Technopheniac

Tuesday, 27 August 2013

Technopheniac Guide to Improving Your PC Gaming Performance

If you’re new to the world of PC gaming, it can all seem a bit complicated. Consoles don’t have upgradable hardware, desktop software running in the background, or graphics settings that must be tweaked for ideal performance.

We’ll walk you through what you need to know to take advantage of the most powerful gaming platform on the planet and get the best FPS you can, whether you’re new to PC gaming or just want a refresher course.

Optimizing Your Software

A console’s software gets out of the way each time you launch a game, reserving all possible system resources for the game alone. PCs aren’t like that. Even if you’re playing a game in full-screen mode, your computer’s software is still running in the background. Downloads, web pages, programs on your desktop or in your system tray – they’re all still running behind your game.

It should be fairly easy to figure out which programs will slow things down. Downloading big files with a BitTorrent client, encoding video, extracting files from an archive – these can all put load on your system and dramatically slow things down. Of course, if you want to squeeze out all the resources you can for a particularly demanding game, you may want to close all non-essential applications while playing the game.

To determine which programs are using a lot of resources, use the Task Manager. Open the Task Manager (right-click your taskbar and select Task Manager) and use it to see which applications are using up a lot of resources. In the below screenshot, we have low CPU and physical memory (RAM) usage. If either was higher, we would want to identify applications using up a lot of CPU or RAM (click the CPU or Memory column to sort the process list by CPU or RAM usage) and close them.

You can generally tell if your hard drive is grinding away by looking at the hard drive light on your computer. If it’s flashing a lot, something is using your hard drive heavily. Network bandwidth is also important – if any program on your computer is using your network heavily (like a BitTorrent client or any other file-downloading program), it could take up precious hard drive input/output time (slowing down game load times) while also saturating your Internet connection and causing problems in online games.

Upgrading Graphics Drivers

Graphics drivers are the software glue that sits between your graphics card and the games running on your computer. Regularly updating your NVIDIA or AMD graphics drivers can help you improve your PC gaming performance, particularly when it comes to newer games. Some new games may even refuse to run if you have graphics drivers that are too outdated.

Read our guide to identifying your graphics hardware and updating your graphics drivers for more information.

Tweaking Game Settings

Games try to automatically select the best graphics settings for you, but this doesn’t always work properly. Older games may not know what to do when they see new hardware and may default to the lowest settings, while some games may use too high a graphical setting and may slow down.

You could use the preset settings – many games offer presets like “Low,” “Medium,” “High,” and “Ultra” – but you can generally tweak individual settings. For example, your hardware may not be good enough to play on Ultra, but may be easily able to handle High. In this case, you can select High and then increase individual graphics settings.

If you tweak enough games, you’ll eventually start noticing similar types of settings in all of them – although some games will often have unusually named options that you’ll have to Google. If you can’t run a game on maximum graphical settings, you’ll often have to choose settings to decrease, and it helps to know what the settings actually do. We’ll cover some of the most common options here so you’ll know just what settings do and which you would want to tweak.

Different games have different settings and different game engines perform differently, so some settings may be more demanding in some games. Some settings are obvious, like “texture detail” and “shadow type.” Enabling more detailed textures will use more of the memory on your graphics card, while selecting more realistic shadows will increase the work done by your graphics hardware. “Draw distance” will increase how far you can see in the game – a longer distance means more objects will need to be rendered, increasing the work done by your graphics hardware and, perhaps, CPU.

Feel free to play with these settings and see how they affect your game performance. Some settings may have little impact on your performance, while others will have great impact.

While many settings are obvious, you’ll also notice a few oddly named settings in most games:

Anti-aliasing: Anti-aliasing helps eliminate jagged edges, smoothing things out and making them look more realistic. Different levels of anti-aliasing are often available – for example, there may be a slider you can adjust from 1x to 16x. The more anti-aliasing , the smoother the visuals will be – but this will take more GPU power, which may slow things down. You may also see references to different modes of anti-aliasing , such as FXAA (fast approximate anti-aliasing) and MSAA (multi-sample anti-aliasing ).
Anisotropic, Bilinear, and Trilinear Filtering: These filtering methods are all techniques of improving perceived texture quality in games.
Supersampling: Supersampling is an anti-aliasing technique that renders the game at a higher resolution than your screen before scaling it down to your screen’s resolution. This reduces jagged edges, but it’s the single most demanding graphics option in many games.

