| jDome - The Next Generation of Vapourware | |
| By John Gatt onTuesday, May 13, 2008 1:28 PM | |
| Earlier on this year, I covered the benefits of widescreen vs pan and scan gaming. The most interesting thing about widescreen gaming is the field of view it provides. This guy, John Nilsson, is trying to take that field of view one step further wit the use of larger resolutions projected onto a dome. jDome is his new invention which has been patented but is till in prototype stage. Although this guy doesn’t make a great video presenter I do find the product, the jDome, to be kinda interesting, although it may be more of a novelty than a practical application. The room required to set this up is a lot more than most people would have available in their average lounge room or study. | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| The Joys of Auto-Defragmenting | |
| By John Gatt onMonday, May 12, 2008 10:01 AM | |
| So, you get up on Monday morning and the first thing you want to do is get stuck into work, complete the benchmarking you started on Friday and move on. It doesn’t quite work that way with Windows Vista. As I loaded up the Crysis benchmark, I noticed a whole heap of hard drive activity and then I remember that Vista likes to automatically defragment hard drives. You watch the RAM usage go through the roof and benchmarks end up no where near where they were when Vista wasn’t trying to fragment your hard drive at the same time. Little features like this are great for the average user. And I know there is a way to disable it but you’d think it would be a standard option, with easy access to turn on and off. On the other hand, ensuring that a hard drive I properly defragmented before benchmarking, is always a good idea. So rather than continuing on with the last tests I need to do with this particular video card, I’m defragmenting hard drives and typing out this bl ... |  | | Comments (1) | More... |
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| Cheap Graphics Cards | |
| By John Gatt onFriday, May 09, 2008 3:43 PM | |
| I got into an conversation earlier on in the week with some guys I was gaming with about the hardware they are using. I am really surprised how many were using sub-$100 graphics cards in their gaming systems. One particular guild member was quite proud of her new $60 graphics card and how much it had dramatically improved her gaming experience in WoW. I really suppose that, being in the industry, I have been spoilt by having access to the latest and greatest graphics cards. The reality really kind of struck me this week, as I am testing budget graphics cards that are priced between $50-80. It surprised me how much these cards are actually capable of and how good games can look at low settings. Developers use tricks and techniques and they are improving them all the time. This has mainly happened due to them having no choice if t ... | | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| Grand Theft Auto 4 | |
| By John Gatt onTuesday, April 29, 2008 4:05 PM | |
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Grand Theft Auto 4 hits the shop shelves today (locally). I can’t say that I was surprised to see lines going outside the local EB shop. What did surprise me though, was the amount of mothers that had been convinced to g down and pick up a copy of the latest game for their kids, while their kids were at school. I heard the attendant behind the counter ask several of the mothers what their kids ages are. One that I overhead said she had an eight and a nine year old and not to worry because they’ve been dying to have this game for ages and all their friends will have it. Even though this latest episode in the series is rated MA, the pure hype behind it is almost making it a requirement for any cool console lovin’ kid at school to have it. The hype is not being gene ... | | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| Moving Day | |
| By John Gatt onThursday, April 24, 2008 11:57 AM | |
| You all might have wondered why blogs and content have been a bit slow over the last several weeks. To be honest, what I’ve been doing hasn’t been really interesting on the IT side of things. It’s been productive for the future of the site, but do you all really want to hear about me getting acid burns on my feet while cleaning the concrete floor of our new studio? Didn’t think so. 
Anyway, we’ve totally converted what was a two car garage into a studio which will allow us to do regular videos for the site. Also, I’m thinking about podcasts, if we can get the context right. While I’ve been scrubbing floors and walls I’ve taken the opportun ... |
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| The Joys of Vista Service Pack 1 | |
| By John Gatt onThursday, March 20, 2008 9:24 AM | |
| I woke up this morning and I thought the first thing I’ll do is update both my work PCs to Windows Vista Service pack 1 (SP1). For those of you who missed it, Windows Vista SP1 was released on March 18th. I have been a beta tester for Microsoft for many years now and I have been impressed with Vista SP1 on my notebook. I must say I was surprised when they released SP1 to manufacturers and didn’t allow the people who have been beta testing it and providing feedback to update properly at that time. Actually that’s not quite true, they allowed premium paying beta testers to upgrade. Any other beta testers were made to wait until SP 1 was made available to the public. So anyway, the first PC I thought I’d install it on was the gaming P ... | | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| Non-techie Friends | |
| By John Gatt onFriday, March 07, 2008 10:45 AM | |
| I always find it entertaining when friends try to get technical and blunder. Yesterday we had a friend trying to describe her new ADSL modem she got. She wanted to set it up in her house and really had no idea how to do it. When describing it, she referred to it as having “whiffy”. It took us a couple of seconds to realize that what he was trying to say was that it had Wi-Fi. J She called it “whiffy”, like what you might call an old pair of socks that are in need of a wash! Then we explained to her that she needed a dongle and even showed her one. And for the life of me, I could not explain to her how it was connecting to the modem without a wire. It had no aerial, so it didn’t make sense to her that it was sending and receiving stuff wirelessly. | | | Comments (1) | More... |
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| Bit-tech: Babbling About Misinterpreting the Enthusiast | |
| By John Gatt onWednesday, March 05, 2008 2:52 PM | |
| There is an interesting and entertaining article over at Bit-tech about the way in which the industry is currently miss-representing enthusiasts or enthusiast products. The main thrust of the article is about chipsets and motherboards. After spending many years in the industry and seeing both sides, I can understand his interpretation of the state of play. I also get the impression that he kind of came into the game at about the half way point as he doesn’t touch on any of the older hard-core stuff from the dawn of the enthusiast case mod building days. He seems to blame the manufacturers for wanting to produce everything as enthusiast products and goes into BIOS and voltages available to the average user. | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| The Extra Day Filler blog. | |
| By John Gatt onSaturday, March 01, 2008 7:27 PM | |
| Friday 29th February 2008 is kind of an extra day, so I thought I'd fill it in with some of the stuff I have let out over the last few months and use this extra day to re-evaluate the way in which I blog. Every couple of days, Fiona asks me, what are you blogging about today. I think about it for a minute, realize that I am still working on the same stuff that I was working on a couple of days ago and then end up not blogging. But yet, every time a friend comes around, I find I have plenty to talk about. So do I blog on just IT stuff, or do I blog about all sorts of things that I'm doing? Is it possible that some of the other things in my life, might be of interest to readers who visit tech sites? Hell yeah. So why don't I blog about it? Well this is my blog to change all my future blogs. I have been so hung up on finding something ingenious to say about a topic in the tech industry that I have neglected all of the ... | | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| I’m a type of hands on guy | |
| By John Gatt onWednesday, January 30, 2008 4:07 PM | |
| I get asked a lot about what hardware I use in my gaming rig, what I recommend for upgrades and even what’s the best keyboard, mouse etc. Now yes I test a lot of stuff, but the only way to really get to know something is to use it full time. 
I love the people I come across that are still using XP, telling me how bad Vista is and when I tell them I use Vista on my main work PC (notebook) and my gaming PC, they kinda get thrown back and ask why? We have the whole industry telling us how it sux and XP is better because it’s faster and simpler. The funny thing is I remember people saying the same thing about Windows XP vs 2K. Does the whole industry forget the Infinite Loop or NV Loop/BSOD error? I spent mo ...
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