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Leo Laporte A technology journalist, author and broadcast personality. His specialties lie in computers, the Web, video games, digital music and consumer electronics. |
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Amber MacArthur An experienced Web content and usability strategist, Amber is also a tech journalist who specializes in Internet, software, and gadget trends and tips. |
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Vertical Sync
Lance, Hamilton, ON
Q: I have a few games that require vertical sync, is this the same as syncronizing the game with the monitor? such as 72mhz? Or is this frame rate synchronizing? How does this work?
Sean’s note: With older CRT monitors, a short delay was required after drawing the last line of the picture, before heading back to the first line and starting the drawing process all over again for the next pass. Without that delay, the contents of the upper portion of the screen may not properly match the lower portion of the screen, creating images with artifacts, errors or “tearing”. This short delay allows the video component to correct the frame buffer to draw a proper image. This is used in games to ensure a proper image, but the downside is that it will effectively limit your framerate to your monitor’s refresh rate—in other words, if your monitor is set to 72 Hz, you will have a maximum frame rate of 72 frames per second. If you’re playing a game where frames per second must be maxed out to avoid being fragged, you may want to turn this off if the game will allow it, especially if you’re using an LCD display set to 60 Hz.
XP Restore Not Working
Wayne, Blacks Harbour, NB
Q: Recently I found my Windows XP has stopped allowing my firewall to work and my systems restore has shaded out with check mark so now I cant clear my restore points.
Reinstall Windows. You almost certainly have a piece of malware on your system that’s attempting to prevent you from removing it.
XP Won’t Play My Game
Terry, Williams Lake, BC
Q: Greetings: I bought an Acer T-135 from staples and upgraded it with more ram ( 768 mb) and and Gigabyte The reason I bought this computer was to play a game, surf the net, watch videos on the net. To do most of this an old suped-up 486 would do the trick…aaaah…the game, that is a different matter. I am hooked on the Total War series I needed the processor speed and video card to play the game. It all went well until Rome: Total War came out. My old computer just wasn’t up to snuff, hence the Acer T-135. Well the game wouldn’t run, or wouldn’t load ( video card unstable.Lock ups..crashes etc. Many times I reloading my HDrive after one too many crashes I finally put my ME back on. Low and behold it works. So what is it that the video card/Acer and XP do not like about each other? Soon the ME will be ‘discontinued’ and the XP will be useless to me
Rome: Total War came out in 2004 - so it’s definitely Windows XP compatible. In fact, it should run best under XP.Sean’s note: If Windows ME will play the game fine but Windows XP wouldn’t, my biggest question would be whether or not the Windows installation had all of the newest upgrades necessary to play the game. A lot of games these days (that one included) need at least DirectX 9.0b in order to function properly; if you hadn’t doublechecked the version of DirectX to make sure it was the most current one (it’s now up to version 9.0c), when you finally have to go back to XP because the 5-year support window for WinME lapses, make sure you’ve double-checked that. You can always doublecheck that all of your DirectX components are functioning as they should by going Start>Run>cmd and then typing “dxdiag” to bring up the DirectX Diagnostic Tool.
The other thing you may want to consider is the graphics card driver for XP — you should doublecheck that the graphics component is up to date. The Aspire T135 uses on-board graphics from VIA, so you may only be able to use the WinXP driver from the Acer site, but it may be worth looking on the VIA site to see if there’s an update for the K8VM800 graphics component.
