Fragfests and Imbas

The darkhorse that turned out to be a darksword… 

‘Sucked my magic right out. Joram must be proud. Where’s the damned catalyst?!! 

I got infected by the Imgkulot virus months back and all my freeware ICEs (read: anti-malware) couldn’t detect it. (Sorry, Net Runner fan haha!) Finally I went to this site that touted a list of some of the best freeware in the Internet and downloaded what it recommended. It worked — a bit. It detected the Imgkulot virus but unfortunately, wasn’t able to delete it. Still the detection was something so I kept the thing.

Just some nights ago, I checked my process manager (accessible by pressing ctrl-alt-del, pressing the Task Manager button and choosing the "Processes" tab in the resulting interface) and WHOA! a process was gobbling up 40-60Mb of my memory! Effer, I thought. I Googled the filename and gretchins and flayers, it led me back to the forums of that self-same anti-malware thingamagig I DL’d!

It seems that there is a bug with their software and killing its real-time protection won’t kill the process.

So much for on-demand scanning.

I tried killing it and true to what users were complaining about, the thing is immortal:

As you can see 62,548K. WOOOT?!! 0_0

I am uninstalling the software this very night. I mean c’mon, 60Mb?!! (By comparison, the AVG processes do not even amount to 4Mb in my system.) 

There’s a lesson to all this:

Monitor your Processes every once in a while. If you see something gobbling up huge numbers, Google the damn thing. If you are SURE — VERY SURE — it’s not a vital system file and it’s something you can make without, kill it. (I take no responsibility if something adverse happens to your system though so do research and quadruple-check what you have learned.) If you can’t kill it (like the above) and the program is so much dead weight to you (or if it’s redundant in function — ie you have got several programs like it already), uninstall it.

I don’t need to tell you how precious a commodity RAM is to your system do I?

(And no, it didn’t make an appearance in my "Best Free Anti-virus Anti-spyware I Use" article if you are asking.)

This article has been updated and transferred to http://imbacore.blogspot.com/2008/02/realtek-ac97-audio-update.html.  

Invasion of the Sack Snatchers 

I have this article for some time now, in fact it is one of my oldest. The problem is that I hid it in the middle of an article about Tribes: Vengeance. None of my friends have read it apparently as I still hear some of them complaining about "how their PC virtually runs out of RAM after several hours of play and their games hang" or they "cannot install a program as it is YYMb big and their RAM is ZZMb only".

For those interested in knowing the difference between the two, go HERE and scroll down to the part that says "RAM vs  Hard Drives (A Storage vs Memory Comparison-Tutorial ) starts here."

All your sacks are belong to me.  

I got intrigued by this free, online, fantasy-themed fighting game and decided to download and install it. The game has decent visuals and has none of the "grind" that other level-up games impose on their players. It offers quick, slam-bam-thank-you-naks-and-golems PVP action — or so the game’s creators advertise it to be. I never had the chance to find out.

AVG Free interprets the game’s anti-hack/cheat system as a virus. It promptly deleted some of its files and when I logged in next, the game refused to run.

I Googled for resources regarding my predicament and found several forums saying that AVG is indeed misinterpreting some of its files to be malware. I decided to do some online scanning as prompted by a thread in the forums of AVG, glanced at the report, and mailed their support team. This is their reply:

Dear Sir/Madam,

>Dear Grisoft Staff,
>
>I tried playing Rakion Philippines today and received an error message
>saying that part of the Gameguard software that the online game uses for
>anti-hacking/cheating has been modified or deleted. I scanned my PC for
>viruses using AVG free and it saw the Gameguard.des file as a
>"Obfustat.CMC".
>
>I Googled for a solution to my problem and saw several forums saying your
>software erroneously detects it as a virus. I scanned the file using the
>Online Malware Scan (http://virusscan.jotti.org/) and only your product
>detects it as such.
>
>I am convinced this is a false positive. Attached is the file.
>
>[GAVE A PASSWORD FOR THE FILE]
>
>Hope you will fix this in your next update for AVG Free.
>
>John
>
>PS
>
>Is there anyway I could know if it’s okay to install this game again? It
>hassles me that AVG automatically deletes its Gameguard everytime. Disabling AVG is out of >the question as I depend on your product to keep my system
>virus free.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Same
>

 Unfortunately, when I installed the game, AVG still sees it as malware. Either the update to the anti-virus has not been implemented yet, or the game has downloaded another version of its cheat/hack countermeasures that AVG still sees as a virus. (READ: It may not be a case of AVG failing to make alacritous corrections.)