Using your monitor’s native resolution is also important. If you use a lower resolution in a game, the game will appear noticeably blurrier. We’ve covered just why using an LCD monitor’s native resolution is so important, while it wasn’t important in the olden days of CRTs monitors. Of course, this is a trade-off – selecting a higher resolution will require your graphics hardware to do more work. You may have to choose between high settings at a low resolution and lower settings at a higher, native resolution. You can always try each combination and see which looks best to you.

NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience is a new tool that attempts to automatically determine the ideal settings for your PC’s hardware. It only works with a handful of games, but it’s an interesting way to choose better default settings for games without PC gamers having to tweak the settings themselves. In the future, a tool like this one could take the much of the guesswork and tweaking out of PC game settings.

Upgrading Hardware

You can only get so far by tweaking software. If you really want more performance, eventually you’ll have to upgrade your computer’s hardware. Different components do different things, and the bottleneck slowing everything down will depend on your computer.

GPU / Graphics Card: Your graphics card, also known as a GPU (graphics processing unit), is the most crucial part of gaming performance. Once the game is loaded and playing, the game’s 3D graphics rendering is all done on the GPU. Some other work, such as calculating in-game physics, also happens on your graphics card. If you want to increase graphics rendering speed and give yourself room to increase graphical quality settings in your games, you should upgrade your graphics card.
CPU: While the GPU does a lot of work, your CPU does the rest of it. Some games may be “CPU bound”, which means that their performance is generally restricted by your CPU. If your CPU is generally running at 100% while playing a game and games seem to be slow, even at different graphical settings, you may want to upgrade your CPU.
Hard Drive: The speed and capacity of your hard drive are important. A higher capacity hard drive allows you to have more games installed, while the speed of your hard drive determines loading times. When you first load a game – or load new assets in a game, such as a map – the loading time will depend on your hard drive’s speed. Upgrading to a solid-state drive (SSD) can speed things up dramatically if you’re still using a slower, mechanical hard drive. However, SSDs offer less storage capacity, so it’s a trade-off.
RAM: RAM is the memory that holds game files once they’re loaded from your hard drive. If you don’t have enough RAM, the game will constantly be reading data from your hard drive. More RAM will ensure that, once game files are loaded from your hard drive, they’ll remain cached and will load much more quickly next time they’re needed. Having a good amount of RAM also ensures that you can return to your desktop without waiting, as the desktop applications will remain present in your RAM if you have enough. You can check your total RAM usage in your task manager – if it’s at 100% while playing a game, you probably need to install more RAM.

You should hopefully now have a better idea of the various factors – the software running on your computer, your current graphics drivers, per-game graphical settings, and the hardware in your computer – that can be tweaked to improve performance. It’s not a one-size-fits-all world like consoles, which is both the strength and weakness of PC gaming.

Image Credit: wlodi on Flickr, Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier on Flickr

Technopheniac Explains: The Difference Between WEP, WPA, and WPA2 Wireless Encryption (and Why It Matters)

Even if you know you need to secure your Wi-Fi network (and have already done so), you probably find all the encryption acronyms a little bit puzzling. Read on as we highlight the differences between encryption standards like WEP, WPA, and WPA2–and why it matters which acronym you slap on your home Wi-Fi network.

What Does It Matter?

You did what you were told to do, you logged into your router after you purchased it and plugged it in for the first time, and set a password. What does it matter what the little acronym next to the security encryption standard you chose was? As it turns out, it matters a whole lot: as is the case with all encryption standards, increasing computer power and exposed vulnerabilities have rendered older standards at risk. It’s your network, it’s your data, and if someone hijacks your network for their illegal hijinks, it’ll be the police knocking on your door. Understanding the differences between encryption protocols and implementing the most advanced one your router can support (or upgrading it if it can’t support current gen secure standards) is the difference between offering someone easy access to your home network and sitting secure.

