• Do any needed hardware upgrades and test your computer thoroughly
• Optimize your system
• Make sure there is enough hard drive space to install games
• Defragment hard drive
• Run a virus check

• RAM: You want 4GB for gaming. You might be able to get away with 2GB with some tweaking, but not if you are running a 64-bit OS. It doesn't hurt anything to put 4GB in a system running a 32-bit OS, but you'll only be able to use about 3GB of it.
• Video Card: nVidia chipset, PCIe, supports at least DX11. The nVidia GeForce GTX 460 1GB is the best-bang-for-buck right now at $130. If you have the money, the nVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti is a great choice.
• CPU: Dual-core or better and is 3 GHz or higher actual speed. The Intel Core i5-2500K is the best bang for buck. The new AMD FX line of CPUs are not so great, and the Phenom II processors are getting hard to find.
• Motherboard: Built-in 1000T network, SATA 3.0 NCQ, PCIe, compatible with dual-channel RAM or better. For AMD processors, get an AMD chipset with ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration). I recommend Gigabyte and MSI motherboards.
• Hard Drive: SATA 3.0 with NCQ and at least a 16 MB buffer. I recommend Seagate, and I don't recommend Western Digital. For best speed, I recommend getting two and putting them in a RAID-0 (striped). I don't recommend Solid State Drives (SSDs) at this time. They are too expensive and have low capacity, although they are stupidly fast. If being the first guy to load a map is important to you, then consider SSD. I'd personally put the money into a faster graphics card. Because of flooding in Thailand, hard drive prices are stupidly high, and will likely stay that way until 2013.
• Case: Uses 120mm or larger fans (more air current and less noise than 80mm). Has a fan that blows outside air directly on the CPU and/or graphics card, and a fan that blows out the top is nice. I'm a big fan of Antec cases. They are built well, they won't cut your hands, and they have great air flow.
• Power Supply: 500-watt, ATX 12V v2.2 or better. Make sure it has two 6-pin PCI-E connectors for modern graphics cards, SATA power connectors for your hard drives, and a 24-pin connector for the motherboard. Depending on your motherboard, you might also need an 8-pin 12V power connector. Some high-end graphics cards want a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCIe power connector, so check to make sure what you need before you buy. I like Antec power supplies. Avoid generic power supplies! They are made with cheap parts that will likely explode (not kidding).
• LCD: 8-bit color or higher, 8ms or lower response time white-to-black, 1000:1 or higher actual contrast ratio, dynamic contrast, DVI or HDMI connector to PC (not VGA)
• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit for gaming. Ubuntu Linux 64-bit for everything else.

When upgrading, keep in mind that you won't notice anything less than a 20% increase in speed. For example, if you have a game that gets between 50-60FPS, making it feel choppy, it could be smoothed out to a steady 60FPS by a 20% performance increase. Anything less than that and you will still drop below 60FPS, making it still feel choppy. If your game is running less than 50FPS, a 20% increase won't help at all. It will still feel choppy. Make sure you look at benchmarks to determine if your upgrade is really worth it. I personally avoid hardware upgrades unless I can see at least a 50% increase in performance.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure you do any hardware upgrades or tweaking before you come to a LAN party. You'll be in a world of hurt if you discover after arriving at the party that your system isn't working well. And I'm not too excited about spending hours of the party helping to fix your computer issues.

Here are the items you should upgrade on your system in order of importance.

You should have at least 4GB RAM. You will see a significant performance boost in Windows applications and games with 4GB RAM. It is the cheapest upgrade, and usually has the most striking results. If you are still running a 32-bit OS, 3GB RAM is enough.

For DDR2 RAM, you'll want DDR2-800 (a.k.a. PC2-6400). DDR2-1066 gives you some breathing room for FSB overclocking, but it's pretty expensive. For DDR3 RAM, you'll want DDR3-1600 (a.k.a. PC3-12800). Although it may be cheaper, don't settle for less.

Keep in mind that if you get more than 3GB RAM, you will need a 64-bit OS to use all of it. The 32-bit versions of XP, Vista and Windows 7 (which are the standard versions) can only access 2.5 to 3.3GB RAM. There is no harm in having 4GB with a 32-bit OS. You just won't be able to use all of it. 3GB isn't too bad, though. There aren't any current games or programs that benefit from more than 3GB, unless you are doing some heavy multitasking, which you shouldn't do while gaming anyway. If you plan to do video editing, and have for instance Adobe Premiere, Adobe After-Effects and Adobe Encore all running at the same time, you can justify 8GB of RAM.

If you are running a 64-bit OS, you should have 4 GB RAM minimum, because programs take more RAM when runnig a 64-bit OS. For my fellow geeks: In a 32-bit OS, when a program needs to allocate one, two or three bytes of RAM, four bytes are actually allocated to keep it 32-bit aligned. This wastes some space. For a 64-bit OS, an allocation of 1 to 7 bytes will actually allocate 8 bytes to keep it 64-bit aligned. Because of this, applications end up allocating more RAM on a 64-bit OS than a 32-bit OS. A 64-bit OS won't double your RAM use, but it will significantly increase it compared to a 32-bit OS, so you will definitely run out of RAM sooner on a 64-bit OS.

If you really want to be future-proof, 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM is only $45, compared to $30 for 4GB of DDR3-1600.

I highly recommend buying a name brand of RAM, such as Crucial, G.Skill, Kingston, OCX or Patriot. I also recommend buying RAM in twin-packs (for dual-channel motherboards) or triple-packs (for triple-channel motherboards). That way you know for sure the DIMMs will work well together (some don't).

RAM costs fluctuate greatly. At the beginning of 2009, you could buy 4GB of DDR2 RAM for $50. But by the end of 2009, it had gone up to $120! But as of December 2011, it has gone back down to $35. DDR3 RAM is cheaper than DDR2 now. 4GB of DDR3-1600 RAM runs about $30. 8GB of DDR3-1600 is about $45.

Keep in mind that you may need to do some BIOS tweaking in order to get the most out of your RAM. Most RAM will report a lesser speed to the motherboard than it is capable of achieving. Your RAM may provide an Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) that better motherboards will read and automatically use. If not, you may need to manually increase your RAM voltage and timing to get the most out of it.

If you have at least 4GB of RAM, then your graphics card is the next thing to upgrade. In my experience, a graphics card is only useful for about 4 years before it will need to be replaced. Every 4 years, graphics cards double in speed. A graphics card that was fast enough to play all your games smoothly 4 years ago with high resolution and high settings will struggle with the today's games, even at low resolutions and low settings.

I highly recommend nVidia chipset graphics cards for better performance, quality, dependability, value, and infinitely better drivers.

I recommend a graphics card that supports at least DirectX 10 and Shader Model 3 in hardware. DirectX 11 support would be even better.

Games will run faster on newer graphics cards, even with an older CPU, as long as your CPU is fast enough to drive the graphics card to its potential. For example, I have a GeForce 8600GTS (circa 2007). It runs at the exact same speed on an Athlon X2 5600+ as it does on an overclocked Intel Core i5-2500K. That's because the Athlon X2 5600+ is fast enough to drive the card to its potential. For another example, I saw a 22% speed increase with the GTX 260 on my E8500 vs. my E6600. The bottom line is, you may see a performance increase in games by upgrading your CPU, but if your graphics card is already being driven to its potential, a graphics card upgrade would be more beneficial. I will explore this further in the CPU section below.

If you still use an AGP card, it's way past time to upgrade to PCIe. AGP is dead. The newest AGP cards are several generations old now, and won't play any of our LAN party games smoothly at any setting.

The GTX 460 1GB is $130. It's a great choice. It will play all our games smoothly at 1920x1080. The GTX 560 Ti is $210, and it's about 30% faster than the GTX 460 1GB. I don't recommend a more expensive card.

In general, most games are made for the average computer. So it is usually safe to buy a mid-range graphics card, which goes for around $150-$200. Don't go for a cheap card (under $100), because you will likely be disappointed. Cards in that range are not usually meant for gaming. On the other hand, you will likely be disappointed with the value of a high-end card ($250 or higher range). They don't tend to be much faster than the mid-range card, and that is especially true if your CPU isn't very fast. A mid-range card is usually your best buy.

