and took her down. With one healer left, one DPS, and the two tanks, she actually reached her enrage timer, but with a couple quick strikes, she fell, and the Frostwing Halls were ours.For the competitive ones, that currently puts us at rank 38 on Ghostlands for ICC10 progression. Not bad considering there are 90 guilds currently ranked on WoWProgress. Check this link to see our standing. Regardless, excellent job everyone! The Fish and Bread Trick will be very earnestly trying to build a second team of 10 this week, so that more of our guildies can get in on the action of awesome raiding with awesome fellowship. I am still astounded by the fact that a Christian guild is--against all odds and plenty of naysayers when I started it--progressing very well, keeping it fun and light, and building good relationships amongst the group. This is truly a blessing, and I am reminded of this verse: "Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord." (Romans 12:10-11)Even though it's a game, we're raiding, and we're seeking out good players, we're constructing a fellowship bounded up in Christ, demonstrating to the WoW community that the people in this guild are more important than whether Arthas goes down next week. Our devotion is to each other, and to serving God and serving each other.With that said, if you're reading this, and you've got some suggestions for the guild, have questions, or anything, please contact your friendly guild officers. We are more than happy to chat with you and give advice, help with a quest as we can, or figure stuff out for raiding. We want to know what you're thinking and want to help you make this guild your home. Also, we want to get to know you! Chat with us in guild chat and hang out! Good times and good laughs in this guild always!Oh, and here's the guild shot after Sindragosa was taken down:

2010-06-08T08:19:00-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.209.3 2010-05-18T00:43:33-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight has been out since mid-March, but I only just now decided to go ahead and buy it. We were at Fry's this last weekend and they had it for half off ($25 instead of $50). Now since I've been a fan of CnC since highschool (late 90's), I just had to pick this one up. It's supposed to be the final episode and the answer to all the questions about Tiberium. I played the first few missions in the campaign. The play-style is similar to the older CnC games, but they've made a major change. What the original Command and Conquer called the "Construction Yard" and later CnC games called the "Mobile Construction Vehicle" (MCV) has turned into the "Crawler". Instead of it being the key to building all your buildings, this is the sole construction building that creates both structures and fightings units (soldiers, tanks, etc.). It packs and unpacks quickly, so it can be moved around the battlefield easily. You can't produce units or place built structures with it packed and moving, but you can get them ready to be deployed. This means that while the Crawler is walking around, you can have 3 tanks in the build queue. When the Crawler unpacks, it shoots out a tank. This gameplay is taking me a while to get used to. Also, ALL the previous versions involved collected Tiberium and selling it to get money. That's no longer the case. In CnC4, you have a certain number of Command and Structure points. Each structure and each unit has a numeric value. Larger buildings and tanks have a higher value. You can only build up to that Command or Structure point number. For example, if the tank costs 3 Command Units and I only have 9, I can only build 3 tanks. Same thing for structures. It's like they've tried to simplify the game so you don't have to worry about resource management. You don't have to worry about building your base and building the technology tree to unlock advanced units. You just have to worry about building units to either defend or attack your objective.There are 3 different types of Crawlers you can pick from. Offense, Defense, and Support. Obviously, Offense and Defense are about attacking and defending, but Support is where you get the air units. You also get these little repair drones and you constantly have to tell who or what to repair instead of them being somewhat automatic. CnC4 also has a coop feature, which is somewhat unique to Real-time Strategy games. They tried adding it in CnC3, but they're really pushing the coop feature in this version. The wife isn't much of an RTS fan, so I guess I have to find another coop parter to test this part out.I also tried a Skirmish just to get the feel for the new play style. I immediately attacked the enemy Crawler and destroyed it thinking the game would be over and I would have won in just a few minutes. Nope, it just spawned another one. The goal was to "hold" key places around the map. You capture them by having units next to them and you get points for keeping them. The more you have, the more points. After finally figuring this out, I eventually won. I opted to leave my Crawler at a fortified area and just ran my tanks around the map. The enemy was constantly moving his Crawler, but it was also getting destroyed frequently. This tactic helped the enemy get lots of units in focused areas, so I should probably learn a good way to do that. But right now, it's just a tough transition from being base-oriented. So far, I'm not really enjoying the latest version but I keep playing it in hopes I start to like it.

