Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

by Scarlett on December 13, 2009 · View Comments

in Girl Gone Gaming, Hardcore PC

Dear Bethesda, Thank you for completely destroying my productivity this week! I blame you entirely for my utter lack of contribution to society. Also, your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries. Love, Scarlett … PS: Fallout 4 – can you get on that already? Kthxbai.

Fallout 3

Oh, most evil RPGs! Why must you suck me in with your engaging plots and intriguing quests and delicious combat? *Sigh* Alas, between requisite working and some bellyaching (literally) over not feeling well, these last few days have proven once again that I am but a weak-willed flower against the mighty seduction of my favorite video games. The feeling of immense satisfaction as I stride confidently through a screen strewn with the corpses of foes fought mightily … Hell, even the Bible is down with RPG. “Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.”

Except that I’m usually the harbinger of death n’ evil n’ stuff. But it’s a minor detail, really.

Ahhh, but my recent re-installation of Fallout 3 did prove to be beneficial in more ways than just the time-suckage variety. Remembering my trials and travails last year with low frame rates, micro stuttering, and hourly crashes, I decided to ready my PC in a most triumphant fashion. Which was an enjoyable project in and of itself, as being the lovably dorky computer geek I am, I’m endlessly trying to eek more power out of my rather modest system: 2 GHz AMD Dual Core Opteron processor, 2.0 GB of RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card, 250 GB hard drive, Windows XP.

What’s that, you say? I could save myself the time and trouble by simply upgrading? Bah! Upgrades are for pussies (and, y’know, people who can afford them). Besides, I’m rather fond of my older system. I have a brand new copy of Windows 7 gathering dust, and nary a desire to install it. Yeah, I’m a hardcore XP’er and for all intents and purposes, my system runs really well. But I’m a born tweaker and tinkerer, and any tricks or routines that I can use to give my baby a little extra juice is well worth the time and effort.

And thus, I present you with Scarlett’s Guide to Making Your PC Gaming-Ready. Or, “Shit I Did to Get Fallout 3 Running Smoothly.” Take your pick ;-)

Step One: Get thee to TweakGuides.com. NAO!

Alright – to be fair, I’ve downloaded the Windows XP TweakGuide and I’ve gone through parts of it, but I still haven’t had the will or wherewithal to sit down and attack the project thoroughly. HOWEVER! I fully intend to … Someday. But the TweakGuides site is chock full of great information, including guides for special tweaks and settings to get particularly graphics-intensive games to run to their best ability. If you’re new to PC tinkering and/or you’d like a very clear, step-by-step set of guidelines written in understandable language, I highly recommend giving TG a look!

Step Two: Upgrade your video drivers.

This is advice that I give out constantly on TSE to folks who have trouble getting the videos to work properly – but it’s something that I rarely remember to do myself. So when I noticed that ATI had released new drivers only 3 weeks ago, I used TG’s instructions for clean-uninstalling my previous drivers and getting all set up with the new ones. Now if you’re not too familiar your system specs, Belarc Advisor is a fantastic free program that runs a quick diagnostic and gives you detailed information about your PC that you can use for a myriad of purposes. In my case, I used it to double-check my ATI graphics card model so I could be sure to download the correct driver package. I also used Driver Sweeper to clean up traces of my old, outdated drivers before installing the new ones. It’s a perfect little program for folks like myself who are hesitant to mess with your PC’s registry, which can become brutally fucked up if you delete the wrong key. Better safe than sorry, I say!

At this point, I went ahead and installed the game (and applied the most recent patch), and then I proceeded to …

Step Three: Deleting and downsizing.

I am all about cleaning my cookies, cache and temp files – and there are some great apps that take care of the whole shebang. My favorites are ATF Cleaner (light-weight but effective) and CCleaner (thorough and robust). You might wonder why I use both, and that’s because in testing, both programs left bits and pieces behind that the other took care of – and they’re both so quick and simple to use, it’s worth using them in conjunction. What I also love about CCleaner is that it includes a registry cleaner, a monitor for your start-up programs, and a built-in uninstaller that always seems to perform much faster than the ol’ Add/Remove Programs routine.