Let's say you budget $6.25 per month for a graphics card update. Every two years you can buy a mid-range card for $150. For example, you can buy a GTS 460 768MB today for $140 (if you can find it). Two years ago, the best card for that price was the GTS 250. The GTS 460 is 53% faster than the GTS 250. In two years, there will likely be another graphics card that will be around 50% faster than the GTX 460 768MB for about $150, and you can buy that one. This will keep your computer up to date with the latest graphics technology. On the other hand, you can get a GTX560 Ti right now for about $230. It's 43% faster than the GTX 460 768MB, but in two years you could buy a card that is just as fast for half the price. At $6.25 per month, you would have to save up for 3-4 years to buy the high-end card, but in two years your high-end card will perform like the current mid-range card. By the time you can afford to upgrade, your once high-end card will perform like a low-end card. If you look at it this way, since both options cost about the same amount of money, it makes more sense to go for the mid-range card and keep it updated every two years. However, if you have enough money to budget $10 per month toward a graphics card upgrade, then go for a $240 card every two years. That will keep you always ahead of the performance curve.

For the games we play at my LAN parties, you will want at least a GeForce GTS250 512MB. Lesser models will not perform well in all our games, even with low settings.

If you get at least 4000 for your SM2 and SM3/HDR scores in 3DMark06, then your graphics card is fast enough to play most of the LAN party games smoothly with some tweaking. But for some of the newer games, you'll want something closer to 6700 or higher.

If you still have a single-core processor, you should upgrade. You will see a noticeable improvement in speed by upgrading to a multi-core CPU. Most popular games made since 2008 do not run well on a single-core processor. Although older games are not multi-threaded, they benefit from a dual-core CPU because the OS and hardware drivers require some CPU as well. With two or more cores, a single core can be dedicated to running the game, where the other core or cores are running the OS and driver code.

As I mentioned before, you want to make sure your CPU is fast enough to drive your graphics card. As long as your CPU is fast enough for your graphics card, then unless you are doing video processing or some other CPU-intensive task, having a high-end CPU won't benefit you much.

Tests show that games get an 80% boost in speed by going from a single-core to a dual-core of the same speed. A triple-core is nearly twice as fast as a same-clocked single-core in games, and 20% faster than a same-clocked dual-core. There is currently no benefit with a quad-core for gaming compared to a triple-core, unless you have CPU-consuming tasks running in the background, such as an anti-virus scan (which you will typically disable while gaming anyway). For multi-threaded applications, such as video compression, a quad-core is 87% faster than a single-core, and 35% faster than a dual-core.

Intel vs. AMD? If you have the money and you want a really fast CPU, Intel is the way to go. If you have a smaller budget, an AMD CPU will play games just as well, but not be quite as fast for non-gaming tasks. It all depends on your end goal. Typically, if you have less than $200 to spend on a CPU, you should go with AMD. If you have more than $200 to spend, go with Intel.

If you are really strapped for cash, go for an Athlon II X2 255 for $60. It starts off at 3.1 GHz, but you can crank it to 3.72 GHz easily at stock voltage and using the stock fan, and it stays nice and cool. With this overclocked CPU and an $80 9800GT graphics card, you could play Nations at War at 1600x1200 with the highest in-game settings.

The Phenom II X4 955 is $112. You might be able to unlock a Phenom II X2 555 into a Phenom II X4 955, but if you really need the extra cores, it's better to just buy the Phenom II X4 955. For a budget gaming PC, the Phenom II X4 955 is the way to go. You can also overclock it to 3.7GHz extremely easily (just bump the clock multiplier from the stock 16X to 18.5X), and it will outperform a stock-clocked Core i5-760 that costs almost twice as much.

If you have more money to spend, the Intel Core i5-2500K is a great choice. It is a strong performer both for single and multi-threaded applications. The CPU, motherboard and 4GB DDR3 RAM will set you back about $350. In my testing, a stock-clocked i5-2500K is only 19% faster than the Phenom II X4 955 at 3.7GHz. But if you bump up the i5-2500K to 4.5GHz (which is easy to do), it is 52% faster.

I don't recommend a CPU more expensive than the i5-2500K. The i7-2600K adds Hyperthreading for a total of 8 threads, but you won't notice a difference in gaming, and it is almost 50% more expensive. If you are regularly editing and compressing HD video or rendering 3D animation (think Pixar), then the i7-2600K would make more sense.

If you have a CPU with two or more cores running around 3GHz or better and gets 3300 or higher in the 7-Zip R/U benchmark, and 2800 or higher in the 3DMark06 CPU benchmark, then you should not need to upgrade. You would probably benefit from a faster graphics card instead.

Looking at the i5-2500K as an example, it would cost you about $360 to buy a new CPU ($200), motherboard ($100) and RAM ($60) for an upgrade. If you saved $15 a month, you could save up enough to do this kind of upgrade once every two years. If you went with a more budget approach, say the Phenom II X4 955, it would cost about $240 for the CPU ($120), motherboard ($80) and RAM ($40). You would only need to save $10 a month for two years, or $20 a month for one year for this kind of upgrade.

The only reasons to upgrade a motherboard is if your current one is broken, or if you want to upgrade your CPU or graphics card, and your current motherboard won't support it. For example, if you have an AGP motherboard, you definitely want to upgrade to a motherboard with PCIe so you can use the latest graphics cards. However, I recommend against upgrading just the graphics slot on a motherboard. If you have an AGP slot in your motherboard, then your CPU is likely very old as well. Upgrade to a new motherboard and processor at the same time. It's worth the extra cost. If you haven't upgraded in a while, you may also need to upgrade your RAM.

It doesn't hurt to have a motherboard with onboard stuff like sound and networking. In the past this was bad, because the onboard components performed very poorly compared to PCI versions. These days, the onboard stuff works better than most of the PCI alternatives, and having fewer PCI cards in your case means your computer will run cooler and use less power. Also, things like gigabit networking run much faster when they are onboard, because they are not limited to the speed of the PCI bus. Onboard devices will take some CPU power to run, but with a modern multi-core processor, you won't even notice.

For AMD processors, an AMD chipset is a great choice. Some AMD chipsets have Advanced Clock Calibration, which can unlock extra cores on some dual and triple-core AMD CPUs. There is nothing more fun than seeing a dual-core CPU turn into a quad-core simply by changing a BIOS setting! There are fewer driver issues now with AMD chipsets than there used to be.

When you buy a motherboard and plan to use onboard sound, make sure you get a motherboard with Realtek High Definition Audio chipset that starts with an 8 (7.1 audio) or 6 (5.1 audio), such as ALC662 or ALC888. Avoid Realtek chipsets that start with 2, such as ALC262, since they only have one sound channel and no sound acceleration, which is bad for gaming.

I recommend Gigabyte and MSI motherboads. I have had pretty good success with motherboards from EVGA, ASUS and Biostar, although they have their quirks (especially ASUS). I have had very mixed results with ECS. Expect to pay $80 to $200 for a good motherboard.

I recommend a 7200 RPM Serial ATA (SATA) II 3 Gbps NCQ-capable hard drive or better with at least a 16 MB buffer (32 MB is better). I recommend Seagate and Maxtor for brands, and I don't recommend Western Digital. Maxtors and Seagates (in my experience) run cooler and quieter and have better reliability. I've seen many WDs die, and they tend to run extremely loud and hot. By hot, I mean 10-20 C higher than other brand drives. As of December 2011, you can get a 1 TB SATA2 drive with 32 MB cache for $100. But due to severe flooding in Thailand in 2011 (where most hard drives are made), hard drive prices are likely to go up for the next year or two.

If you want high speed for your hard drives, you can put two or more in a RAID-0, which stripes data across the drives. When data is written, it writes some to the first drive, and then some to the second, and then the first again, and so on until everything is written. If you have two drives, half of your data is on one drive, and half is on the other. Because the drives take turns, it reduces the latency of having to wait for reads and writes to complete, especially as your hard drive fills up, which usually makes it slower. The danger in using RAID-0 is if one of the drives dies, you lose all of your data. If you use a single drive and it dies, you may have the option of emptying your bank account to get data recovered from the drive. But with RAID-0, there is no way to recover your data across multiple drives. Don't use RAID-0 for long-term storage of important data. Use it only for games and software that would benefit from faster loading speed.

I can't really recommend a Solid State Drive (SSD) at this point. While they are certainly faster than a regular hard drive, they hold a lot less data, and are a LOT more expensive. While there are certain bragging rights for being the first person to load a new level at a LAN party, in the end it doesn't really do much to enhance your overall gaming experience. It certainly won't make your games have higher frame rates or better image quality. It would be better to invest your money in 4GB RAM, a faster CPU, or a faster graphics card than a faster hard drive. You could get an 80GB SSD for $150 and be the first to load the next level, or you could spend that $150 on a newer graphics card, and be the one enjoying the level itself with all the eye-candy turned on. That 80GB SSD card reads at 200MB/sec, but a RAID-0 with two 500GB SATA hard drives will cost you about $100, and will run at 100MB/sec, plus you'll have 12.5X as much storage space.