I sent them another letter. In the meantime, Rakion players should not freak out if results spew out "Obfustat.des" warnings. It’s a mistake that the staff of AVG will hopefully rectify soon. (Though of course, if Rakion players have reason to believe that they got a virus from other sources, they should not dismiss the notion that it may indeed be a real virus this time.)

Update: AVG replied. This time there is a temporary fix. If you do implement this however, and if your rig somehow gets a real virus, do deactivate the exceptions and scan the game’s files.  (the virus may have infected the .des files in Gameguard —- which you will have set as exceptions. Anyway, if AVG still deletes the .des files, you can always install it and set the exceptions again. Instructions are found in the reply. See below.)

Dear Sir,

website: http://www.grisoft.com

Ooooo…..kay. She’s wearing armor plates but why the red flimsy tights? Orcs could uhm, stick their uhm, weapons in her uhm, vulnerable areas….

Case in point: here:

And have I mentioned this character is putting Mai Shiranui of KOF to shame everytime she makes sudden movements?  

This post has been transferred to my new site http://imbacore.blogspot.com/

This article has been transferred to: http://imbacore.blogspot.com/.

This article has been moved to http://imbacore.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-disable-auto-updates-in-avg-free.html, my blog about PC tweaks and how-tos from a beginner’s perspective. It also has news and reviews about War Rock maps and weapons. 

…. is to make a restore point of your system.

Or the title should be rephrased as "The First Order of Business for Sane PC Users…."

Wha—? What’s a restore point?!! (pauses for a bit) 0_0 GOODGODSOFALLTHECELESTIALPLANESOFTHEMULTIVERSEWHORAINDOWNCLEANSINGFIREONNON-TWEAKERSYOUDON’TKNOW
WHATARESTOREPOINTIS?

What if your younger brother or sister installs something and it messes up your PC?

What if you install something and you find out your PC now takes half of a queen termite’s lifespan to boot?

What if, if either of the above happened and you tried uninstalling the offending "something"s and find out it doesn’t fix the predicament you are in by even an iota?

No fallback point? You are screwed.  Or maybe not screwed but doomed to spend the rest of your PC-using life grumbling about the good ol’days when your PC wasn’t acting like C-3PO before he… oh wait. There’s always a reinstall — and C-3PO was screwed up to begin with. (Anakin wasn’t good at design actually; remember what happened when Darth Sidius made him commander of his armada? Good gods! Were you able to take even a small look at what happened to the control panels of the Star Destroyers? Piccard, if he watched that last SW film, would have thanked all his lucky stars for the Okudagram…)

Anyway.

Anyway, a restore point is a fallbackpoint. You make that point, do something, and then if all hell breaks loose, you can uninstall whatever it was you installed, load that restorepoint and *poof!* like nothing happened.

If you still don’t get it, click here.  

Lol! Of course you get it! But to get back on track, this is what I use for making those restore points:

ERUNT 

Windows XP comes with a tool that makes a backup but I hear from reliable sources from all over the ‘net that this is better. 

You see if you install something, it writes entries into your system’s registry. Oftentimes though, when you unistall a program, it leaves those entries in your registy, so part of your system’s configuration information remain the same even though the offending software no longer resides in your hard drive. Needless to say undesired PC behavior may still occur even after you uninstall that software.

So what to do? When you install a suspicious/unsupported software do:

1. this procedure.

2. Install the software, if you like it/doesn’t do anything amiss, fine. But if anything goes haywire, do:

3. Uninstall the software and load up the restore point by going to C:\WINDOWS\ERDNT\xxx [where xxx is the filename you set for the restore point (the default is the date you made it on)] and double-clicking on it. 

And VOILA! Instant time warp!

TAKE NOTE THAT IT WILL OF COURSE LOAD UP REGISTRY SETTINGS prior TO WHATEVER YOU INSTALLED after YOU MADE THE RESTORE POINT! So if you intalled two software packages and don’t like them, it’s fine but if you’d like to keep one and do away with the other, loading up that restore point BEFORE you installed those two won’t be such a good idea. I do not know what will happen as I have never done such idiocy before. =)) That is why I make a restore point before I install something suspicious/unsupported, test it, and then make ANOTHER restore point before I attempt to install another unsupported program.

Well, that’s it for this week, I hope you learned something new. And oh, don’t forget to delete very dated restore points; they take up about 30Mb each so  6 of those will consume more than 180mb of your hdd space. Again they will be stored in the C:\WINDOWS\ERDNT folder. I normally keep two of them at each time just to be safe, but this is a matter of personal preference.