2010-05-18T00:43:33-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.208.5 2010-05-12T05:24:50-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Finally, a computer game developer that bridged the gap between the PC and the Mac. Well, technically both platforms are PC... using the same hardware and all. This is really a great move by Valve. With the growing popularity of Macs, there are hundreds of potential gamers out there. This could be exactly what the PC Gaming industry needs to keep itself alive.So how does all this work? If you've already bought some games and have them tied to your Steam account, then you don't need to do anything. If you have Portal, for example, then you can install it on either a Windows or Mac computer. There's no need to purchase two different versions of the game. As of this writing, there aren't a whole lot of mainstream games available on the Mac. I've read that all the Source games will be available, including Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead 2. I've also read that Tripwire Interactive is very close to having Killing Floor available on the Mac. Obviously, this isn't a huge list, but it's a good start. Plus any new games should be available on both platforms.

2010-05-12T05:24:50-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.207.2 2010-05-02T23:30:46-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Well it seems that our game server is currently down. This is following a power outage from the thunder storms last Friday night. I was hoping a series of reboots this morning would resolve the issue, but it is still not responding. My fear right now is this is a hardware problem and that something major is broken. Hopefully later today we'll have a little more information as to what's going on.Update (2:15pm): After a few tests, it appears the hard drive is dead. I was doing remote troubleshooting so I'll know more when I see the server in person. Hopefully the data can be recovered easily and I can move it all to a new hard drive (as soon as I find one). More info to come!Update: Well, it looks like the hard drive was ok. Either the SATA or power cable was to blame, but it seems to be working again. The connection seems to be pretty fragile since it stopped working between the test bench and the server rack. But the server is up and running for now!

2010-05-02T23:30:46-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.206.3 2010-04-26T04:21:39-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

The new Steam User Interface (UI) Update is finally here! I could post screenshots, but you can see for yourself on Valve's website or just wait for your computer to finish downloading it. It's a required update, so whether we like this or not is irrelevant. I've been using it for the last almost hour and it's starting to grow on me. I used to use Steam in the minimal mode (where it's just a sliver on the side of my screen). You still have that option with this update, but I've switched over to the full view. With the new UI, when you select a game, it tells you which of your friends have it, your stats, and any news related to that game. I haven't had a chance to try it out, but the new Downloads tab looks interesting. I always hated how difficult it was to stop, slow down, or even monitor active downloads. Now there's a whole tab dedicated to current downloads. The taskbar icon also got a facelift. Nothing major, though. The tray menu has a couple more options. Now you can right click the icon and select one of your recently played games to play. So far, it looks like everything works. They did a short beta to work through some of the bugs, but I'm sure a few more will pop up in the next few days.Speaking of the next few days... With the release of the new UI, Valve has promised to bring Steam to the Mac. This will also include most (if not all) Source-based games including Counter-Strike: Source, the Half-Life 2 series, Team Fortress 2, and the upcoming Portal 2. The best part is gamers won't be required to buy their game for Mac or PC... if you have already bought CS:S, it will work on either the PC or Mac! Please be aware that even though you can get tons and tons of games on Steam, the Mac support is (currently) limited to the games Valve produced. Others, such as Killing Floor, have hinted that they'll also be supporting the Mac "soon". Native Linux support is still not available yet, but I'm betting once they get the Mac platform working decently enough they'll soon have a Linux solution as well.

2010-04-26T04:21:39-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.205.3 2010-01-26T02:02:50-08:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is set to be released this March. No official date yet, just "March". From what I've read, it sounds like the gameplay is going to be just like the Battlefield 2 we grew to love... with the addition of destructible environment. What's that you say? Oh yes, you can destroy the cover your enemy is hiding behind and even take down entire buildings. Unlike all the other PC Battlefields before it, BF:BC2 has a single player campaign. (Note: Bad Company 1 was for console-only and had a single player.) Even though it will probably be fairly short, it should still offer a few hours of enjoyment. I don't believe this will be available for coop, though. Multiplayer will also offer a new gamemode called Squad Rush. In Squad Rush, two squads of 4 players will face off against each other. This is the alternative to a 32-player multiplayer game of conquest. Squads can still be created in the regular multiplayer, though.My one big problem with all the Battlefield games is you have to play on ranked servers to increase your rank. This means that if we wanted to run our own server, we'd have to pay for it. We could run an un-ranked server (I assume), but that would disable any unlocks anybody has. So that just wouldn't be fun for the players who actually earned the new perks. Currently, if you pre-order from Steam, you get access to 6 unlocks and can play the Beta starting on the 28th of this month. I'd really like to pick this one up. It's $50, which is decent considering most new games are selling for $60 now. But I imagine the pre-order offer will be available for a while.