Remember to backup important data often. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are cheap, and a USB thumb drive or external hard drive is also handy for backing up important files. Hard drives are like light bulbs. They will eventually die and need to be replaced. Don't be caught off guard! And keep in mind that CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives can go bad over time. Make sure you back up all your important files often, and to more than one place. For example, I keep all my family pictures on my wife's laptop, my game PC, and on my file server, plus I regularly back them up to an external hard drive, and I burn them to DVD regularly. And I keep all of the old DVDs, just in case. I do pretty much the same thing with my digital video files, and anything else I want to keep. There are also several Internet services that you can use to back up files. That's ideal, because your data is stored somewhere else. If your house burns down, your data is still safe.

For a new system or a relatively beefy older system (4GB RAM, at least a dual-core CPU), I recommend 64-bit Windows 7. While Vista was noticably sluggish compared to XP, Windows 7 is noticably faster than XP for many things like file operations, USB stuff, bootup and shutdown. You also get DX11 with Windows 7, where XP is stuck at DX9. While Vista was very quirky, especially with games, Windows 7 is nearly as solid as XP. The only exceptions I've seen are Battlefield 2 1.5 (you can't alt-tab without crashing HARD), Age of Empires II (colors are messed up unless you kill explorer.exe!), Midtown Madness II (very poor 3D performance, sound issues, no force feedback/rumble) and Star Wars Battlefront II (sound issues causing a crash to desktop). So far, those are the only things I've seen weird with Windows 7, other than the 5% decrease in CPU and graphics performance compared to XP in benchmarks. If you have a beefy enough system, that 5% probably won't matter. Windows 7 Home Premium is the one to get. Most people don't need the features in Windows 7 Ultimate, and Windows 7 Professional is geared toward business use. By the way, most of the sound issues in Windows 7 can be resolved by disabling the digital sound output (if you don't use it) and keeping a microphone plugged in at all times, and by updating to the latest sound drivers.

If you have at least 4GB RAM, I highly recommend using the 64-bit version of Windows 7. If you have less than 4GB RAM, stick with 32-bit Windows 7, and plan on upgrading to 4GB ASAP.

Keep in mind that when choosing between the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows, the 64-bit one can't run 16-bit software at all, while the 32-bit version can still run 16-bit applications. For most people, this doesn't matter. In my case, I have some older games for kids (like Reader Rabbit and JumpStart games) that are 16-bit (made in the Windows 3.1 era), so I keep 32-bit Windows on at least one of my computers for those games. Also, some of my computers only have 2 GB RAM, so I run 32-bit Windows 7 on those.

For older systems, I still recommend Windows XP with Service Pack 3. It has lower CPU and RAM requirements. It doesn't have DX10 or higher support, so your gaming is stuck at DX9 level, but there are few games out there that use DX10 or DX11 in an appreciable way. XP has 5% better CPU and graphics performance compared to Windows 7, so if you need to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your system, XP is for you. There is little difference between Home and Professional versions of XP for personal use, so you are safe going with the Home edition to save some cash, unless you plan to use more than one physical CPU, which requires the Professional version. A single-core CPU with Hyper-Threading or a multi-core CPU is still considered a single physical CPU to XP, so you can safely use the Home version with those CPUs.

I whole-heartedly recommend against Vista. It has fewer quirks now than when it was released, but performance testing has shown Windows XP with Service Pack 3 running certain applications (like Microsoft Office) twice as fast as Vista with Service Pack 1 on the same hardware. Ouch. File operations in Vista are painfully slow, especially over a network or USB. However, on a beefy enough system, gaming is now about the same between the two, as long as your game uses Direct3D and not OpenGL. In OpenGL games, your performance will drop 10-25% compared to XP on the same hardware!

Linux is also an option, but you will be limited in what games you can play. Only a few popular games have native Linux versions. Using Wine, Cedega or Crossover Games, you can run Windows games in Linux, but they may run slower and have quirks. I personally use Ubuntu Linux for my main PC at home (which is also my server). My wife also uses it on her laptop so she has a secure system for doing financial stuff. I have a separate PC for gaming, and it runs Windows 7 x64.

You should ALWAYS install Windows from a fresh install. NEVER install Windows as an upgrade! There are two reasons: The first reason is because the upgrade will often leave your system in a partially-broken state. The other reason, and probably the most important, is that if you upgrade to a new copy of Windows, the installer will flag your old Windows key as unusable with Microsoft, so you will never again be able to install the older version of Windows with the old key. If you buy an upgrade version of Windows, then you can't avoid this scenario.

If you buy an OEM copy of Windows 7, you can only activate it once. You can't ever install it on another machine, and you will have to work with Microsoft to re-enable it if you upgrade your current machine. The full retail copy will let you install it on another machine if you call Microsoft, but it will no longer work on the old machine.

LCD monitors have improved to the point that they work for gamers. They make LCDs with fast refresh speeds now, so you don't have the motion blurring issue as bad. This is a good thing, since they don't make CRTs any more! You'll want an 8ms or lower refresh speed. Be sure that the refresh speed is the time it takes to go from totally black to totally white. Some manufacturers use the speed between two nearly-indiscernable shades of grey (usually shown as GTG, or grey-to-grey), which is bogus.

You want the LCD contrast ratio to be at least 1000:1 actual. Otherwise when you play dark maps in FPS games, you'll have a hard time seeing anything. Dynamic contrast causes the backlight to dim during dark scenes so the backlight isn't as noticeable. Without dynamic contrast, black areas in the image will still look dark grey because of the backlight. Dynamic contrast helps, but don't think for a second that a 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio can compare to a CRT or plasma screen, which can produce pure black and pure white at the same time on the screen. An LCD can never do that. Also, dynamic contrast causes the screen to slowly grow brighter and darker as needed. The effect is not instantaneous. This can be distracting. Usually you can turn off dynamic contrast.

Keep in mind that an LCD is stuck at one native screen resolution. You can switch resolutions in games, but things get blurry since the graphics will be stretched or squished in order to fit the native resolution. If you buy a 1920x1200 LCD, you better make sure you have a graphics card that can run all your games well at 1920x1200. If you have to lower your resolution to play a game, you won't be happy with the blurry results.

LCDs can be fragile. If damaged, you will get dead pixels or stuck pixels which can't be fixed. Dead pixels stay black, while stuck pixels will always display a particular color (red, green, blue or some combination including white). Most LCDs can't be returned just because of dead or stuck pixels. Most stores have fine print that allows up to 10 or more dead or stuck pixels before they will accept the LCD as a return, even if it was that way straight out of the box!

Widescreen support in older games is spotty. Most newer games work fine, but older games are hit-and-miss, and usually require config file hacking, if they work at all. Even when they do work, the graphics are often stretched out. The Widescreen Gaming Forum is a great resource for making your games support widescreen.

Windows 7 and Vista have issues with some monitors. They exclusively use the EDID that your monitor provides to determine what screen modes and refresh rates will work. The problem is, sometimes the EDID information is incorrect (and in my experience, it is USUALLY incorrect), so Windows will use refresh rates that don't work with your monitor. Some games will default to running at the highest resolution and refresh rate your monitor can handle, which your graphics card might not be able to keep up with, making things choppy, as with some CRT monitors that only report their highest-supported frequency, like 2048×1536 at 85Hz. In some cases, if the information is just wrong, your monitor won't be able to display the game at all, like with some 60Hz-only LCD monitors that falsely claim they can support 75Hz. If you use VGA to attach your monitor, you can break off pin 12 to prevent Windows from reading the EDID, and then manually set the resolution and refresh rate like you used to do in XP. If you use DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort (which you usually want to do instead of VGA because it is so much clearer), you can try to use third-party software tools to force certain refresh rates, such as RefreshForce, which is fairly easy to use, but doesn't work sometimes, or RivaTuner, which is a very powerful and extremely difficult tool to use, and it sometimes doesn't work either.

The most important thing to keep in mind as a gamer is to avoid a wireless mouse! There is a ton of data going from the mouse to the computer all the time. A good mouse sends 125 updates per second of the X and Y delta and the state of all the buttons and scrollwheel! If any of that data gets lost or corrupted along the way, you will have erratic mouse behavior. Keyboards and game controllers don't transfer as much data, so it isn't as dangerous to use wireless for those, although you could still see some problems. And then there is the battery issue. Batteries in your wireless devices seem to die at the most inopportune times. Your best bet for reliable control is to stick with a wired keyboard, mouse and controller. I've witnessed many frustrated gamers fighting their wireless mice at our LAN parties and online game nights.

