Dracion1

Some strange UK ones I know: Illegal to detonate a nuclear weapon. Putting stamps of the monarch upside down on an envelope can be considered treason. The head of any deal whale found on a beach in the UK automatically becomes property of the King. Likewise, any tails belong to the Queen. Illegal to enter the houses of parliament wearing a suit of armour. Illegal to die in the houses of parliament.

What platform? PC, 360, PS3 or a different console? PC is relatively easy because there a lot of free programs that let you record things (though you'll notice some lag when doing it), on consoles it depends which one you have, you need extra capture cards and suchlike to do it.

1. Half-Life 2. Rogue (Early dungeon crawl game) 3. Tetris 4. Pokemon 5. Age of Empires 6. Mario 7. Command and Conquer 8. Quake 9. SimCity / "Sim" games 10. Battlefield

Too add to my earlier post, Patrick Alavi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYs1mCu68y8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zANivwexmCY

Just Cause 2. An action game in the truest sense of the word. I've had it for a week now, and I still get my head round just how big the map is. All the stunts you can do are pretty awesome, and I love the fact you need to muck around causing chaos to advance the story :D

Hoping there'll be more info on Brink from Splash Damage/Bethesda (It's a Mirror's edge meets Borderlands FPS game). Also, more info on Portal 2 and perhaps whatever else Valve happen to be working on; and Fallout: New Vegas, though that looks a lot like FO3.

*facepalm* Command & Conquer? Age of Empires? Civilisation? Have they just decided to ignore all strategy games or something? :s

About time :P I hope they released another meet the team video too.

I got a laptop recently with a Mobile 5650, and I get a comfortable 30fps on high settings. It runs GMod from 30-100fps depending how much stuff I've spawned, and that's with all the settings maxed out. Basically, expect the 575o/5770 to be even better than that. They should run pretty much all newer games quite well. Also, a big massive +1 to Vidi about the power supply. If you do get a new one, make sure it's a decent one from a good brand. Cheaper PSUs can be unreliable, and it's the one part of your computer that you really can't afford to break.

Not really. There have been other threads by people in a similar situation to yours, and the general consensus is that no one here will tell you how to do it. The best thing I, or anyone else can 'tell' you to do is to reason with your parents about this. Sorry :(

With a bit of fiddling you can play TF2 on some really old computers, but it looks quite retro. Sort of like an N64 game :P Unrelated, I got a level 1 medic mask :P

A 9600GT will be fine for running TF2 on high settings. Before you go ahead and order it though, make sure your computer has a powerful enough power supply in it. A lot of prebuilt computers only supply enough power to run the stuff the manufacturer put inside them. If you start adding more things, like some of the newer power hungry graphics cards, you'll get some nasty problems if your computer doesn't get enough power to run properly. If it is prebuilt, just post the model and someone should be able to find out for you. And yes, having a better graphics card should help the stop the framerate from dropping when a lot of players are on screen. It will still drop slightly, but not as much. Also, if you still want to play TF2 before you get a new graphics card, have a look at this thread on the steam forums. Makes everything look retro, but useful if you want to play :P

Love this game :D I managed to make a fairly basic wire plane not that long ago Anyway, some tools that I find are really useful for building: Mount2 - Lets you use any source game content in Gmod, including L4D and Sourcemod items. This loads stuff from the GCF files (I think), so there's no need to download extra models and textures. Smartsnap - Allows you to snap to a grid for accurately placing things while building Fin 2 - You can use this to turn props into fins, so you can make proper planes Advanced sleep and wake - Freezes a prop which can unfreeze when it collides with another prop, very useful for making machinima. Buoyancy - Self explanatory :P Also, Mobenix is an awesome map to muck around on :)

Had tons of problems with Norton a couple of years ago, I would avoid it like the plague. I've used Avira Personal since then and never had any problems. Used to have spybot, but that's gone downhill unfortunately. And McAffee actually breaks you computer, so it's worse than getting a virus in the first place :P

Got a new laptop recently: Dell Studio 1749 17.3" 1600x900 Screen Intel Core i5-520m @ 2.4Ghz (2 cores, 4 threads) 4GB DDR3 RAM ATI Mobility Radeon 5650 1GB 500GB 7200rpm HDD Wireless, webcam, DVD, etc, etc Windows 7 64-bit (will probably stick Debian/Ubuntu on here when my exams are over) Performance wise, it runs TF2 on highest at 60fps, and Bad Company 2 on Medium at about 30fps. It's adequately powerful for games, and the screen is a nice size without being excessively bulky. I got it mainly because I didn't want to get a desktop but I wanted something that was reasonably powerful. The PC behind is my old desktop.

What are the rest of the specs of your computer? No point getting a nice graphics card if your processor is really slow, it will just act as a bottleneck on the rest of your system. Anyway, a 9600GT will be fine for running TF2 and WoW. I had an 8600GT in my old PC which ran TF2 fine on highest settings at 30fps (1280 x 1024), so the 9600 will be better. If you want an ATI card instead, the 5670 is the one to get. It doesn't need a connector from the PSU and runs slightly cooler, though it's probably a bit more expensive.

I'd say try and aim to play on worlds with a ping lower than 100. Anyway, I can get a ping as low as 10 to some UK servers, but 300 to the Australian ones. If anyone's wondering, I get Sky internet, Download is about 5-6Mb/s, upload about 800kb/s Ultra low ping only really matters for FPS/Action games like CoD or TF2 where a split second makes all the difference between a kill or a death.

Cool story bro.

It's not just the TV that's the problem, but the voltage that's supplied from the socket. Over in America your normal wall socket will supply 110V, over here in the UK (and I'm pretty sure for the rest of Europe) it's about 230V. I don't know if the N64 has an internal or external transformer, but you could have problems if your console isn't getting enough power, or if it's getting too much, even if you are using a plug adapter.

Overclockers is a good online place to buy stuff from in the UK, they sell budget and high end stuff at reasonable prices. Dabs might also be worth having a look at.

Yes, just because the main advertised numbers are higher doesn't necessarily make it better. A quad-core running at 2.5Ghz will outstrip a single-core running at 3.0Ghz by quite a way. Porgrams like McAffee and Norton are notorious for sapping your system's power even when they're not doing anything. I had trouble running TF2 when I had Norton, I switched to Avira shortly after I got it but it was worth it :) If you can kill any other background programs, stuff like MSN, IRC, iTunes and such, that should help. As for the 'dun-dun' sound, have you tried unplugging the webcam and printer? I'm sure why you'd be getting that sound, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to try that to see if it fixes it. Do you get any messages telling you what the computer has 'found' when you get the sound?

Orbital: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roKxZMDWMMA Fatboy Slim: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7Ky5R-vxns The Chemical Brothers: Röyksopp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7gFGTknfA

Right Here, Right Now by Fatboy Slim. I remember seeing that song (and the video) being previewed on SMTV Live/Live and Kicking as a song from Fatboy Slim's 'new' album.

Some clients will let you automatically scan stuff when you're done downloading it, depending what clients you use. Also, as a general rule, the more 'popular' something is the less likely it's going to be dodgy.

If you select "Do a system scan and save a logfile" it should open a text file containing the log after completing the scan. Just copy and paste it on here, and someone will take at it look for you. No need to pay anything ;)