Ever had these issues when buying a game?

• Can your computer run that game?
• Ever confused about what is listed for minimum system requirements?
• Do you know if your processor has enough speed?
• Is your video card powerful enough?
• Do you have enough RAM?

With the arrival of new and resource intensive games for the PC platform, it has become increasingly difficult for old PCs – aged two or more – to run these games. The requirements for such games have shot up immensely over the last couple of years.

Most games that are produced for PCs now-a-days have a minimum requirement of:

1 Gib RAM

128 Mib Graphics card with certain features like pixel shader and T&L

Processor requirements have gone up as well.

The one way to check if the game you want will run on your PC is to verify the minimum and recommended requirements for the game on the manufacturer’s site. However it does not end there. Even if your PC has the mimimum requirements satisfied, there may be one or two minor requirements which may never be mentioned in your game manual. So, when you try to run your game, the obvious happens and the game fails to load owing to the lack of a single feature.

This may range from an older version of a vertex shader or pixel shader may make the entire investment on the game go waste.

But there is one way to find out exactly if your PC would satisfy the minimum and recommended requirements and I found it to be amazingly useful and free.

System Requirements Lab presents you, something called the System Requirements Test or SR test for free. Using this you are able to determine how capable your system is of running a particular game. You also get a (more…)

For most sites, the background of each page is as important to the design as is the main content area. The backgrounds come in varied types: striped, checked, plain and sometimes with a lot of weird designs. Among these, the striped backgrounds can be used to produce a pleasant visual effect when used in sync with appropriate designs.

Most professional designers create their backgrounds using Photoshop or the GIMP or the likes of them. But, for laymen it is very difficult to do so unless he/she is following a tutorial. Now, this is indeed time consuming and error prone. So, this service called Stripe Generator is the boon for all the amateur designers and time conservers out there.

This nifty tool can be used to (more…)

I have come across sites offering free disposable email IDs for its users. Now in these type of sites we are forced to use the email inbox provided by them. Usually, these inboxes suck and lack most of the features in regular mail providers to view mails. So these services can only be used for the most basic of emails.

Also, these in these mailboxes we are unable to view the email with the hypertext that is a part of it. So using these disposable email ID services may be a pain sometimes. At this point, it would be better to use a service that provides a temporary redirection for your emails. This service is called spambox and enables you to setup a temporary email redirect.

Why do you (more…)

DropBoks is a basically another free online file storage service. Here, you are able to store your files and retrieve them whenever you please. Once you arrive at the site, you are greeted with a simple, no-nonsense interface completely devoid of ads. Why I am mentioning this is because most free file storage or file sharing sites put up ads in just about any and every square pixel of area available on their site. This would actually make it seem like the site’s primary service is advertising. This site, however comes as a refreshing relief from such sites.

The upload area is, as the name suggests, a box!

For a first (more…)

YouSwap is, simply put, a file sharing service. You are able to store your files in your account at YouSwap, share them with your friends and also download them yourself later on. This scenario comes into play when you travel elsewhere and don’t want to take your files with you in a flash drive or a CD/DVD etc. It would be better to store the files in YouSwap’s servers and then retrieve them easily from the place you are at (provided it has an internet connection).

• For the guest user here, you are simply able to (more…)