Rant 370 / Make Way

Time is a funny thing. This week's E&T magazine (which I have a year's subscription for, thanks to my one-year membership in the IET) was on time. Time. Time feels like it flows slower when you're doing something you don't enjoy. Everytime I join a failteam in Empires, we seem to take so long to lose that I sometimes ask the enemies to charge in and kill the commander vehicle (winning in normal maps in Empires means either killing the CV or killing all players and destroying all spawn points).

But when I join a team with people who do what they're supposed to do, the game just feels right.

How to identify a failteam:
1) Squad leader/commander gives order before start of the game, eg Alpha squad go Northeast, and half of Alpha goes south immediately after spawning.
2) Two flags that gives resources at double the normal rate of res nodes on each side of the map. Commander orders everyone to spread out, divide and conquer. Whole team goes east. Fuckin hivemind...
3) Jeep-spamming players who refuse to run to the frontlines with their own feet. Jeeps are cheap, fast and unarmoured vehicles that only serves as transport. Generally a waste of resources except during rushes.
4) Enemy barracks suddenly appear, built and spawning enemy infantry, behind the frontline... on our side.

How to identify a good team:

1) Commander gives sensible orders and drops the right buildings at the right spots.
2) Squads stick together (squad members get bonuses when they are close to each other)
3) Players who always seem to be at the right place at the right time.
4) No griefers.
5) No failjeeps, ie jeeps driven straight into enemy base, get horribly raped and achieve nothing before dying.










OMFG I just remembered that I need an OS for my new PC. Good thing I haven't bought it yet, or I'll be forced to spend about $150 more than I expected.

This shall be my new list of components.

AMD Phenom II X4 955 & MSI 790FX-GD70 ~ $674
Kingston ValueRam DDR3-1333MHz 4GB (2X2GB) ~ $98
Palit GTX285 ~ $499
Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB ~ $123
Samsung SATA 22X DVD Rewriter ~ $31
Corsair HX620W PSU ~ $174
Cooler Master CM690 ~ $129

+ random wired keyboard and mouse ~ $15 (or free?)
+ Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit ~ $164
+ Philips 22" LCD monitor ~ $275

On the CPU side, including the OS, the price would be $1892. About $100 lower than what I expected. Total: $2167. This is calculated under the assumption that they would have everything I want.

I would have picked Windows 7 since it's supposed to be less resource-demanding than Vista, but it's going to be released in October. At first I wanted to download the Release Candidate, which apparently is the version of the OS between Beta and retail edition. But after some searching and scanning through Q&As, I found that it's not recommended to install RC for main computers, ie the most important PC of people who use several PCs.

So... I also considered using a pirated version of Windows Vista till its release, but I need the most updated version of Vista for gaming and security purposes. For anyone who doesn't use the retail version of Vista, you should know that Windows Defender updates almost every alternate day. Not officially, but it just feels like that.

I had changed the options to make it such that I have to approve of any Windows updates before it downloads the data. This is because the updates occasionally requires a restart and this causes a popup that interrupts programmes that are running. I strongly dislike anything that brings me back to windows while playing and it's really annoying to have the alert pop up when I'm watching CSI.

So this is how I notice that every time I'm done playing for the night or when I turn on the monitor of my PC, there always is that tray icon indicating that there's a new update available for Windows. And I always check what the update is for because some are just useless for me, like updates for Microsoft Works and Silverlight.


Anyway I didn't include a soundcard nor speakers. I have a working headset that I'm still wearing right now and I'm no audiophile. It also helps to lower the costs a little.