2010-01-26T02:02:50-08:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.204.3 2010-01-05T03:23:04-08:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Army of Two: 40th Day is set to be released on the 14th of this month. That's in a little over week. I really enjoyed the first Army of Two, so I'm really looking forward to this one. It actually got a bad reputation because a lot of people were playing by themselves and relying on the AI to control the second player... which is not how the game was intended to be played. Even on an easy level of difficulty, there's enough stuff going on to keep both players busy. It's been quite a while since I played a shooter on my Xbox, so I need to dust off my skills before trying this one. Hopefully they're not too rusty. For you fellow coop lovers, Ao2:2 is supposed to have split screen coop... always a plus. It's also supposed to have a 4-player section, but that's only available for online play. Two players are supposed to be able to connect from a single console, though. Obviously, I'll be picking this one up for Xbox. Partly I don't like over-the-shoulder games on PC, but mostly because it's for console only. Like I said, it's supposed to come out in a little over a week... on Xbox 360, PS3, and PSP.

2010-01-05T03:23:04-08:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.203.2 2009-12-03T09:22:38-08:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

So we finally have internet at our house. It's not super fast, but I'm hoping I can upgrade my package later. When they hooked it up earlier today, it was really fast, but I think they've throttled me down. So hopefully I'll have it taken care of soon. I'm in the process of preparing a forum post about the up-coming LAN Party. So keep an eye out for that. I'm planning on holding it on or around New Year's, so if you think you're going to have a conflict you'd better let me know as soon as possible. You'll also be able to request certain games, maps, gametypes... all sorts of things. I'd say the post is about 90% ready, so it should be up by the weekend.If you didn't notice already, there's a new poll. Go ahead and vote if you have an opinion. The results may greatly affect what we do at this next LAN Party.

2009-12-03T09:22:38-08:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.202.2 2009-11-28T23:18:04-08:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Still no internet at home. But I still have access while at work and sometimes even plug my cell phone into my computer to get very, very slow access. Enough that I can download email, anyway. We did finally get a couch, so that's one item we can finally cross off our list. It was a bit of an adventure getting it in the house and we've already decided that if we ever sell the place, the couch goes with it. Along with probably all of the appliances. While I'm making a news post, I thought I'd point out that Steam is doing a 5-day one-day only sale. What this means is they're running a sale for 5 days where each day they have different games for stupidly low prices. Today is day 3 of this sale, so I'm a little behind in alerting everyone. But I'm sure they'll have some good deals in these next few days. Don't forget, Steam also usually puts almost all their games on sale right before Christmas... like 2 or 3 days before. So keep that in mind.Also, I'm hoping to have a LAN Party around New Year's (or at least after Christmas). So go ahead and check your calendars for conflicts. I'd also like anyone planning on coming to have already signed up for an account on this webpage. In addition to creating an account, you should also post in the forums to at least introduce yourself. Even if it's just a "Hi" thread, that's enough. Later on, I might create a separate forum for introductions, but for now you can use the "General Discussion" topic.

2009-11-28T23:18:04-08:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.201.2 2009-11-24T05:11:50-08:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Last weekend, we moved into our brand new house. I say brand new, because... well, I built it. And yes, everything actually works like it's supposed to. We've still got a few things that need to be finished, but nothing that would keep us from living there. But a couple things have made it a little less than ideal. For instance, we don't have internet or satellite TV. But this begs the question... how did we get along without these things 10 years ago? It's been a little over 10 years since I got the internet and it's been a part of my life ever since. It's really strange to go home and have a very powerful computer that isn't able to do much. I can play games in "offline mode", but that only works on single player games. Since my wife also likes to play, we could technically have our own mini-LAN parties. Well, we could starting last night. I only got around to hooking up the network last night after getting home from work. But also, there's the TV. I have a fairly small TV which suited our needs perfectly in our old house, but now that we have a full-sized living room a 19" widescreen LCD just doesn't cut it. I haven't completely decided on what size to get, but it's between 46 and 52". But what's the point of having a super nice TV if there's nothing to watch? We can't get cable, we don't have satellite (yet), and we don't have a TV antenna. We do have a pretty decent DVD collection, so that's what we've been watching. It just really bothers me that I actually feel like there's nothing fun to do at home since we don't have TV and internet. We don't have a couch either. In all fairness, it's probably a good thing we don't have internet or TV. It motivates me to finish the thousands of things that need to be taken care of.In case you're unsure, no LAN Party for the day after Thanksgiving. If you're not Black Friday shopping and you want something to do, let me know. We're putting up a large retaining wall in the back of my house and the stones weigh about 120lbs each.

