Blog - Antony Leather - Page 6

Can I Go Solo With Windows 7?

Posted on 27th May 2009 at 12:25 by Antony Leather with 27 comments

Have you tried Windows 7 yet? One of my plans for the bank holiday was to do one of my bi-yearly reinstalls of Windows to clear out the crap and maybe try a different RAID setup. I'd been running XP for a while after I gave up on dual booting it and Vista, dumping the latter because I didn't really play any DX10 enabled games, got thoroughly peeved with its clunky interface and interfering antics compared to XP, even after SP1, and, well XP was all I needed really. I guess I'm just set in my ways when it comes to operating systems.

However, given that the recently announced Windows 7 RC1 will stay operational till next year, I thought I'd give it a stab hearing glowing reports and also the fact I could get a 64bit version to make use of my new 4GB of RAM to help with the pretty demanding photo editing I've been doing recently which saw my 2GB RAM all used up. The question is, could I get away with using it alone or would I need to dual boot with XP again? Maybe I'd even be sick of it within 30 minutes like I was with Vista. This is a bit of a risk too as it's a release candidate but I was inclined to believe the glowing reports it had received and went for it.

Graphics Bargains Ahoy

Posted on 19th May 2009 at 11:15 by Antony Leather with 8 comments

Are you in the market for a new graphics card? Well, for the first time in quite a while, there are some great deals to be had. While the ATI Radeon HD 4770 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 275 are good deals, in the past I've rarely bought new hardware as soon as it’s released. What I've tended to do is wait for new releases and then look at older, high-end hardware, as prices tend to tumble.

Left 4 Dead Survival Mode and new stats system

Posted on 11th May 2009 at 11:15 by Antony Leather with 8 comments

Part of the reason some individuals get slightly hot-headed online is teamwork, or lack of it. In Left 4 Dead, this primarily involves staying together and helping team mates that have been pounced by hunters or tongued by smokers. If you stray too far ahead or don’t keep up, you’ll usually end up dead and will be pretty unpopular with your team mates.

It could be argued that if you want to take the game this seriously, you should join a clan instead of endlessly calling people noobs and hurling other insults at strangers who are just on for a bit of zombie bashing fun. However, there has been quite a shift in gameplay following the release of the new survival mode update on 21st April which has, if anything, made working as a team even more rewarding and might just change things for the better.

The Downside to Digital Distribution

Posted on 30th Apr 2009 at 10:27 by Antony Leather with 22 comments

Joe and Clive both wrote about digital distribution recently. In fact, this was actually going to be a post solely dedicated to the new survival mode in Left 4 Dead, however seeing as the game has developed some gremlins and I can now barely run the game at all, my enthusiasm has waned somewhat.

I need something to get my teeth into

Posted on 11th Apr 2009 at 12:33 by Antony Leather with 17 comments

So PC gaming isn’t dead. To be honest I’ve known that for a while. Even though previous reports had it supposedly well behind console gaming (mainly because they forgot a little genre called MMO, duh), those of us who are lucky enough to have a half decent PC with a broadband connection are usually aware there are things like Steam, and free online games like Desktop Tower Defence that more often than not, occupy way too much of our time to even think about giving any of the current generation of consoles a second glance.

Two decades of innovation and we still get sore fingers

Posted on 19th Mar 2009 at 11:06 by Antony Leather with 6 comments

I'm often asked how to build a water-cooled PC and what components are compatible with what. Mainly what frightens people is the assumed complexity of the cooling system compared to air cooling.

Having just completed the labs test for Issue 69 of Custom PC involving numerous CPU coolers, I can honestly say that mounting a waterblock like the D-Tek FuZion V2 is an awful lot easier than many CPU coolers I've seen.

In fact, the FuZion V2 costs a lot less than most air-coolers too. Alright, I'll concede that you need to fork out for pumps, radiators and reservoirs too, but the fact remains.

The perfect netbook

Posted on 14th Mar 2009 at 17:36 by Antony Leather with 10 comments

I’m sure most of us have had to lump an old heavy laptop around at some point or another. For those of us who commute a fair distance to work, something that weighs in at more than 2kg can be a royal pain in the backside to carry around, especially if you have a case, power brick and other sundry hardware too.

My old 1.6GHz Pentium M laptop has certainly seen better days but it’s relatively nippy and handles XP and video playback fine. Also, because our lab is five floors away from our desks here at Dennis, I was able to start writing up reviews between benchmarks whilst still in the lab tweaking things. However at nearly 3kg, I felt I’d run some dreaded army marathon with a ton of gear on my back by the time I’d got to work.

How big is your radiator?

Posted on 1st Mar 2009 at 14:03 by Antony Leather with 14 comments

It’s been an interesting twelve months for all the water-coolers out there. We’ve had the launch of the D-tek Fusion V2, Swiftech Apogee GTZ, OCZ Hydroflow and XSPC Delta V3 CPU waterblocks and we’ve seen plenty of new GPU blocks too. Blocks for both the Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 series and ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards have been launched as well as some interesting dual GPU blocks for the HD 4870X2 and the GTX295.

Modding and hello!

Posted on 23rd Feb 2009 at 11:22 by Antony Leather with 8 comments

Actually that should probably be the other way round as I’d first like to say greetings to the bit-tech community! I’m Antony Leather and like Mark who blogged recently, I also joined the Custom PC team in June of last year.

Unlike Mark though, I wasn’t in IT or system building prior to starting at Custom. Instead, the last few years have seen me come very close to becoming a pilot in the forces, then in to housing development of all things. However, my evenings and weekends were spent gaming (mainly FPS and flight sims), overclocking, modding and building a range of water-cooled PCs and I was also the Custom PC forum water-cooling guru for my sins.

Tags forum, modding

bit-tech.net

Archive for Antony Leather

Can I Go Solo With Windows 7?

Graphics Bargains Ahoy

Left 4 Dead Survival Mode and new stats system

The Downside to Digital Distribution

I need something to get my teeth into

Two decades of innovation and we still get sore fingers

The perfect netbook

How big is your radiator?

Modding and hello!

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