Some of my friends have heard me yammering about this term and think I have completely lost it. “AA” for short, anti-aliasing is that setting ingame that enhances 3d images by smoothing out “jaggies” that you see commonly in games. They are frequently seen distorting diagonal objects like stair railings, wires, cables, curved surfaces — basically anything that isn’t perpendicular relative to the sides of your screens.

I won’t explain the intricacies of pixels, 3D rendering, etc as this part of the blog deals with "PC Tweaks/Tutorials from a NOOB’S Field of View”. So, suffice to say, computers have a hard time “drawing” smooth curves or lines that are not perpendicular to the sides of your screen. To clarify things:

Ha. Ha.

You can force it to, and this is where anti-aliasing comes in. The settings are available in multiples of two (2x, 4x, 8xs, 16x, etc) with higher numbers translating to better “smoothing out those danged jaggies”.

And danged they are.

They are not just there to ruin your suspension of disbelief, you run, and the diagonal sides of your gun move. Hell, it’s not just what you are holding; they are there hugging every last piece of diagonal line and curve in the game world you can see. It’s like an invasion of mini-Agent Smiths. They are everywhere. And they move when you move, stop when you stop; it’s like a horror movie too.

“Dang, hombre, I swore I saw something move in the corner of my eye!”

At their most prominent, they look like mini-escalators that are moving everywhere –  they TOTALLY ruin your immersive experience. Overhead phone lines with moving serrated edges anyone?

Here’s a real world application of my rant. Click on each image below to enlarge them and compare: (take notice of  the lines in the landing of the stairs)

 
Without anti-aliasing

 
With anti-aliasing

Hmm. “Real world application” — I think I just created an oxymoron.

Alright if you didn’t spot the difference, you are luckier than the rest of us; you can live out the rest of your life content with just a GeForce MX card and Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 with 16X or more AA be hanged.

Really, it’s bliss; why live in torment? =)____) 

I have wifi. That enough is a death warrant for me everytime I play online shooter games. Considering that I play a three-year old game that is thought to be dead and where 75% of the remaining players are pros I get my a$$ handed to me everytime I play. But hell it’s fun. I play for the rush, the catharsis I get everytime someone ragdolls and cartwheels in the air after catching a well-led spinfusor round. I get a high when I successfuly penetrate an enemy base and launch mass-driven mortar rounds at their electronics, my sub-woofer faithfully emulating the sound of shaking foundations as explosions wail and hammer away at tortured concrete and screaming warped metal.

Still, the high ping caused by my connection shows; I only get 0-16 kills in 10 minutes. Compared to my Americans and Australian competitors who have sub-100 pings, this is very low a kill count. I started surfing the information superhighway for something that might fix this.

I found the site www.speedguide.net, which offers a freeware that optimizes one’s TCP settings. TCP Optimizer enables users to get 90% of the rate their ISPs promise them.

I downloaded the freeware, didn’t quite go for the automated "optimal settings", instead opted to read the individual definitions of the alien terms, tweaked the fields and voila! I got:

 (click to see image)

ResultOne

…which was even lower than my previous speed I was getting. While it was disappointing — and a bit alarming —- OMG, what did I do?! —- I didn’t freak out and studied some more. I sifted through the site’s forum again, browsed through the results their online TCP Analyzer gave me (whose link can be found in the aforementioned site) and found the phrase "Reccomended RWINs: 64240, 128480, 256960, 513920 ". I grew puzzled as the freeware set a number that was very low compared to what was recommended. I posted a query which read:

0…..kay.

(click to see image)

Surprisingly (for me) I got a number that is one of the figures in the "Other RWIN values that might work well with your current MTU/MSS: " list given by TCP analyzer and is nearer than my former RWIN, which was relatively optimal than the one made by this freeware.  I’m going to try this figure now…..

These are the results I got when I inputted the recommended figures:

(click to see images)

Result3

Result4

Result5

My ISP advertised 384Kbps so the results are nothing short of spectacular considering I was averaging 260Kbps in the past weeks. I’m currently using the second highest RWIN value. (you want the rationale? Read and post in the forums or better yet, do some research)

The TCP Optimizer. Get it fellas. (A note of warning though: back up your registry before using this; I take no responsibility if anything adverse happens to your system) 

And no, it doesn’t fix ping. I kind of knew that before I used the thing but well….. it doesn’t hurt to dream of miracles. In the meanwhile, I hope I helped your browsing/streaming needs and as for me:

Zero. To. Sixteen.