After all my temp files were thoroughly obliterated, I ran another one of my favorite little apps called SpaceSniffer. I tweeted about this program a few weeks ago and it caused a minor flurry of replies and DMs singing its praise. So what does it do? Not much, really … Except that it shows you, in a simple but effective graphic format, where all the space on your hard drive is being used up. Folders filled with old save game files, raw images downloaded from your digital camera, gigs of mp3s … It’s amazing how much space gets devoted to things we don’t give much thought to, but when you take the time to clear out old data and files that you no longer need, you’ll free up valuable space AND make it much faster to run full system diagnostics. The first time I ran SpaceSniffer, I was able to root out almost 20 gigs of extraneous files I no longer needed. 20 gigs! At the time, I only had a 150 GB hard drive, so freeing up that much space was massive. Even if you’re one of the lucky ones with a terabyte drive and legions of extra space, it’s still a great little app for being able to visualize where the space on your drive is being allocated, and finding any surprising space-hogs that might be left over after you uninstall games and programs. I dig it!

Step Four: Defrag and optimize.

Ahhh, the dreaded defragment. PC World said in it’s latest issue that it was a largely unnecessary process for folks with decent computers running a modern OS, but I’ve always noticed a substantial speed increase after a defrag/optimize session, and that alone is worth the time it takes. The good news is that the programs mentioned in Step Three will help to streamline your system so the defragger has less muck to muddle through on your PC. And there’s more good news! I’ve found a fabulous little program that will defragment and optimize your hard drive(s) quicker than the built-in Windows routine, and it it has lots of little features that can streamline the process for the future.

MyDefrag may be look unimpressive at first with its very basic interface, but it gets the job done efficiently and completely, and I can honestly say that its process has produced the most noticeable improvement to the speed of my computer over any other defragger. There are three basic routines to choose from that are meant to be run Daily, Weekly, and Monthly. (You can set up schedules if you like – personally, I prefer to run it on demand.) Since I hadn’t defragmented in a while and I had just installed new drivers and a new game, I decided to go for the Weekly (“middle ground”) routine, which defrags and optimizes without the lengthy file sorting. It still took about 3 hours to complete, but once it had finished and I rebooted my system, the speed improvement was immediate and definite.

Step Five: PLAY!

Survey says? Whether it was one tweak or the combination of everything I’d done, Fallout 3 is running FAR more smoothly than it was last year. I still experience a crash after 5 or 6 hours of cumulative gameplay, but the graphics are smooth as butter using the settings that the game launcher recommended based on my system (medium). It looks great, plays like a dream, and is even more addictive than I recall, especially with all the new DLC packs. (New quest lines! New weapons! New NPCs to murder ruthlessly! Om nom nom.)

So if you don’t get another post for a little while, blame Bethesda! In the meantime, I’ll be wandering about with my Xuanlong Assault Rifle and my radio tuned to the sweet vintage sounds of GNR, ready to to wreak some havoc the likes of which the Wasteland ain’t never seen. Don’t wait up. ;-)

{ 46 comments }

Cult of Celebrity

by Scarlett on December 6, 2009 · View Comments

in Popped Culture

Seasons Greetings, dear readers! Apologies for the long overdue post, as things have been rather loco here at Casa Scarlett, business (and busy-ness) wise. But I’m sure you’ve had plenty of other eyebrow-raising reading material with which to indulge yourself. What’s that? Not keeping up on the latest sordid scandals? Let me sum up for you. In the last week or so, Alec Baldwin turned into a whiny attention whore; Adam Lambert proved to be an actual whore; and Tiger Woods went from being known as a master golfer to a raging swinger, when (following a truly bizarre car accident), five – count em, FIVE! – different women came forward with claims of having had affairs with the married father of two.

vibrating touch women Cult of Celebrity
Two out of three women agree: Tiger Woods is a cheatin’ whore.