2009-11-24T05:11:50-08:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.200.3 2009-11-16T23:16:01-08:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

North American Retail and Steam Available Now, Rest of World Follows Later This WeekNov 17, 2009 - Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the availability of its zombie thriller, Left 4 Dead 2, at retail outlets across North America (360, PC) and worldwide via Steam (PC). Retail outlets around the world will launch the title later this week.Exclusively available for the Xbox 360 and PC, L4D2 promises to set a new benchmark for co-operative action games and become one of 2009's marquee titles. The title adds melee combat to enable deeper co-operative gameplay, with items such as a chainsaws, frying pans, axes, baseball bats, and more. With the AI Director 2.0, L4D's dynamic gameplay is taken to the next level by giving the Director the ability to procedurally change weather effects, world objects, and pathways in addition to tailoring the enemy population, effects, and sounds to match the players' performance. The result is a unique game session custom fitted to provide a satisfying and uniquely challenging experience each time the game is played. Finally, with new Survivors, boss zombies, weapons, and items, Left 4 Dead 2 offers a much larger game than the original, featuring more co-operative campaigns, more Versus campaigns, new Survival maps, and the new competitive game mode, Scavenge, all available at launch The dedicated server should be up later today.

2009-11-16T23:16:01-08:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.199.3 2009-11-10T07:05:30-08:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

Hopefully the title got your attention, but don't be alarmed... I plan on hosting LAN Parties for a long time to come. As many of you may have already heard, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released today for Xbox 360 and PS3. It'll be available for PC gamers this Thursday. Why the two day wait? I have no idea. Activision has bluntly said that the PC version is a direct port from the console version. No dedicated servers, no built-in game recording, and no modifying the game. So what? So since Activision is planning on using a match-making service similar to Xbox Live! and Playstation Network, it not only makes it more difficult for clans and other teams to practice, but it'll make it impossible to have LAN Parties without internet access. Also, not having player-driven dedicated servers would require Activision (or someone) to police the servers and ban cheaters and hackers. CS:S, for example, has several thousand servers in the world. Can a single company successfully administor all those servers at once? Doubtful.A PC game without mods is like cake without icing... not exciting. Sure, games are fun without mods for a while, but if we didn't have any variety we'd all still be playing Doom on a token ring network. I'm sure this aspect will be broken eventually, but could come at a huge risk since Activision is using Valve Anti-Cheat system (VAC). Ironically enough, you'll have to install Steam in order to play CoD:MW2... which is another thing gamers are upset about. Well, not so much gamers, but other digital rights management companies since they won't get the same rights as Valve.Personally, I won't be buying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I enjoy the multiplayer on the first Modern Warfare and the single player campaign was tons of fun. I was even looking forward to continuing the story. Activision didn't create the Call of Duty series. They bought it. The first Call of Duty game was on PC... not console. The second Call of Duty was on both console and PC... developed on PC and ported to console. From then on, it seems like Activision has been trying to avoid the PC altogether. A few of the Call of Duties were released for console only. But now I'm rambling. I just hope this isn't the start of a terrible trend.

2009-11-10T07:05:30-08:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.198.3 2009-11-03T07:36:31-08:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

For those who pre-ordered, the Left 4 Dead 2 Demo has been available for around a week. But now, it's available to everyone. The demo consists of a portion of one of the campaigns and is only playable as coop (no versus), supporting 1 to 4 players. If you've never played any of the Left 4 Dead games and are at least willing to try it out, it's worth your time.You can also pre-order L4D2 at a discounted price, or do like I do and get the 4-pack. This time around, pre-ordering comes with a few perks. First of all, you'll get an American-themed baseball bat (in-game, of course). I'm not sure if this is exclusive access or not. Also, Team Fortress 2 owners will get a "Bill" hat for TF2. It's basically a green beret. Not much, but it's the simple things that make it fun.Anyway, check out the demo. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

2009-11-03T07:36:31-08:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.197.5 2009-10-29T01:33:10-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