I highly recommend a USB optical mouse. USB mice have better refresh rates than PS/2 mice (125 updates per second vs. 40, which is too low for gaming). Optical mice don't have a mouse ball that requires constant cleaning. Laser mice currently don't offer better control than regular optical mice. In fact, they often perform much worse! Microsoft and Logitech both make excellent USB optical mice for under $20, such as the 400 DPI Logitech SBF-96 for about $15.

I personally recommend Logitech, since I have had several Microsoft optical mice die for no apparent reason, but I have had great success with Logitech mice. I like the five-button Logitech MX518. It has excellent resolution (up to 1600 DPI, and the DPI setting can be switched on-the-fly) and extremely low error rates. It outperforms nearly all current optical mice, including laser.

I definitely don't recommend a laser mouse at this time, and I again strongly recommend against a wireless mouse.

If you are looking for a game controller, for about $20 or less you can buy a PlayStation to USB adapter and use PlayStation 2 controllers. You can get these adapters at Radio Shack and Fry's. This is a great idea if you happen to already have some PS2 controllers around. If you don't, Logitech has a nice PlayStation-style USB controller for about $30. Don't bother with a cheap controller. It will only make you frustrated. Also, keep in mind that for racing, you will want an analog joystick. A digital controller is no better than using your keyboard for racing. Some people prefer XBOX 360 controllers. They sell for $35. Many new PC games support XBOX 360 controllers without any additional configuration. Some PC games ONLY support the XBOX 360 controller. Blur, I'm looking at you!

Keyboards are highly subjective. Personally, as long as the keyboard doesn't feel cheap, it connects by wire, and I can press multiple keys at once, I don't have a preference. I don't like wireless keyboards because of the batteries, responsiveness and data loss issues. When I press a key, I want it to work NOW. If possible, try the keyboard out before you buy it, and see if it feels right to you.

Avoid the really cheap keyboards. Some cheaper keyboards can't detect multiple simultaneous keypresses, which is needed for FPS games. It's not unusual to press 5 keys at once: pressing W to go forward while pressing D to move right, all while running with the shift key, ducking with the control key, and jumping with the space bar. Some nicer keyboards can handle 11 keys at the same time (for those with an extra finger on one hand, plus a third arm for the mouse). With some keyboards, you cannot press Shift, W and 2 at the same time, so in Nations at War, you can't run forward while switching to your shotgun.

Case styles are very subjective things. Some people like them flashy. Others like them plain. Either way, you want a case that can keep the components cool inside, contain all of your parts, and be easy and safe to work with.

For cooling, I prefer a case that has large fans. Larger fans move more air without as much noise. A case with a single 80mm fan in the back is not adequate these days, and you definitely can't get by with just the fan in your power supply like in the old days. You'll want at least a 120mm fan in the back, and maybe a fan on top and one on the side. Then having one or two in the front can be handy. You generally want to pull cool air in from the front, and exhaust hot air out the back and top. The two front fans pull in cool air. The one on the side blows cool air directly on your graphics card or CPU, which are the biggest heat producers in your case. Without a side port, air has to be pulled over your hard drive (another big heat producer), so the air is already warm before it gets to your hot CPU and graphics card.

Ideally, try to find fans that can be plugged into the fan headers on your motherboard so the motherboard can control their speeds. Better motherboards can increase the fan speeds as your CPU gets hotter. If you are playing a game, you'll want your fans going full tilt. If you are working or watching a movie, you won't want all the fan noise. Some fans have heat sensors built-in. These work OK, but the air inside your case is rarely hot enough to cause the fans to run full-speed, so it's kind of a waste.

Antec cases, as well as some other brands, have air filters over the front intake fans. That helps to reduce the dust inside your case. Dust makes things hotter, and heat kills your computer. Keep your air filters clean!

Some cases have USB and FireWire ports, audio connectors, and even memory card slots on them. These should be chosen according to taste. Just make sure your motherboard has the appropriate headers on it for these connectors.

Especially for the audio connectors, make sure the case matches the capabilities of your motherboard. There are two styles of audio headers: AC97 and HD Audio. They are not interchangeable. If you have an AC97 motherboard, and your case only has the HD Audio connector, then you can't use it. If you have an HD Audio motherboard and an AC97 case, then you can use it, but you will need to tell your audio drivers to not detect when a device is plugged in, or you won't get any sound. Most new cases and motherboards have switched to HD Audio, so if you are buying all new stuff, you won't have any problems.

Most case components are made by pressing sheet metal, which can leave a razor-sharp edge. If these edges are not ground down, you will end up cutting your hands when you work inside the case. It has happened to me many times with cheap cases.

I recommend Antec cases. I've used them for years, and I've never been disappointed. They keep things cool, they are easy to work with, and they have ground-down edges. They also tend to be fairly affordable. Often they are paired with Antec power supplies, which I also recommend.

Be sure to use a name brand of power supply. Cheap power supplies can explode, and they will likely take computer components with it. I like Antec power supplies, but you can find good power supplies from Cooler Master, Corsair, EnerMax, RoseWill, Thermaltake and others. If your power supply costs less than $50, then it's probably not worth it.

I recommend using the eXtreme Power Supply Calculator to determine how big of a power supply you need. You'll want to change the CPU Utiliziation to 100%, the System Load to 100%, and change the capacitor aging to 30%. Then round up the Recommended PSU Wattage to the nearest 50W, and you know the minimum power supply you need.

Make sure to get a power supply that meets your needs. For instance, if your graphics card has two PCIe power connectors on it, make sure to get a power supply with two PCIe power connectors. You could use an adapter, but it is better to get the right power supply for the job. Some graphics cards have 8-pin PCIe connectors. Motherboards may have a 4-pin CPU power connector, or an 8-pin. All newer motherboards have a 24-pin power connector instead of the old style 20-pin connector. Make sure the power supply has the right connectors for your hard drives, DVD-RW, floppy drive, and whatever else you have in your system. Again, you can get adapters, but that's not usually a good idea.

As mentioned in the motherboard section, you want to buy a motherboard with on-board gigabit (1000T) networking. This won't speed up your Internet connection, but it will help with copying files between computers. I provide gigabit networking at my LAN parties, so you can install games faster if you have gigabit on your motherboard.

Wireless networking is great for web surfing and e-mail. It's TERRIBLE for gaming. Packet loss is very common with wireless networking. That will cause you no end of trouble. Latency is also a big problem with wireless. It will make your pings higher. I strongly recommend against using wireless networking when gaming. Just plug it in.

At my LAN parties, I will ask you to plug into a network cable, even if you have a laptop.

Headphones are very subjective. You want to find headphones that sound nice and are comfortable to wear for long periods of time. For game parties, it's nice to have headphones that let you hear ambient sounds, so you can hear what people in the room are saying. Noise-cancelling headphones are counter-productive at game parties, but they are great for at home when you game by yourself.

There are a few different styles of headphones. The oldest style uses a band that goes over your head. The speakers are attached to this band. These often have the best sound quality, since the speakers tend to be larger. But they can be heavy, and if the band that goes over your head isn't well-padded, it will hurt after a while. And you will end up with "headphone hair", which is an indentation in your hair where the headphone band goes. The speakers can cover your ear completely. These are usually called "cans". They can be made open-ear or closed-ear. Open-ear designs allow you to hear ambient sounds, where closed-ear designs block out ambient sound. If you wear glasses, this style of headphone can press the frame of your glasses against your head, which will get uncomfortable after a while. Another style has a smaller speaker that sits on your ear, but doesn't cover it completely. These allow ambient sound to be heard. These can also be uncomfortable if you wear glasses, since they press your ear against the frame of your glasses.

There is a variation on the above where the band goes behind your head. They tend to be lightweight, and they actually hang on your ears, kind of like glasses in reverse. These won't mess up your hair as badly. But if you already wear glasses, these may not work well.

Earbuds are more popular now. These stick into your ear. They don't have any kind of band on them. They won't mess up your hair. But they can pop out if you tug on them. And they may not fit inside your ear very well. Better earbuds come with a few different sizes of the part that fits in your ear. Try each one out to find the one that works best. Earbuds don't usually have very good low-end response, because the speakers are physically very small. Because they go in to your ear, they block out a lot of ambient sound.

There is another style of headphone that is small and lightweight like an earbud, but it hangs on each ear like glasses. It doesn't have a band, though. These have larger speakers, so they have a better sound range and deeper lows. They sit outside your ear, so they allow in ambient sounds.