WEP, WPA, and WPA2: Wi-Fi Security Through the Ages

Since the late 1990s, Wi-Fi security algorithms have undergone multiple upgrades with outright depreciation of older algorithms and significant revision to newer algorithms. A stroll through the history of Wi-Fi security serves to highlight both what’s out there right now and why you should avoid older standards.

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP)

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is the most widely used Wi-Fi security algorithm in the world. This is a function of age, backwards compatibility, and the fact that it appears first in the encryption type selection menus in many router control panels.

WEP was ratified as a Wi-Fi security standard in September of 1999. The first versions of WEP weren’t particularly strong, even for the time they were released, because U.S. restrictions on the export of various cryptographic technology led to manufacturers restricting their devices to only 64-bit encryption. When the restrictions were lifted, it was increased to 128-bit. Despite the introduction of 256-bit WEP encryption, 128-bit remains one of the most common implementations.

Despite revisions to the algorithm and an increased key size, over time numerous security flaws were discovered in the WEP standard and, as computing power increased, it became easier and easier to exploit them. As early as 2001 proof-of-concept exploits were floating around and by 2005 the FBI gave a public demonstration (in an effort to increase awareness of WEP’s weaknesses) where they cracked WEP passwords in minutes using freely available software.

Despite various improvements, work-arounds, and other attempts to shore up the WEP system, it remains highly vulnerable and systems that rely on WEP should be upgraded or, if security upgrades are not an option, replaced. The Wi-Fi Alliance officially retired WEP in 2004.

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)

Wi-Fi Protected Access was the Wi-Fi Alliance’s direct response and replacement to the increasingly apparent vulnerabilities of the WEP standard. It was formally adopted in 2003, a year before WEP was officially retired. The most common WPA configuration is WPA-PSK (Pre-Shared Key). The keys used by WPA are 256-bit, a significant increase over the 64-bit and 128-bit keys used in the WEP system.

Some of the significant changes implemented with WPA included message integrity checks (to determine if an attacker had captured or altered packets passed between the access point and client) and the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). TKIP employs a per-packet key system that was radically more secure than fixed key used in the WEP system. TKIP was later superseded by Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

Despite what a significant improvement WPA was over WEP, the ghost of WEP haunted WPA. TKIP, a core component of WPA, was designed to be easily rolled out via firmware upgrades onto existing WEP-enabled devices. As such it had to recycle certain elements used in the WEP system which, ultimately, were also exploited.

WPA, like its predecessor WEP, has been shown via both proof-of-concept and applied public demonstrations to be vulnerable to intrusion. Interestingly the process by which WPA is usually breached is not a direct attack on the WPA algorithm (although such attacks have been successfully demonstrated) but by attacks on a supplementary system that was rolled out with WPA, Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), designed to make it easy to link devices to modern access points.

Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2)

WPA has, as of 2006, been officially superseded by WPA2. One of the most significant changes between WPA and WPA2 was the mandatory use of AES algorithms and the introduction of CCMP (Counter Cipher Mode with Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol) as a replacement for TKIP (still preserved in WPA2 as a fallback system and for interoperability with WPA).

Currently, the primary security vulnerability to the actual WPA2 system is an obscure one (and requires the attacker to already have access to the secured Wi-Fi network in order to gain access to certain keys and then perpetuate an attack against other devices on the network). As such, the security implications of the known WPA2 vulnerabilities are limited almost entirely to enterprise level networks and deserve little to no practical consideration in regard to home network security.

Unfortunately, the same vulnerability that is the biggest hole in the WPA armor, the attack vector through the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), remains in modern WPA2-capable access points. Although breaking into a WPA/WPA2 secured network using this vulnerability requires anywhere from 2-14 hours of sustained effort with a modern computer, it is still a legitimate security concern and WPS should be disabled (and, if possible, the firmware of the access point should be flashed to a distribution that doesn’t even support WPS so the attack vector is entirely removed).

Wi-Fi Security History Acquired; Now What?

At this point, you’re either feeling a little smug (because you’re confidently using the best encryption scheme available for your Wi-Fi access point) or a little nervous because you picked WEP since it was at the top of the list. If you’re in the latter camp, don’t fret; we have you covered.