In my previous post, I mentioned how Windows 7 has basically the same performance as Windows XP. Well that's still true, except Win7 not only takes more memory, it takes A LOT more memory. Not quite as much as Vista, but still a bunch compared to XP. The light at the end of the rainbow is how Win7 is able to manage the amount of memory it has and it does a very good job. When I installed Win7 on my machine, I had 2GB of RAM, which is a solid amount for running Windows XP. In fact, I could only upgrade to a total of 3GB on my Windows XP machine, since it's 32-bit. Because the version of Windows 7 I installed is 64-bit, it supports much higher amounts of memory. Win7 Professional supports up to 192GB of RAM. Waaaay more than anyone will need [for a while]. Anyway, when my computer booted up, it used roughly 600-700MB of RAM. When running most of the programs I keep open all the time, it was closer to 1GB. Now that's half my memory... used for my day-to-day sort of things. And it would go higher depending on how much web surfing I was doing.And that should beg the question, if half the memory is used for just Windows, how can you play any games? Most older games run fine since they don't need a ton of memory. Those that need close to 1GB are fine. In fact, the operating system scales itself back automatically and quickly enough that a user hardly notices. Now I know that this feature has been available for many versions of Windows, but not so it's very unnoticeable. I did notice some slight jerks and glitches in Left 4 Dead, but when I closed the game and looked at my Task Manager, I saw the memory meter was pegged. Windows had scaled back to around 400MB. I also realized that Outlook and IE (which I had left open while playing) responded very quickly and I had very little indication that memory had been shuffled around.Since I like a little extra horsepower under the hood on all my computers, I decided to go ahead and upgrade my memory. I knew I could get away with 4GB of RAM, but I decided to go ahead and upgrade to 6GB. This should give me a decent bit of head room. I installed the memory last night and so far no problems (fingers crossed). One thing I noticed is that Win7 realizes it has extra memory and goes ahead and uses it. So now, while my computer is idle with only a few applications running, it's using 1.6GB of RAM when it had been using 800-900MB. I tripled my RAM and now the system has adjusted to using twice as much. I also tried a couple chapters in Left 4 Dead and had no problems.So in short, if you're looking to upgrade to Windows 7 and plan on staying there for a while, a memory upgrade should be on your mind. It's a simple procedure and takes less than 20 minutes from start to finish. 4GB of DDR2 800 cost me $82 (shipped) but it's got a $20 mail-in rebate. You could get by with 4GB of RAM if you want to save some cash, but that's your choice. I installed the Windows 7 Beta on my personal laptop a while ago and it only has 1GB of RAM. The Win7 part ran ok, but I wasn't able to play games with much speed. I'll test it again here in the next few weeks.

2009-10-29T01:33:10-07:00 http://www.christiangamersnetwork.com/news.php?item.196.6 2009-10-22T01:57:35-07:00 DHAJ admin_cgn@nospam.com

It's finally here (officially)! Windows 7 is officially for sale starting today. I've been able to run the retail version of Windows 7 on my work laptop for a little over a month since my company is a Microsoft Certified Partner. All in all, I haven't really found anything horrible about Windows 7. If you're upgrading from Windows XP, it's a huge difference. Going from Vista to Win7 isn't all that bad, but there are some new and nifty features they've added. My favorite is the window previewing. You can hover your mouse on any icon in the taskbar and it will show you a small preview (like Vista). Unlike Vista, you can then hover your mouse over the small preview and it will show you the actual window. If you move your mouse away, the big preview goes away. If you click, it brings the window to the front. Also, most Vista users will be glad to see that the UAC box can be completely disabled. Anyone who has used Vista for more than 5 minutes has seen this annoying menu. With as little as 3 clicks, this annoyance goes completely away.Since this is a gaming website, it'd be silly to make a whole newspost about a new Operating System and not mention the gaming aspect. So I installed Windows 7 on my home PC... my main gaming PC. Installing took less than an hour, and it was right about at the hour mark when I finished installing drivers for my system. The setup detected everything (and I mean everything), but I wanted the official nVidia drivers for my motherboard since I'm doing RAID. At any rate, I installed all my games and fired up CS:S. My wife's computer is almost identical to mine so we both ran a video stress test in CS:S. Our scores were extremely close. So going from Windows XP to Windows 7 has no performance loss (at least in CS:S). I've played a couple other games just to see how it handles. I don't really notice any difference except one... my video card temperatures are lower. And I don't mean by a degree or two. My idle temperature has dropped over 10 degrees. I'm not sure if that's an issue with DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 being more efficient, but the driver reports them as running cooler. I actually expected them to idle at a higher temperature since Windows 7 has more graphical stuff when changing windows and opening files and stuff. Like with any other major upgrade, there's the possibility of games and other programs not being compatible. So, if you're curious, here's a list of games that users have tested on Windows 7.One last thing. If you're a college student, I believe you can get Windows 7 at a discounted price if not for just a few dollars. Check with your university and see. Everybody else can hop on over to Microsoft's webpage and get the Release Candidate if you just want to test it out.

2009-10-22T01:57:35-07:00