My favorite headphones are of the last style. They are the Koss KSC75. I've tried a lot of different headphones over the years, but these perform well and are comfortable to wear all day. Amazon.com sells them for $12.95, which makes them the best-bang-for-buck. I'm a bit of an audiophile, so I demand great sound from my headphones. Cans are the best style for that, but they don't work well with my glasses. And I have never found an earbud that I like (most are squawky and have no low-end). The Koss KSC75 headphones can be a little fragile. I've broken a couple. But they are cheap to replace.

I've always been pleased with headphones from Sennheiser, Koss and Sony, although they each put out lemons. Be sure to read reviews before you buy.

A great website I found for researching headphones is Headphone Reviews. They rate headphones on several factors, and they have some great recommendations. That website is what helped me to find the Koss KSC75 headphones that I like so much.

For gaming, a headset is nice. Having a mic right by your mouth helps to reduce the ambient noise when you use voice chat. But headsets have bands that go over your head. The mic makes them even heavier than normal headphones, so they may be uncomfortable after a while. I personally use a unidirectional (don't use omnidirectional!) microphone that sits on my desk. That's a great alternative to a headset mic. You can find a good desktop mic for your PC for $10.

Bonus tip: At game parties, I like to turn off the in-game music. That makes it a lot easier to hear the other players in the room. This is especially true with RTS games.

When overclocking your CPU and/or graphics card, just like when upgrading, keep in mind that you won't notice anything less than a 20% increase in speed. You can usually see much greater performance boosts from upgrading your hardware instead of overclocking. I will overclock if I can safely get a 20% boost. If I can't get a 20% improvement, I don't bother. The increased wear and tear on the hardware isn't worth the unnoticeable performance improvement.

Some hardware seems to be made to overclock. For example, my E8500 starts off at a nice 3.166GHz. But it overclocks easily to 3.8GHz on air cooling, and doesn't even get close to overheating. That's a 20% increase in speed with no penalty! I bought an E3300 and motherboard at Fry's for $28 after rebate. I can overclock it from 2.5GHz to 3.75GHz easily with the factory fan and with no voltage increase. That's a 50% increase! Overclocked, it's faster than an E6600, and almost as fast as an E8400, but the smaller L2 cache size holds the E3300 back. Most Athlon II and Phenom II processors can overclock 20% without any fuss.

If you do decide to overclock, remember that heat is usually your biggest enemy. Look up the maximum safe temperature for your CPU or graphics card, and ALWAYS stay below it. Usually you want to keep your CPU below 60C. You will probably require an after-market CPU cooler to overclock well, but some CPUs can overclock well using the bundled cooler. Also, watch your voltages. Some motherboards increase their voltages automatically when you overclock. If your voltage gets too high, you can fry your equipment instantly. Higher voltage also equates directly to higher heat. Some CPUs can be overclocked without raising their voltage, or only raising it slightly. Overclocking is a time-consuming trial-and-error process, and the risk may not be worth the reward.

When overclocking, your memory timing is often the biggest hurdle. In general, you will want to start off by lowering your memory speed. For instance, if you have DDR2-800, you would lower it to DDR2-667 in the BIOS. Then you would manually set the memory timings to what they should be for DDR2-800, and not the lower/faster settings for DDR2-667 that the motherboard will choose automatically. Then you will increase your front-side bus (FSB) clock by 20%. For example, if it starts off at 133MHz, like with the Core 2 Duo E6600, you set it to 160MHz. This causes the RAM to run at DDR2-800 speed again. If you have an nVidia motherboard chipset, then you might need to lower your HyperThreading speed one notch. Then you will want to boot into Windows. If Windows crashes on bootup, then you will have to lower your FSB speed. If it doesn't, run an intensive program, such as Orthos (for two cores) or Prime95 (for more than 2 two cores), which will peg all your CPU cores to 100% usage. Run a temperature monitoring program in the background like CoreTemp. If you can run Orthos overnight without an error, and if your CPU stays under 60C the whole time, then you are good to go.

If your CPU gets hotter than 60C, you might be able to lower the temperature with a better CPU cooler. The CPU coolers that come with boxed CPUs tend to be just enough to keep the CPU at or just under 60C at full load without overclocking. You might also look into how cool it is inside your case. Generally, your ambient temperature inside your case should be no more than 10C higher than your room temperature. For example, if your room is 79F (about 26C), then your case temperature should be no higher than 96F (about 36C). If it is hotter, you might need better fans, or maybe even a better case.

The CoolerMaster Hyper TX 212 Plus is a nice CPU fan for $30. It works with a lot of different CPUs from Intel and AMD. It cools well, and it's fairly quiet.

If you want to buy an AMD CPU, look out for the Black Edition. These let you easily overclock by increasing the multiplier. This is much easier than changing your front side bus speed, and doesn't have the nasty side effects. My Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition went from 3.2GHz to a stable 3.7GHz just by raising the clock multiplier. I didn't have to change any other BIOS settings!

Some dual and triple-core AMD processors actually have four cores on them, but some of them are disabled. If you use a motherboard with ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration), you have a 25% chance to unlock those disabled cores. If you try this, make sure to run Prime95 overnight to make sure you don't get any errors. The cores are usually disabled for a reason (like not passing quality control), so there is no guarantee that an enabled core will work correctly. You don't want to deal with random crashes just to get an extra CPU core. Unlocking cores should be considered a lucky bonus. If you need a quad-core CPU, just buy a quad-core.

Graphics card overclocking is generally not worth it. You might be able to overclock your card about 10%-20% without causing trouble, but you won't notice the difference in games. If you want faster graphics, you need to buy a new card.

Fry's is great, especially if you watch the ads. They will sometimes sell things for much less than you can buy them online. Be aware that a sale price on equipment at Fry's sometimes indicates it was used as a Fry's Rental (somebody buys the equipment, uses it for a LAN party or something, and then returns it a couple of days later for a full refund). This equipment is often still quite good, but you will get a discount on it. Beware that sometimes when bad equipment is returned, it is put right back on the shelf. If you see a great deal in a Fry's ad, make sure you rush to Fry's early. They usually only have a few at that price, and they sell out quickly. You can check Frys.com, as they often have similar prices to the stores, but sometimes the prices are slightly higher. If you live in California, you can look at the local Fry's ad thanks to San Jose Mercury News. Fry's frequently beats NewEgg's prices these days on pretty much everything, even without the sale prices! Fry's will match prices, even if they are an online store. I like to support Fry's because they own everything in their stores, instead of buying their merchandise on credit, and then paying for it after it is sold like most other stores do. Fry's is more economically sound and responsible. Fry's used to give away cheap motherboards with a discounted CPU until August of 2010. They did this for system builders, because they figured they could sell you the other parts at the same time, which typically have a better profit margin. But unfortunately, people would show up at Fry's at opening time, buy all the CPU and motherboard combos, and then sell them separately for retail price on eBay or Craigslist. Fry's lost money on these deals, so they stopped doing them. :(

If you can muddle your way through their incomprehensibly bad web site, Amazon.com sometimes has good prices, and you can often get free shipping and not pay taxes. Their search feature is hopelessly broken, though. If you know exactly what you want to buy, you can usually find good prices there. But don't bother shopping for the best price with their web site. You can't sort by price (although it falsely claims that you can), and random items will show up in your searches.

NewEgg.com and TigerDirect.com have good prices, and sometimes offer free shipping. Depending on where you live, you may have to pay taxes. Newegg.com charges taxes in California. Their prices have gone way up lately as well, so it's been a long time since I purchased from them.

Beware of buying on eBay! You regularly see used computer equipment selling for higher than the current retail price! Be sure to check Fry's or a price searching website before you put in a bid on eBay. I usually see Fry's selling new equipment for WAY lower than the same used parts on eBay! On the other hand, sell your old equipment on eBay, because there are apparently a lot of ignorant eBay buyers out there. You'll recoup your computer costs in no time! ^_^

Craigslist is another option. Since it is the Internet Garage Sale, you often only find really outdated equipment. But sometimes you can find some amazing deals on good stuff. I have made quite a bit of money selling older stuff on Craistlist. There are a lot of guys out there building computers for parents or grandparents, and they are grateful for your cheap, 4-year-old parts. You don't have to deal with shipping or tax on Craigslist, but you don't get the protection that eBay and PayPal provide. Also, because it is local, you don't get as wide of a selection.