Before we hit you with a further-reading list of our top Wi-Fi security articles, here’s the crash course. This is a basic list ranking the current Wi-Fi security methods available on any modern (post-2006) router, ordered from best to worst:

WPA2 + AES
WPA + AES
WPA + TKIP/AES (TKIP is there as a fallback method)
WPA + TKIP
WEP
Open Network (no security at all)

Ideally, you’ll disable Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) and set your router to WPA2 +AES. Everything else on the list is a less than ideal step down from that. Once you get to WEP, your security level is so low it’s about as effective as a chain link fence–the fence exists simply to say “hey, this is my property” but anyone who actually wanted in would just climb right over it.

If all this thinking about Wi-Fi security and encryption has you curious about other tricks and techniques you can easily deploy to further secure your Wi-Fi network, your next stop should be browsing the following up comming Technopheniac articles:

How To Secure Your Wi-Fi Network Against Intrusion
Don’t Have a False Sense of Security: 5 Insecure Ways to Secure Your Wi-Fi
How to Enable a Guest Access Point on Your Wireless Network
The Best Wi-Fi Articles for Securing Your Network and Optimizing Your Router

Armed with a basic understanding of how Wi-Fi security works and how you can further enhance and upgrade your home network access point, you’ll be sitting pretty with a secure Wi-Fi network in short order.

Technopheniac Explains: Why You Should Perform Clean Installs, Not Upgrades

Whether you’re installing the latest version of Windows or upgrading your Linux distribution, most geeks agree that you should probably perform a clean installation rather than try your luck with an upgrade.

New operating systems versions want to reduce the pain of upgrading and offer to bring your old files, settings, and programs along with you through an upgrade, but this can often cause problems.

Upgrade vs. Clean Installs on Windows

To a less-experienced user, an upgrade seems like the best type of install. If you want to install Windows 8 on a PC with Windows 7 already on it, you can perform an upgrade installation to bring many of your programs, settings, and files with you rather than reinstalling your programs, changing your computer settings, and copying over your files when you’re done.

In theory, an upgrade will save you time because you can skip much of the set-up work afterwards. In practice, upgrades have often caused problems. When you perform a clean installation, you get a fresh copy of Windows without any clutter. When you upgrade, Windows must attempt to bring your programs and settings with you. You won’t end up with a clean copy of Windows – you’ll end up with the latest version of Windows with your old programs and settings copied over. Files you haven’t used in years, registry entries created by long since-uninstalled programs, and other junk will remain on your fresh copy of Windows. Some applications may not be compatible and may be uninstalled during the upgrade process or may not work afterwards – you’ll have to reinstall some things anyway.

Some benchmarks have found that upgrade installs perform more slowly than clean installs, which isn’t surprising. An upgrade install might have old bloatware and startup programsrunning in the background.

We don’t encourage running a registry cleaner and smart users shouldn’t have to reinstall Windows on a regular basis. However, when you’re switching to a new operating system, it’s the ideal time to start things out on the right foot with a fresh operating system.

How to Clean-Install Windows

To perform a clean installation of Windows, don’t select the Upgrade option when installing Windows. Select the Custom: Install Windows only (advanced) option and select the hard drive you want to install Windows on. You can even perform a clean install with an Upgrade license. The Upgrade license just requires that your computer must already have a valid license for a previous version of Windows; it doesn’t require that you perform an Upgrade installation.

Be sure that you have backup copies of all your important files before performing a clean installation, as a clean install will wipe your system partition.

Linux-Specific Problems

Clean installs are also useful on Linux distributions. We’ll refer to Ubuntu in particular here, as it’s the most popular distribution, but much of this also applies to other distributions, such as Fedora.

Mark Shuttleworth, who created Ubuntu, recently wrote that “Upgrading today is possible, but to keep the system clean over multiple successive upgrades requires an uncommonly high level of skill with APT.”

In other words, problems can also occur when you upgrade your Linux distribution. A new version of Ubuntu may have dropped a particular package from the default system because it offers duplicate functionality, but such packages will not necessarily be removed from your system during an upgrade. If you have packages from third-party repositories installed, they may prevent you from upgrading. Various package dependency problems can occur and old configuration settings may not be overwritten properly with new default settings if you’ve customized them.