Interestingly enough, I happened to read a magazine article the other day about the phenomenon of “schadenfreude” – which is a German word occasionally used in English that roughly translates to “harm joy” – or more specifically, deriving pleasure from the harm that befalls others. And it’s a perfect way to describe the general public’s rabid interest in anything having to do with sex or scandal (or preferably, a combination of the two) when it involves someone of celebrity status. Think about it: men cheat on their wives every day – it’s nothing new, and it’s not a practice that will die out anytime soon. But somehow it becomes hypnotically mesmerizing when the person involved has a certain level of notoriety. Now I’ll admit, Tiger’s case is particularly compelling when you factor in the odd way it all began, and the sheer number of women making claims. But even then, it’s nothing truly earth-shattering – and yet, the story has been dominating all news outlets for well over a week. Although I do have to thank the man for giving us a grateful reprieve from non-stop gossip about the New Moon cast. Huzzah for small miracles!

Still, I think the bulk of the public’s fascination could certainly be chalked up to a case of schadenfreude, and it’s easy to understand why. The Average Joe will never know the fame, success, or wealth of someone like Tiger Woods, and there’s a bit of a perverse thrill in seeing someone so seemingly perfect and untouchable take a tumble. But how did we let ourselves become so obsessed with the foibles of celebrities? Don’t we have our own lives and families and careers to worry about?

Now please don’t mistake this as me rockin’ some kind of “holier than thou” attitude; after all, I’ve been subscribing to Entertainment Weekly for years, and while they’re pretty good about not going over the top with scandal speculation, they are a pop culture “news” outlet, first and foremost. I just don’t see how these stories warrant endless news coverage. It’s one thing to be informed, but another thing to be inundated, amirite? If anything, I blame people like Perez Hilton who makes a living off exploiting the famous (and infamous) in his Blog o’ Shame. I do appreciate how celebrities are made accountable for their wrong-doings via public scrutiny, though. When you have people like Lindsay Lohan getting away with DUIs and drug possession charges with barely a slap on the wrist from those who are supposed to be judging her crimes fairly, it’s good to see that the public isn’t so forgiving. Still, I’m sure that Tiger will bounce back over time. Famous men have traditionally suffered much less backlash in the wake of infidelity than women (see: former US President, Bill Clinton). Although I hope that his wife takes him to court for every penny that he’s worth. I’m sure she’s not an unerring saint, but girlfriend deserves some major coin for this mess!

Aww, fuck. Now I’ve gone and dedicated an entire blog post to this junk – I’m truly no better than the rest. Quick, someone recommend a good game or movie to review! When does Avatar come out again?

Damn you, pop culture holiday slump! ashamed Cult of Celebrity

{ 21 comments }

Holidaze

by Scarlett on November 27, 2009 · View Comments

in Randomnation

I hope you all had a magically delicious Thanksgiving! Mine was stuff’d with fun, food and frivolity as always – although this year it was punctuated by my step-dad’s insistence that I watch an episode of Stripperella, which he kept manipulating on the DVR amidst chuckles of glee. “Look, honey – she’s has a pole between her legs!” (See, prudes and naysayers? The dirty mind and “punny” sense of humor runs in the family, honestly!)

Stripperella

I haven’t yet decided if Stripperella is a stroke of cheesy, dirty brilliance or just plain awful, and you kind of have to take a pause for thought on this one, since Stan Lee is the creator. But if you’d like a glimpse of how ridiculous this show is, not only was Pamela Anderson providing the voice of Stripperella, but in this particular episode, Pamela Anderson shows up as a character, and the two proceed to have a conversation. I’m pretty sure I lost a few brain cells somewhere between that exchange and the introduction of the evil Queen Clitoris who lives on a pussy-shaped, “crab” infested island. I know, I know! On one hand, I’m jealous that I’m not the one who conceptualized this hot mess, and on the other hand, I feel so dirty and violated that I kind of want to take a mile long swim in a pool filled with hand sanitizer. It sure did make for an interesting Thanksgiving though!

