Over the course of the next couple of days, I’m going to post quite a few articles in relation to the 89 best PC tips. This will include everything from Audio, iTunes, Email, Productivity, Mac OS X Tips & Tricks, Security, Travel, Video, the Web and even Media in general! This is a very well thought out and well written list originally from Laptop Mag. I enjoyed reading this article so much that I decided it was worth re-publishing. All of the original copyrights are in place, the next series of articles, titled 89 best PC tips, are completely credited to LaptopMag!
The following series of tips is in complete dedication to Gaming.
#1 – Go Back In Time
Relive your glory years by playing Pac-Man and other arcade classics on your desktop. GapTap (free – www.gametap.com), is a free download that lets you install the game player. With 50-plus free games, including some oldies but also a fair number of modern action titles like Hitman: Blood Money, time will fly during that flight delay. If you want more, a monthly subscription of $9.95 buys you a Gold Pass and access to more than 900 games. Either way, the graphics look rich and don’t require you to have a discrete graphics card or more than 256MB of RAM.
#2 – Frag Faster
Trust us, there’s nothing like being the first to pull the trigger in Call of Duty 4. So up your game with the Razer Lachesis ($79.99 – www.razerzone.com) gaming mouse. We gave it our Editors’ Choice award for it’s nine programmable buttons, 32k of on-board memory, and five custom dpi settings ranging from 125 to 4000.
#3 – Eye Candy Upgrade
You’re always buying new games, but did you know that graphics-card manufacturers are constantly releasing driver updates that help your hardware run those new titles more efficiently? To find out what graphics card you have, right-click on “My Computer“, click “Properties“, select the “Hardware” tab, then “Device Manager“, and then open the “Display Adapters” tree. To upgrade your graphics drivers, visit one of these sites:
Nvidia Graphics: www.nvidia.com/page/drivers.html
ATI Graphics: ati.amd..com/support/driver.html
Integrated Intel Graphics: downloadcenter.intel.com
To download the latest version of DirectX 10, or to see if your system supports the technology, visit www.gamesforwindows.com.
#4 – Kill some time with flash!
There are tons of sites for playing flash games, but few are as socially interactive as GameGum (free – www.gamegum.com). Choose from hundreds of titles on the site, and then comment or share secrets about the games, just like a blog. Many of the games are recreations of older ones; we quickly became addicted to an unofficial version of Sonic the Hedgehog. Players can also chat about and rank games, and send them to their friends through Facebook.
#5 – Feel Every Grenade
You can’t expect to be a successful gamer without the ability to hear someone sneaking up behind you, crouched down for the kill. That’s why it’s important to grab a set of 5.1 surround sound headphones. Better yet, the eDimensional Audio FX Pro 5+1 by BenHeck offer force feedback ($79.95 – www.edimensional.com), so you can actually feel any movement around you. If you’re a total noob, no worries; it comes with a built-in mic so you can call for backup.