Computer Sense

What better way to kill the time on a long drive than an impromptu game of StarCraft II using backseat broadband? That’s obviously the first thing we thought of when Ford told us that next year’s Focus will have a built in WiFi router capable of setting up a mobile LAN in the back seat.To our US readers, there may be nothing novel in the idea of a vehicle which can talk to your electronic devices, but over on this side of the pond our in-car tech is the equivalent of a two stroke engine with a handcranking starter.

The 2012 Focus, however, will debut Ford’s SYNC technology on this side of the Atlantic. SYNC, co-desgned by Microsoft, is a collection of tools which currently use Bluetooth to connect a car to your phone. So you can stream back music, place calls and use GPS from the phone via a dashboard control panel.

When it launches in Europe, however, SYNC will also include a WiFi hotspot with support for up to five wireless devices. That’s a fairly decent sized LAN you could set up for a SupCom match on the motorway.

More interestingly, SYNC will also be able to share one phone’s modem across the network. Last time we looked at gaming via 3G (PCG 201), we got Left4Dead up and running comfortably enough to play a few rounds of zombie shooting without too much interference from bad ping times. While it’s unlikely you’ll be able to game online in a Focus while the car is moving, it seems entirely reasonable that you’ll be able to run a quick WoW heroic when you’re parked up and stationary. What’s more, by the time SYNC launches over here, there’s a good chance we’ll have an LTE service of some sort we can connect to for proper low latency games.

Of course, you could do something similar now with a beat up old mini and a battery operated mobile hotspot like 3′s MiFi, but that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

Original Article:  http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/20/next-years-ford-focus-is-a-lan-party-on-wheels/

I often get emails asking for advice on upgrades, most of which I try to answer as quickly as I can, but one that came through the other day struck me with a problem that I imagine is more common than you’d think.

The writer wanted to know what the best graphics card would be for his motherboard, and proceeded to list all the bits and bobs inside his PC. Some of them were nearly ten years old. Two things were immediately obvious from his mail. Firstly, that a graphics upgrade alone wasn’t going to get Crysis 2 running at full speed. Secondly, that he’d obviously made a mistake identifying his components. According to the email he was running an Athlon FX chip from the middle of the last decade with a Pentium 4 motherboard circa 2001.

Since he also reckoned he was using two GeForce graphics cards in SLI configuration, I surmise that the writer is probably right about the chip, wrong about the mobo (since that predates SLI technology). Or that it was someone deliberately being silly and trying to catch me out.

The serious question the story raises, though, is how do you know what motherboard is inside your machine, and what its compatible with when you come to upgrade?

The easiest way is through Windows’ own System Information tool. You can call this up by typing its name into the search bar of the Start menu, and it should come up with a screen that looks something like this. The highlighted lines are the motherboard manufacturer, the model number and the current BIOS and revision number.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a foolproof piece of software. If you can’t get any useful information from it,  you’ll have to open up the side of your case and have a look at the motherboard itself. If you’re lucky, the manufacturer name and product code will be clearly visible – as in the image at the top of this post – and you can go along to their site and look for a manual online. This branding could be anywhere, but the most common places are by the CPU socket, near the expansion slots or along one of the edges. If there’s no obvious stamp, however, there’ll be other identifying marks.

One of them should be its FCC ID code. This is the serial number assigned to components when they pass through testing at the Federal Communications Commission in the US. This should be printed onto the PCB itself or a white sticker that looks like the one above. You can check it at the updated FCC Site here. Turns out the component pictured is a WiFi adaptor from an old , abandoned  motherboard. Who knew?

If there’s no FCC label, you could start your component sleuthing by trying to figure  out the manufacturer using its factory code. This is a six character code beginning with a D which usually appears next to a symbol that looks like a circle with an arrow pointing through it. Gigabyte, for example, is D33006. The hard drive below is from Kingston. I can’t find an up to date list in English, so you could try translating this page or just Googling the code and seeing which name comes up most often. Armed with the manufacturer name, the BIOS code and version which appear when you first boot the machine (and in System Properties) should give you an exact match.

Original Article: http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/13/how-to-identify-a-motherboard-when-you-want-to-upgrade/

Are your case fans giving you nightmares about ‘nam? Are they just a few RPM away from sending you into a Ridley Scott style reverie? Want to know a quick, cost free way to make your PC run more quietly than it is right now? Everything you need to stop that incessant din might be right there in your BIOS.

The other day I was chatting to a reader via email about the best way to slow case fans down so that they whisper rather than roar, and I realised that this simple trick isn’t actually as well known as I thought it was. Every single motherboard that I can think of that’s been manufactured in the last ten years or so has a set of built in sensors for monitoring various temperatures around the case. What’s more, they have the ability to use that information, and throttle your case fans accordingly. If everything is running smoothly and within certain heat thresholds, your motherboard can slow the rotation of fan blades down in order to silence them.

For some reason, which makes absolutely no sense to me, the default option in the BIOS is not always set to turn this spectacular feature on.

The older your motherboard is, the more likely it seems that this setting is turned off. That’s an observation based purely on anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me that more recent boards have been set up correctly at the factory. Whether your system is new or ancient, though, it’s worth seeing if you can silence it.

Simply open up the BIOS by hitting F2 or DEL – depending on your motherboard’s settings – during the first stage of the boot process, and use the cursor keys to find the option marked ‘Hardware monitor’. This could be almost anywhere: in a top level menu of its own, or as a sub-menu within the ‘Advanced’ settings for example. It’s there though, I’m almost certain of it.

What this should show you is a readout of the temperature settings the motherboard is monitoring, along with other information like fan speeds and possibly voltage readings if you’ve got a top end board. Somewhere on this page there will also be a setting for the CPU fan. Often this menu is broken up into seemingly random phrases, like Q-Fan or Extreme, but basically it’s a list of settings for running the CPU flat out or at a slower speed.

The beauty of this setting is that unless you set it to run constantly at a particularly percentage of its maximum speed, it’ll automatically accelerate to provide extra cooling if the CPU is running hot. In other words, you can set it for the quietest maximum speed and be confident that it won’t let your CPU damage itself.

With that done, just select ‘Save settings and exit’ and enjoy a quieter gaming experience.

If you don’t fancy playing around with the BIOS, there is an excellent Windows app called Speedfan which can tap into the same settings and let you configure them from the desktop. It may need manually resetting after every boot, though.

Original Article:  http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/26/make-your-pc-run-quieter-with-one-simple-trick/

The Minecraft 1.6 patch has landed. We dived right in, eager to start playing with the new hatches and maps added by the patch. Spiders died, cows exploded and lava spills threatened to destroy everything. Read on for an account of our first hour in Minecraft 1.6, and a video showing how you craft the new maps.

Hatches may sound like a small thing, but when I started playing with them I realised two things. Firstly, given the fact that so much of Minecraft takes place undergound, hatches are far more useful than doors for creating entrances to your underground base. It feels straight away as though they’ve been in the game forever.

They’re crafted easily enough. Simply place six planks in two layers across the bottom two layers of the crafting window. As with hatches in real life, they’re very much like horizontal doors, except only one block in size. Right clicking opens and closes them, and they can be operated by switches, at distance if need be, with the help of redstone wires.

I was playing with hatches and switches when a second thought occurred to me. What if I could use these hatches for evil in some way? A hatch gone bad. A trapdoor. When night falls Minecraft’s square hills fill up with skeletons, spiders and creepers. The new hatches would work perfectly as a night-time trap for any creature foolish enough to come near my tiny box of a house.

Original Link: http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/26/minecraft-1-6-hands-on-when-hatches-go-bad/