Benchmarking is handy to see how well tweaking and upgrades improve your system. I like to use 3DMark06 as a benchmarking tool. It is CPU-limited, so you can see how much your CPU affects your graphics card, and it tests DX9, which all of our games use. For our LAN party games, I recommend that the SM2 and SM3 scores be 4000 or higher, and the CPU score be 2800 or higher. FutureMark has a newer test tool called 3DMark Vantage, but that requires Vista or Windows 7 because it tests DX10 performance. It's not as useful because none of our games use DX10.

7-Zip has a nice CPU benchmarking utility that gives you a rating based on usage, which accounts for multiple cores. That way you can compare the single-threaded CPU performance of one system to the next. It also gives an overall performance rating, which can be used to compare how much your multiple cores make a difference for multi-threaded software (7-Zip is multithreaded, by the way). To run it, open the 7-Zip File Manager and choose Benchmark from the Tools menu. For a more detailed test, open Command Prompt, CD to "Program Files\7-Zip", and run "7z b". I prefer to do the latter. I recommend that the rating by usage value be 3000 or higher in order to play our LAN party games well.

I've also grown fond of GeekBench. It gives you CPU scores and memory scores, and they are very consistent, so you can compare very different systems against each other.

If you want to benchmark Nations at War on your system, you can learn how to do it on my Nations at War Performance Optimization page.

When benchmarking, make sure you always keep the same settings on every system. For instance, in 3DMark06, I use the default settings on every system. Also, you will want to disable vertical sync, or VSync, in your graphics card control panel. VSync keeps the graphics synced to your monitor refresh rate, which prevents tearing. This is desirable most of the time, but if you are benchmarking, it will artificially lower your benchmark numbers. For example, with VSync on, the benchmarks won't go higher than 60FPS on a 60Hz LCD.

Finally, if your computer does poorly with benchmarks, don't complain about "lag" when playing online. It's very likely NOT lag at all, but just your computer's lack of performance. Most games play smoothly at up to 250ms ping. If you have a lower ping than that, you are definitely NOT experiencing "lag".

• You should run Windows Update to get the latest OS updates and driver updates for your system. Make sure you have installed the latest service pack. I set Windows Update to notify me of updates, but not to automatically download or install them. I don't want it to start updating in the middle of a game session!
• You should get the latest drivers for your graphics card from nVidia's or ATI's web site. Most modern games require the very latest graphics card drivers. It is also a good idea to upgrade your sound card drivers and motherboard drivers, since newer drivers tend to have better performance and fewer quirks. The latest games often use new features that haven't been as well tested. The latest drivers will have fixes for issues found in the new games. You typically won't get the very latest drivers from Windows Update.
• Defragment your hard drive. You'd be surprised at how much quicker your games will load from a freshly defragged hard drive.
• Remove any unnecessary background programs. These will steal precious system resources from your game, or cause strange behavior. You can use msconfig (Press Windows-R, and enter msconfig) to enable or disable programs in your startup. You will have to experiment to discover which programs you can disable. Google is your friend. Google the filename of the program you see in msconfig, and you will get back web pages explaining what it is for, and whether or not it is safe to disable it.
• Remove any unnecessary background services. There are some excellent guides here that explain what services are needed. Use the "SAFE" column.
• If you change your motherboard, you HAVE TO reinstall Windows from scratch. Windows has a number of motherboard-related drivers. If the motherboard hardware suddenly changes, you will get unpredictable behavior. It might boot, but you are playing with fire. At very least, make sure you uninstall all the drivers on your system before changing your motherboard. With XP, you could sometimes get away with changing motherboards. With Windows 7, it works very rarely.
• If you really want things running their best, you should install Windows from scratch at least once a year. That's the best fix for slow or strange computer behavior. If you call Microsoft support, they will tell you the same. Windows basically self-destructs over time.
• Be sure to run a full virus check before and after each LAN party. Make sure your virus checker has the latest virus definitions. This will ensure that you do not give a virus to anyone, and that you will not be affected by any virus you may acquire from the party. I check all of my install CDs, patches, cracks and servers for viruses, so you will not get a virus from me. I highly recommend the free AVG anti-virus system. Microsoft Security Essentials is also a good free choice for Windows 7. Be advised that Symantec, Norton and McAfee have been known to falsely flag no-CD cracks as viruses or trojans to appease game companies. They also use a lot of system resources, so they aren't game-friendly.
• I recommend using Mozilla Firefox for web surfing (install the AdblockPlus extension) and Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail. These will keep you from getting spyware and viruses in the first place. Thunderbird has an awesome Bayesian spam filter that works great. It also has the Lightning plug-in to add Outlook-like calendar capabilities, and the Provider for Google Calendar plug-in will keep Lightning and your Google Calendar synced up.
• If you want to avoid viruses, trojans and spyware from e-mail, just use webmail with Firefox. Google Mail is very nice, as is Google Calendar. You can easily replace Outlook with these tools, and never look back.
• For ultimate protection, I recommend using this constantly-updated host file that intercepts ad-related web junk and causes it to not load when browsing.
• Run Advanced System Care. This cleans up your registry, defrags your hard drive, and does a bunch of security fixes.
• I always have the latest upgrade patches and no-CD cracks at the parties. I recommend MegaGames for cracks. It is a clean site (no porn), and the cracks are legitimate (no viruses or trojans). Look for the "PC Games" link under the "Game Fixes" section in the left menu.

• Laptops do not usually have upgradeable graphics. For a desktop, you'll want to upgrade your graphics card every two years or so to keep up with the latest games. It would get awfully expensive to buy a new laptop every two years. Of course, laptops tend to be very fragile, especially modern laptops made in China with ultra-cheap parts, so you might have a dead laptop in two years that needs to be replaced anyway.
• The graphics chips for laptops tend to be fairly low-end compared to the ones available for desktops. Avoid Intel graphics chipsets, because they are terrible for gaming.
• Beware of laptop graphics that use "shared memory". That means that it uses your system RAM, which is WAY slower than if it had dedicated (A.K.A. discrete) RAM for graphics.
• Laptops can overheat quickly, especially when your system is being pushed to the limits like most games tend to do. That can cause your laptop to shut down unexpectedly, and will reduce the life of the components in the laptop, especially the hard drive.
• Everything in a laptop is more expensive than a desktop. You can get a laptop designed for gaming starting around $1,500 (and averaging about $2,500). But you can put together two complete high-end desktop machines with much better game performance for that price.

Laptops are great for doing work without being tied down to a desktop, like light word processing, e-mail, web surfing, social sites like Facebook, and so on. If you really want a general-purpose laptop, I'd recommend one that has GeForce graphics with dedicated video RAM, 2 GB or more system RAM, and I'd recommend getting a separate desktop for games. If you want to play games on your laptop, do NOT get one with Intel graphics. Intel graphics won't play games very well at all. Most laptop graphics chipsets are equal to the GeForce 2 or 3 at best. Don't expect to play modern 3D games.

You can get a decent laptop for about $500 these days, but you won't play Counter-Strike:Source or any other newer game on it very well, if at all. It will likely play Condition Zero, Rise of Nations, and other older games. But it's not going to do well at a LAN party where we play the latest games. For example, I have a laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 (2.166GHz), 4GB RAM, and nVidia Quadro FX 1500 graphics with 512MB dedicated RAM (about the equivalent of a GeForce 7800GT). It can't play any Source-based game very well at all. It works fine for general-purpose computing, but it is lousy for games.

If you need a portable computer for general computing (Internet and productivity software), I highly recommend getting a netbook. They tend to sell for $300-$400. They have longer battery life than a regular laptop, and they tend to be more durable due to fewer moving parts, and due to the fact that they run cooler. There are some newer netbooks that include nVidia ION graphics that can play modern games and decode 1080P h264 video! You'll pay more for those netbooks, though (around $450).

A tablet is nice if you don't need to type. You can tap out a quick e-mail on a tablet, but you wouldn't want to write a document on one. Tablets are even more portable than a netbook, and have even longer battery life. They are great for web surfing and checking e-mail. Android tablets are under $500. I don't recommend iPads. They are slow and clunky, and way overpriced. Plus, Apple is a very immoral, anti-Christian company.

You might be able to just use your phone for most of the tasks you used to do on a PC, such as e-mail, web-surfing and social networking. An Android phone is a very capable computer.

Do everyone a favor and don't support the morally-bankrupt, anti-Christian Apple by purchasing any of their products. You can buy an Android-based tablet from Wal-Mart for $140 that does more than an iPad could ever hope to do. You can buy a $400 laptop and put Ubuntu on it, and you will have a very similar user experience to any of Apple's laptops that cost 3 to 5 times more. You can buy an MP3 player for $40 that plays music just as well as a $200 iPod. And you don't have to have a guilty conscience of knowing you supported an evil company. And for those who say that every company is evil, so we can't help but buy products from evil companies, let me tell you: not every company is evil, and you can, indeed, help it!