Just as old files, settings, and programs can persist on a Windows machine, the same thing can happen when you upgrade your Linux distribution.

There’s no doubt that Ubuntu’s upgrade process works much better than the upgrade process offered by many older Linux distributions, but it’s nowhere near perfect, as Mark Shuttleworth himself says.

How to Clean Install a Linux Distribution

When you see an upgrade notification, you don’t have to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu with the built-in too. You can download the Ubuntu installer from Ubuntu’s website and burn it to a disc (or put it on a USB drive) before installing the new version of Ubuntu over your previous version of Ubuntu.

As with Windows, you should ensure you have backup copies of your important files before installing the new Linux distribution over the previous Linux distribution.

The Previous Version Rule

Note that you can generally only upgrade from the previous version of an operating system. For example, you can upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7, but not from Windows XP. Likewise, you can upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 from Ubuntu 12.04, but not Ubuntu 11.10 – although you could upgrade 11.10 to 12.04 and then upgrade it to 12.10, if you felt like living dangerously.

Upgrading is tempting, and upgrade installs are becoming more reliable with each new operating system version release. However, clean installs are still the way to go if you want a fresh system without clutter from previous versions of your operating system. A new operating system release is a good excuse to start fresh with a clean OS, anyway.

Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu

You have a new computer that came with Windows 7 pre-installed on it, and you want to create a dual boot system so you can run Ubuntu Linux as well. Here we take you through the process to install Ubuntu on your pre-installed Windows 7 machine.

For this demonstration I(ALBIN PAUL) am using Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit) and Ubuntu 9.10 (32-bit)

Install Ubuntu

Here we will set up a basic dual boot system with the Ubuntu 9.10 disc that will create GRUB as your boot loader. On the Window 7 machine pop in the Ubuntu disc and boot from it.

If you experience a problem with the graphics with Ubuntu not displaying correctly, go back to the start screen, hit F4 and select Safe graphics mode.

Continue through the installation steps by selecting your language, time zone, and keyboard layout. When you get to the following screen (step 4 of 6), the easiest method for beginners is to select the first option– Install them side by side, choosing between them each startup. On the first bar you’ll see is the entire Windows 7 partition. Then on the second bar, you can slide it up or down to specify the amount of hard drive space you want for Ubuntu.

The green area represents the amount of space we’re leaving for Windows 7, and the brown is the space we’re allocating for Ubuntu.In this example we’re sliding it down to 10GB and leaving the rest for Windows.

Click continue to the verification dialog box.

In the next step create your user name, password, and configure log in options.

If everything looks good, go ahead and click Install. If you need to make any changes you can still go back and make them at this point.

The installation will start showing a progress bar and display new features in Ubuntu 9.10.

The amount of time it takes to install will vary from system to system, and once it’s complete, go ahead and restart the machine.

When the machine reboots you’ll see the GRUB loader where you can boot to Ubuntu or Windows 7.

One thing to point out in my experience with this method is when you first boot into Windows 7, Check Disk runs, then reboots and you need to choose the Windows 7 option again from the bootloader.

Conclusion

This should help get you started in enjoying a Windows 7 / Ubuntu Linux dual boot configuration. There are definitely other ways to get a Windows / Linux dual boot system, but if you want a quick method, so you can try out Ubuntu, this method works well.

BitLocker To Go Encrypts Portable Flash Drives in Windows 7

The BitLocker feature was introduced in Windows Vista and allowed you to encrypt the content of your hard drive. Now in Windows 7 they offer BitLocker To Go which allows you to encrypt portable USB flash drives.

First open up My Computer and Right-click on the flash drive you want to encrypt and select Turn on BitLocker.

After BitLocker initialized the flash drive you will need to enter in a password to unlock the drive. You can also set up a Smartcard which are usually used in a work environment so talk to you IT staff.

Next you will be prompted to store the recovery key which is used in the event you lose your password or smartcard. If you store it as a file make sure that it is not on the same drive that you’re encrypting.

After the key has been saved as a file or printed you will see a confirmation message.

