Hardware Geeks

Yup, I was one of the unwashed masses that stood in line last night at midnight to pick up their copy of GTA IV and I had a chance to play a little bit before I figured I should get some sleep before having to get up in four hours for work.  Here’s just a few thoughts on what I’ve played so far…

I recently became a fan of Lexmark’s new line of Wi-Fi Printers, and I would of told you a few weeks ago that I was the proud owner of the Lexmark X4550 Wi-Fi Printer, but then I had a paper jam.  It literally broke—a piece of plastic in the printer literally broke due to 4 sheets of paper that somehow managed to get crumpled, I was left without a printer.

But as my luck would have it, the day before my X4550 broke HP asked if I would be interested in taking a look at one of their Wi-Fi printers and I agreed. But my expectations were low.  I didn’t expect much; in fact I did not even know HP had any Wi-Fi printers.

With the release of GTA less than two hours away here on the west coast (and already having occurred in Liberty City’s real-life counterpart), gamers across the country are acquiring their copies from midnight launches at their local Gamestop or Best Buy.  As might be expected from a game of the GTA pedigree, this game has barely hit the street but there has already been widespread ballyhoo from various Christian and family groups and certain activists who shall go unnamed regarding the game’s potential for debauching our children and training them in a “murder simulator.” The press embargo on GTA IV was over on Sunday, and since then a flood of reviews and legal gameplay videos has hit the web for widespread perusal.  These publications were the world’s first chance, at large, to see what kind of game GTA IV was going to be through the presentation of major media sites like IGN and 1UP before its official release.  Given the storm that is already surrounding the game, though, and without impugning the editorial acumen of the gaming media in general, I wonder: did the whole truth about this game come out?

So I was digging around in my files earlier and came across a nifty hack I came up with awhile back to add custom default save locations to Office’s save menu. It’s a pretty straight forward registry command and could be customized to automatically list network resources in the left hand column of Office’s save dialog.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-454780241-466041071-1862565094-15694\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces\NAME]
“Name"="Name of Location”
“Path"="Web Address or physical path here”
“SortAscending"=dword:00000001

Futuremark has finally made available the much anticipated 3DMark Vantage.

I have had the pleasure of playing with it today, and although I ran into a hick-up with my AMD based system, AMD helped me solve it and provided me with a Hotfix, Thank you Damon Muzny! 3DMark Vantage has a pretty nice UI, and a lot easier to understand and use than the previous version.

Today Apple announced it has updated it’s iMacs to include the latest intel Core 2 duo processors and improved the graphics capabilities of the iMacs.

The systems will have a starting price of $1,199 and most systems will come with 2GB of memory standard. The 24-inch iMac now offers a 3.06 GHz Intel processor and the high-performance NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics.

“The iMac’s gorgeous aluminum and glass all-in-one design has been an incredible hit with our customers and is just one of the reasons Mac sales are growing three and a half times faster than PC sales,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With the latest Intel processors, a faster new graphics option and more memory, customers now have even more reasons to love the iMac.”

You might recall that a MLE game will be launching with WiiWare next month.  As a promotion for their upcoming title, Mastiff Games is holding a weekly “Food of the Week” contest on the official game website.  Each week they are picking eight people to receive a $15 gift certificate towards the food of the week.  For further details and information on how to enter, simply go to the website and click on the “Weekly Food Giveaway” button.  This week’s smorgasbord selection is: hamburgers!

It’s Big, It’s Bad and it will last 31 days!

Coming soon the event of the YEAR…

This event is so HUGE that a billion dollar company is sponsoring it and hundreds of people are working on it, thousands more will take part. Think Blue.

As we prepare to finish off April with the release of Grand Theft Auto IV and move into the merry month of May, there have been several recent announcements of purchasing incentives for various games.  Most notably, the collector’s editions of Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout III and the Xbox 360 version of Command and Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath.  Is there one piece of swag that companies feel that gamers desire more than all others?  We’ll take a quick look at the accompanying items for each game to see if there are any common links.