And today we have the phenomenon known as Black Friday, which marks the frantic countdown to the gift-giving holiday season, and every retail worker’s ultimate nightmare. I vividly remember my first, last, and only Black Friday experience ten years ago, working at The Earth Shop in the local mall. What the hell is an Earth Shop, you ask? Well … Mix the “New Age” book section from Borders with the headache-inducing smellables from Yankee Candles; add in the weird gift items from Spencer’s and Hot Topic (minus the bawdy sense of humor and the emo/goth vibe); toss around some racks of nondescript jewelry and clothing items, and the most irritatingly noisy wind chimes in existence; don’t forget the perpetually leaking water fountains and the bins of polished rocks for the rugrats to steal (because it’s soooooo bad-ass to palm a piece of amethyst). But look beyond the vaguely metaphysical tchotchkes, and you’d discover that it was all a ruse – a flim-flam operation with the sole intention of hiding our owner’s true source of income … A practice so vile, so loathsome, it caused me to break out in a fever any time a customer deigned to utter those five ugly words:

“Got any new Beanie Babies?!”

Noooooooooo!   We will eat your soul.

Yes, I aided and abetted in the evil that was the Beanie Baby craze of the ’90s. *Hangs head in shame* I needed a job, man! I was paying my own way through college, and I had no car at the time so my only option was the shopping mall because it was within walking distance of my house, and all the other jobs were taken, and … and …

Well, it was better than whoring mah body for extra ducats. Just barely.

Other than dealing with the rabid soccer moms who literally clung to the metal security fences in fevered anticipation of the latest arrivals, it made for an interesting choice of employment. I looked forward to daily sexual harassment from the guys at the Verizon booth (seriously, is it on the job description that you simply must be a douche to hawk cell phones?) and I had regular exchanges with customers about the quality of my aura, the flow of my chi, and whether or not I had recently cleared my chakras. (For once, those are not sexual innuendos!)

But then Black Friday came around, and it was like a perfect storm. Imagine sale-starved, Beanie-ravenous mothers with the grizzle of 10 hours of Thanksgiving prep still clinging to their fingernails. Aging hippies swathed in tie-dye and hemp, hovered protectively around the Nag Champa. An endless succession of frightened looking men purchasing chimes and fountains for their mothers-in-law. You couldn’t eat or pee for your entire shift – you were rooted to the spot, ringing up everything from CDs with titles like “Christmas with Cannibals!” to woven tapestries featuring menacing wolves and stoned polar bears. Rawr!

I think that’s the day that I vowed to avoid holiday shopping at all costs, relying instead on the internet – which has been both a boon and the bane of my existence, as it’s far too easy to let your fingers do the walkin’ and your credit cards do the talkin’. This year I’m tapped out to the max, which is pretty saddening since I’ve always enjoyed gift-giving with friends and loved ones. I’ve also noticed that the older you get, the less magic and excitement the holiday season seems to offer. This has been a downward trend since my childhood though. I remember an exchange I had in the car with my father at 8 years old:

“Dad, Santa is a LIE!” My eyes snapped with anger and my chest was puffed out in passionate frustration.

“Santa is real,” Dad replied, his eyes shifting to look at my 4 year old brother in the rear-view mirror. I took a deep breath to mount my debate.

“Then why does he have your handwriting? And why does he only like yucky oatmeal raisin cookies?” My excitement rose as I readied myself for my final piece of incriminating evidence. “And WHY doesn’t he bring me my COMPUTER so I can play OREGON TRAIL?!?!”

Dad signed wearily. “Santa’s real, okay? I promise.”

I huffed with indignation at the unsatisfactory reply. “I’m going to write this day down in my diary, and when I find out Santa’s a lie, I’m totally going to show it to you and then you’ll be sorry!”

… Which I never actually did – and I never did get my Apple IIe. Stupid, bearded, North Pole dwelling master of FAIL!

But I digress. And if I may get all melty and sentimental for a moment, the last few days have been a really sweet reminder that even if your wallet is empty, your life can still be full and rich with awesome people. So to everyone on the TSE forums, my friends on Facebook and Twitter, and those of you who’ve been kind enough to read my rambles here, I ♥ you n’ stuff!

Relax – I meant in a non-sexual way. Mostly.

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