Here are the things I do after I install XP on a system:

1. Install the latest motherboard drivers.
2. Install the latest network driver. Turn on the firewall.
3. Disable 1394 networking if it exists.
4. Install the latest CPU driver if needed.
5. Turn off all visual effects except show shadows under menus, show shadows under mouse pointer, show translucent selection rectangle, show window contents while dragging, and smooth edges of screen fonts.
6. Set font smoothing to Normal for CRTs, ClearType for LCDs.
7. Turn off menu and tooltype transitions.
8. Remove the following Windows Components: MSN Explorer, Networking Services, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger

Windows 7 is a lot easier. It comes with a lot more drivers than XP (since it comes on DVD instead of CD), so the first several steps are not necessary.

1. Turn off User Account Control. I can't stand clicking OK for every action I want to perform.
2. Turn off file indexing for everything I can.
3. I also like to disable Combining in the task bar, and I set my Notification Area to always show all icons.
4. I customize the Start Menu to display Control Panel as a menu, include Downloads as a link, not to highlight newly installed programs, and I enable Network.
5. I change the user picture to not be the default orange flower. Too girly.
6. Disable digital audio output unless you actually use it. This fixes sound issues in some games (like Midtown Madness II).
7. Make sure my microphone is connected and set up. This also fixes sound issues in some games (like Star Wars Battlefront II).

These things are the same for both XP and Win7:

1. Remove any desktop background picture. This saves RAM and improves desktop speed). The Windows 7 default picture is too girly anyway.
2. Turn off indexing on all hard drive partitions.
3. In Network Properties, turn off smooth scrolling. Set the IE home page to blank.
4. Set the page file initial and maximum size to the recommended value, or 1024 MB, whichever is smaller. (Reduces page file fragmentation, and some older games freak out if your page size is too large.)
5. Disable error reporting.
6. Turn off Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop.
7. Turn off Automatic Updates. Set it to notify me when there are changes.
8. Turn off System Restore.
9. Run Windows Update. Install the latest service packs and all updates. In Win7, install the drivers it recommends. I usually don't install drivers in XP, because that can leave you with a dead PC.
10. Install the latest graphics driver and audio driver. This assures compatibility with the latest games.
11. Disable all unnecessary services by following the "SAFE" column in Black Viper's Service Configurations guide. Use the appropriate guide for the OS you have.

After installing and tweaking Windows, I install a bunch of software:

1. Install 7-Zip, a free file archiver, superior to WinZip and WinRAR. Configure 7-Zip to handle all file compression types, and to add a decompress to folder option.
2. Install Advanced System Care, a free system cleaner and optimizer.
3. Install AVG Free, a free anti-virus program. In Windows 7, I just use Microsoft Security Essentials.
4. Install Audacity, a free audio editor. Install the LADSPA Plugins.
5. Install BlueRazorLame, a free MP3 compressor GUI that uses Lame.
6. Install CDex, a free CD ripper and MP3 encoder.
7. Install Combined Community Codec Pack, which installs a ton of free video codecs and Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which is an outstanding alternative to Windows Media Player. Configure the video codec to use auto post-processing and debanding.
8. Install e-Sword, free Bible study software. I highly recommend the NET Bible, the New English Translation, which is also free, and I think the best translation of the Bible currently available.
9. Install FileZilla client, a free GUI FTP program.
10. Install Foxit Reader, a free PDF reader that is WAY faster and smaller than Adobe Reader.
11. Install GIMP, a free, powerful graphics editor.
12. Install HWInfo32, a free hardware information and diagnostics tool, similar to Lavalys Everest/FinalWire AIDA64.
13. Install ImgBurn, a free tool for writing ISO, BIN, CCD, CDI, IMG and many other image types to CD, DVD and BluRay.
14. Install InfraRecorder, free CD/DVD burner software.
15. Install Mozilla Firefox, a free web browser. Install the AdBlockPlus extension. Much more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer.
16. Install Mozilla Thunderbird, a free e-mail client. Install Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar plugins.
17. Install Notepad 2, a free enhanced text editor. Configure Windows to use Notepad 2 for text files. Pin Notepad 2 to the Start Menu, and add a shortcut to Notepad 2 in the Send To folder.
18. Install LibreOffice, a free, fully-compatible alternative to Microsoft Office.
19. Install Paint.NET, a free graphics tool, like Microsoft Paint on steroids.
20. Install PDFCreator, a free tool that lets you print PDF files from any application.
21. Install Process Explorer, a free tool like Windows Task Manager on steroids.
22. Install PuTTY and PSCP, free ssh/telnet/serial terminal and scp programs for Windows.
23. Install Recuva, a free file recovery program for Windows.
24. Install QuickTime Alternative, a free QuickTime codec without spyware/adware.
25. Install Real Alternative, a free RealPlayer audio and video codec without spyware/adware.
26. Install Smart Defrag, an excellent freeware disk defragmenter, including boot-time defragmenting on Win7.
27. Install Virtual CloneDrive, a free CD/DVD emulator, which lets you use ISO, BIN and CCD files like they are physical discs.
28. Install WinAMP, a free media player. For listening with headphones, install the Jammix Enhancer plugin. Configure WinAMP to use Jammix Enhancer. Set Jammix Enhancer to "My favourite" preset.
29. Install WinDirStat, a free tool that lets you see what is consuming your disk space at a glance.

Done! At this point, I start to install the games that I want to play.

You may notice that I use mostly free software. You might ask, why don't you just use Linux? My answer: I do! I started using Ubuntu as my desktop OS when version 7.04 came out (April 2007). It was the best choice I ever made. Windows is a gaming OS, and that's all I use it for.

Another helpful tool that I don't always install, because I don't need it often, is nLite, which lets you create customized pre-Vista Windows install CDs. For instance, you can create a Windows XP install CD with Service Pack 3 and all your hardware drivers already installed. You can also include your CD key and other configuration options so it won't need to ask for any information during install, which speeds things up considerably. Plus you can do some handy performance tweaks to the default install, which will save you time later. If you reinstall Windows a couple of times a year on multiple machines like I do, these kind of things really help!

• Norton, Symantec or McAfee software. These will bleed your system resources dry, and will make your modern, multi-core system feel like a 486. AVG Free is a much better anti-virus program, it won't eat your resources, and it's free. Microsoft Security Essentials also does a good job without hogging a lot of resources. Of course, if you run Linux, you don't need an anti-virus program.
• Internet Explorer. I like my computer to be free of viruses, trojans, spyware, malware, keyloggers, trackers, and so forth. So I prefer to use Mozilla Firefox. Although IE has improved over the years (just say no to IE 6 and 7!), Firefox has been rock solid for me since I started using it back when it was still called Phoenix (circa 2003). I also like Google Chrome.
• Adobe Reader. This is used for viewing PDF files. Adobe Reader installs a quick-loader program that stays resident in your system memory and slows down your boot times. It doesn't speed anything up. It's very slow to start, and it is very sluggish when viewing files. FoxIt Reader loads almost instantly, and it performs much faster when viewing PDF files. The difference in speed is very noticable.
• Windows Media Player. I don't want Microsoft collecting information about every song I listen to and every video I watch. I also want control over how things look and sound. For Windows, I use WinAMP for music and Media Player Classic Home Cinema for video. I use Audacious and SMPlayer on Linux, respectively.
• iTunes. I don't own an iPod, and I wouldn't purchase any product from the grossly immoral, anti-Christian Apple. So I don't need it. Plus, iTunes installs all kinds of stuff that starts up at boot time and needlessly consumes your system resources. I only buy MP3 players that act like an external hard drive so I can copy my MP3s to them easily without software. I prefer to rip my own MP3s from CDs that I own, and do it at a MUCH higher quality than you can get from iTunes. I use BlueRazorLame to make my MP3s, and EasyTag to insert information into them. For ripping CDs, I use CDex, which can make the MP3s and fill out the MP3 tags all at the same time. When I make an MP3, I use the following lame options: -V3 -q0 --lowpass 18. The -q0 option uses the highest quality compressor (which takes a little more time, but the sound quality is improved), and the -V3 gives me a variable-bit-rate file that averages 192Kbps (the minimum I can stand), but can go up to 320Kbps as needed (which avoids the "swishy" sounds), or down to 32Kbps to save space when it can. The --lowpass 18 options reduces file size by throwing away any sound above 18KHz, which most sound equipment can't reproduce, and even if it did, most human ears can't hear. This gives me a reasonably-sized MP3 that sounds excellent, even when played loudly through a nice sound system, or through high-quality headphones. The quality is indistinguishable from lossless for most purposes. By the way, for archival purposes I use FLAC, which stands for Free Lossless Audio Compression. It compresses a WAV file to about half it's original size, and when decompressed, it is bit-for-bit identical to the original. By comparison, using my lame MP3 settings above, the MP3 file is about 90% smaller than the WAV file, and sounds the same as the original.
• Microsoft Office. I prefer the free LibreOffice, which does everything that Microsoft Office can do. LibreOffice is the follow-on to OpenOffice. I use Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail instead of Outlook. I also use Google Mail and Google Docs quite a bit. I mostly use Thunderbird to store e-mail locally, rather than using up my Google Mail quota.
• Roxio CD or DVD software. Their software is slow and bloated. InfraRecorder is a great alternative. If you need a fancier DVD package, I've used Nero, and I liked it. If I need to just burn an ISO or some files to disc, ImgBurn is great. In Linux I use K3b.
• I don't install QuickTime or RealMedia. They install spyware that loads at bootime and consumes resources. If I need to play a MOV or RM file (which is rare at best), I use QuickTime Alternative and Real Alternative, and play them in Media Player Classic Home Cinema. In Linux, SMPlayer plays anything, and there is no spyware worries at all.