Finally you will be ready to start encrypting the drive so just click the Start Encrypting button.

While it is encrypting there will be a progress screen displayed.

A successful encryption of the USB flash drive. notice that the drive icon will change to show its encrypted with BitLocker.

Notice that the drive icon will change to show its encrypted with BitLocker where the gold lock indicates it is locked up and the gray lock is displayed after you have unlocked it.

Right-click on that icon to bring up options to manage BitLocker encryption.

The next time you plug in the drive to a Windows 7 machine you will be prompted to enter the password to gain access to the drive. You can also always have it unlocked on specific machines in the future.

You can also use the encrypted drive in Vista and XP. Here we will look at how it looks in XP, when you plug it in you will be prompted for the password to launch BitLocker To Go Reader (the utility is installed automatically on the drive by Windows 7).

BitLocker To Go Reader is a Windows Explorer type navigation utility for showing the content of the drive.

With a BitLocker encrypted drive you will only be able to read and copy files. If you need to add files or change them you will need to use a Windows 7 machine.

This is a great way to easily make sure sensitive data on your USB flash drive is safe. Right now anyone who has Windows 7 RC1 Ultimate can use this feature.

How to Burn an ISO Image to a Disc

There may be a time when you have an ISO image that you need to burn to a CD or DVD for use in a computer or other device. Today we show you how to do it using ImgBurn, ISO Recorder, and Windows Disc Image Burner in Windows 7.

You might need to burn an ISO of an operating system, software app, CD, DVD…etc. It doesn’t matter what the ISO image is, burning an image is a fairly straight-forward process and here we’ll take a look at three free options to accomplish it.

Using ImgBurn

ImgBurn is an awesome free utility that will create ISO images, allow out burn almost anything, and a lot more. Although there are a lot advanced features available, burning an ISO to disc is easy. Download and install ImgBurn (link below) taking the defaults in the install wizard.

The main thing to watch for and uncheck during installation is when it offers the worthless Ask Toolbar.

The easiest way to use ImgBurn is to burn an image to disc is pop in a blank disc to the CD/DVD drive, right-click on the ISO file, and select Burn using ImgBurn.

ImgBurn opens up with the source and destination fields already filled in. You can leave the default settings, then click the Write button.

You’ll notice that the ImgBurn Log screen opens, this is by default and is meant to show error messages you may receive during the writing process.

A successful burn! That is all there is to it…click Ok and close out of ImgBurn.

Use ISO Recorder

ISO Recorder (link below) is another great utility for burning ISO images to disc. They have a version for XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (32 & 64-bit Versions). Pop your blank disc into your CD/DVD drive and right-click on the ISO image file and select Copy image to CD from the Context Menu.

In the next screen the image file path is in the Source Image file field. Under Recorder select the drive with your blank disc, select a recording speed and click Next.

You’ll see a progress screen while the data is written to the disc and finalizing…

That’s it! Your disc will pop out and you can click Finish to close out of ISO Recorder.

Use Windows 7

If You’re using Windows 7, use the built in Windows Disc Image Burner feature to burn ISO images to disc.

The process is very straight-forward, and for a full walkthrough on this, check out our article on how to burn an ISO image in Windows 7.

Conclusion

You don’t need an expensive commercial application to burn an ISO image to disc. Using any one of these free utilities will get the job done quite nicely.

Download ImgBurn

Download ISO Recorder

Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7

If you have a shared or public computer you might want to allow users to use only specified programs. Today we take a look at a setting in Local Group Policy that allows you to set only specified programs to run.

Note: This process uses Local Group Policy Editor which is not available in Home versions of Windows 7.

First click on Start and enter gpedit.msc into the search box and hit Enter.

Navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ System. Then under Setting scroll down and double click on Run only specified Windows applications.

Set it to Enabled, then under the Options section click on the Show button next to List of allowed applications.

A Show Contents dialog comes up where you can type in the apps you want to allow users to run. When finished with the list, click OK then close out of Local Group Policy Editor.

If a user tries to access an application that is not on the specified list they will receive the following error message.

This is a nice feature for limiting what programs users can or cannot access on the computer.