I had two spare computers with older equipment in them. I noticed that one of them, the Athlon XP 2700+ with a GeForce FX 5900XT was not performing very well in some games (especially Trackmania Nations). I was curious how it compared to the system with the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz and Radeon 9800. I had assumed that the Radeon 9800 was a lesser performer than the 5900XT, but after running 3DMark06 on both systems, I found that the 9800 was slightly faster than the 5900XT. I also found that the 2700+ was faster than the P4 2.8 GHz, but I knew that already. I decided to swap the video cards so the faster graphics card and CPU could be in the same machine. That was the beginning of my troubles.

I knew from prior experience that I should download the latest Radeon drivers before I swapped the cards, so I did that. Then I shut down the systems and swapped the cards. When the P4 system came up with the 5900XT, the ATI drivers crashed several times. Once I clicked through numerous error windows, I was finally able to uninstall the ATI drivers, which took a while. Once I rebooted, I installed the latest nVidia drivers, rebooted, and the system was complete. Once the ATI drivers were out of the way, it took about 3 minutes. This is as it should be. You should always uninstall hardware drivers BEFORE you replace the hardware, so the troubles I had here were technically my fault.

Then I went to the 2700+ system with the 9800. When it booted up, I was able to uninstall the nVidia drivers without a hitch. No crashes. It didn't even hiccup. Then I went to install the ATI drivers. When I started to find the drivers, I got a BSOD. That was weird. The XP install was fairly fresh, so I couldn't imagine what was wrong. The BSOD didn't give me any clues (it usually tells you the module that crashed). So I hard reset the computer, and it came back up. I got another BSOD. The only thing different here is the 9800. I thought that maybe there was some sort of BIOS issue, so I checked that out. I saw that I had the timings set to be optimal instead of normal. This overclocks the front-side bus to 334 instead of 333 MHz. So I switched it to normal. Then I rebooted. No BSOD. So the 9800 is extremely sensitive to timing on the bus. OK. I can live with that. But I lost half an hour figuring this out.

Then I installed the ATI drivers. It gave me an error. It said I needed to install .NET 2.0. I clicked OK, and expected it to stop installing, but it went ahead and installed, and then wanted to reboot. On reboot, I got several errors. I assume these were related to the lack of .NET 2.0. So I started up Windows Update and installed .NET 2.0, which took a long time. Then I rebooted. Same errors! So I reinstalled the ATI drivers and rebooted. Same errors! I then uninstalled the ATI drivers, rebooted, reinstalled the drivers, rebooted, and finally the errors went away, and I was able to use the ATI control panel. Yay! That only took 2 hours to install. Compare that to the 3 minutes it took to get the 5900XT running once I got past the ATI driver issues.

So then I decided to try 3DMark06 to see if all my efforts were worth it. 3DMark06 immediately crashed. It claimed it couldn't create the screen. I tried changing the screen mode from the default, but it was no good. I tried several other settings in 3DMark06, but nothing would fix the errors. Then I tried starting up Call of Duty. It started fine and displayed graphics. So I messed with 3DMark06 some more, rebooted a few times, messed with some BIOS settings, and checked that there wasn't anything weird with Windows. Everything checked out. So I uninstalled the ATI drivers and reinstalled. No luck. Same problems. I started Flat Out 2, and got an error that it couldn't open the screen. Then, after an hour of investigation, it dawned on me that OpenGL is working (Call of Duty uses the Quake 3 engine, which is OpenGL), where Flat Out 2 uses Direct3D, as does 3DMark06. So I started dxdiag. Sure enough, it had errors for D3D7, D3D8 and D3D9. So I started messing with more stuff. I tried reseating the card, tweaking Windows some more, uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, and even reinstalled XP from scratch, but no luck. One time I uninstalled the drivers, and when Windows came up, I let it try to download the drivers over Windows Update. It installed some 4 year old drivers, but much to my surprise, I found that dxdiag ran successfully! 3DMark06 was still having issues, probably because of the age of the drivers. After 3 more hours of experimenting, I finally found the culprit, so I decided to try different drivers.

I went to ATI's web site again, and found a link at the bottom for older drivers. They were all separate install modules, instead of being a single install program like the latest driver. I grabbed the three main files from the previous version of the driver. I installed them. Each one required an individual reboot (ouch). But once I got all three installed, I ran dxdiag successfully, and then ran 3DMark06 successfully. Yay! I finally had my Radeon 9800 working in my Athlon XP 2700+ system! And it only took 6.5 hours to do! Again, compare that to the 3 minutes it took me to install the nVidia card.

So you see, I have very good reasons for not recommending ATI cards. Can you imagine someone less experienced than me trying to go through all of the above? It probably wouldn't happen. You'd probably spend hours on the phone, long distance to ATI in Canada, to figure out the problem, like I did when I tried to get my All In Wonder Radeon to work a few years ago. After two hours and a hefty long distance bill, I was told to use Intel CPUs instead of AMD. They claimed that ATI doesn't support AMD processors! Considering their dislike for AMD processors, it's rather ironic that AMD purchased ATI, isn't it?

Update: I have learned since going through all of this effort that ATI dropped support of AGP Radeon cards after the release of their Catalyst 7.6 drivers. They are well aware of the problems with AGP cards, but are not interested in fixing the issues. So if you want to play the latest games, your best bet is to upgrade to a GeForce video card. Honestly, that's always been the best choice.

Update (1/31/08): ATI has finally done something about this. Although the Catalyst driver still doesn't support AGP as-is, starting with Catalyst 8.1 they have a hot fix. This is good, since you will need at least 8.1 in order to play Enemy Territory:Quake Wars. Sadly, I found no link to this hot fix on their web site. You have to Google for it, or else dig through ATI's support forums. Shameful! Once you get to the hot fix page, it will claim that it is only for the X series AGP cards, but I found that it worked fine on my 9800 Pro. Get your act together, ATI!

Update (2/14/08): It was a fluke. ATI only created the hotfix for 8.1. Later versions don't have the hotfix available. So AGP users are stuck at 8.1 now. And good luck finding the 8.1 hotfix. It's even harder to find now!

Update (9/15/08): If you are stuck with an AGP ATI card (you have my deepest condolences), do yourself a favor and use the Omega Drivers. These are special drivers that are hacked to perform better, support OpenGL and Direct3D games on AGP Radeon cards, and they eliminate the need to install .NET by providing a much snappier and overall more useful configuration utility.

Update (12/9/08): A year and a half later, ATI seems to have fixed their little AGP issue. Apparently Catalyst 8.11 works with AGP Radeon cards (at least my X700 and 9800 Pro in 64-bit XP). But I'm sticking with Omega Drivers anyway.

Update (1/5/2009): I was wrong. Catalyst 8.11 and 8.12 do NOT support all AGP Radeon cards (HD3850 in particular). But you can still Google for the latest AGP hotfix (they have one for 8.12 now), so at least you can find a workaround like before.

Update (10/28/2009): ATI just announced that if your card doesn't do at least DX10, they no longer support it. Nice. That includes many PCIe cards, and all AGP cards.

Given all the ATI driver issues, it's no surprise that 2 out of 3 gamers chose nVidia.