RPG games

Online RPG games are a great way to have a good time, if you have leisure. A lazy afternoon on a rainy day is the perfect setting for immersing yourself in a fantastic tale that involves wonderful worlds, crazy beasts and gigantic ogres, beautiful princesses, powerful magicians, deadly plagues and incredible adventures. Some people don't even need the excuse of a rainy day to ignore work and enter their private fairyland!

These games are even better (on your wallet) when they're FREE!! There is a steady and dedicated fan base for free online RPG games. 'RPG', of course, as most of you may already know, stands for 'Role Playing Games'. You play the role of an adventurer in a fantasy world. You may choose your race so that you become a specialist in fighting with swords and clubs or bows and arrows, or you become a magician.

Many free online RPG games also allow you to choose one or more companions for your adventures, so that your group has a good selection of diversely skilled people. When you play a free online RPG game, it is best to concentrate on building your character(s) on single skill lines. Build one character to be a skilled mélee fighter, another as a combat magician, and so forth. A truly versatile party should contain about three to four members, each highly developed in a certain skill.

This kind of party is vastly superior to a loose bunch that contains jacks of all trades. There are people who have been playing free online RPG games for many years, and have built up their characters through numerous adventures and several levels. Their playing characters are truly formidable, the most powerful inhabitants of the imaginary worlds.

Among free online RPG games, there is a new type of games that have become very popular in recent years. These are the MMORPG-s, which is a shortened form of 'Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games'. The MMORPG-s contain truly gigantic worlds, with vast continents of land and huge oceans, snowy mountain peaks and sunny glades.

Thousands of people from all over the world log in to the game servers to assume their fantasy roles in those strange countries. As in most free online RPG games, the MMORPG-s do not have strict story lines - only interesting settings where unique stories may unfold from the live interaction of a great number of human participants. You are even free to remain relatively free of quests and adventures, and simply roam the beautiful worlds as a traveller.

Commercial based MMROPG-s include the hugely popular Everquest by Sony Inc. (I also found a great guide for playing it over here, with all sorts of help for playing the game) , and The World of Warcraft by Blizzard games (along with THIS guide, you you'll go from newbie to seasoned pro faster then you can swing a digital sword). Recently, the internet has seen at least one massively multiplayer free online RPG game, known as Ragnarok. If you want a taste of this one, visit http://regnorakonline.com and get yourself registered for free. You will need to download a small component of the game and install it on you computer. The rest of this fascinating game is online, and comes to you gradually as you progress through the levels.

Remember that in order to enjoy a free online RPG game to its fullest potential, you need to have a broadband connection to the internet.

What games are you playing? let us know the game, and any tips you have that can help everyone else out!

until next time....

10 easy tips to improve computer performance

Computer no longer running the way it did when you first got it? programs taking longer to start up then they did just a little while back?

Many computer problems can be solved with free or low-cost products or just by using a few common sense tips to improve performance and keep your PC running for a long time.

Computers often (read that, WILL MOST LIKELY) freeze or crash when one needs them the most; in the middle of an important presentation, a term paper that's due the next day, or while updating our financial software.

The good news is, Many computer problems can be solved with free or low-cost products or just by using a few common sense tips to improve performance and keep your PC running for a long time.

1. An anti-virus Program - The most essential thing to have is a anti-virus scan that is run weekly. Most new computers come with anti-virus software already installed. If the computer you are using doesn't have one, there are free scans available online, but one really should be installed on your computer if you spend any time at all online. Spend the time learning how to use your virus scanner. Find out how it's updated - most update automatically - and use the options to set it up to run automatically at a set time every week. Most computer problems can be prevented just by having a virus scanner installed.

2. Run the Scandisk program - At least once every two months, you should run a program called Scandisk. The great thing is, It's already on your computer. Scandisk actually scans your files and even your hard drive and can let you know of any problems it discovers.

To run Scandisk, first make sure everything running in the background on your PC is turned off. To do this press "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" and your close program box will appear.

Highlight each item EXCEPT "explorer" and "systray". Click on "End Task" to close the program.

Then go to your start button and choose "Programs". Choose "Accessories" at the top of the list. Move your cursor down to "System Tools" and Choose "Scandisk".

A box will appear giving your choices of what you want your computer to scan. You can have it scan your files only or your entire hard drive. Scanning your hard drive will take longer, although at times, it may be worthwhile to wait.

3. Run the Defragmenter program - Another program that you should run about every two months is called Disk Defragmenter. Defrag will arrange your files better so your PC can access them faster. It's best to run this program after the Scandisk program is finished.

To run Disk Defragmenter go back to the "System Tools" and choose "Disk Defragmenter". It's best to run this program overnight as it takes a long time.

You should not be using these programs while using other programs on your computer. If the Scandisk or Defrag program keeps starting over you may need to run the programs in Safe Mode, a special diagnostic mode. Read the manual for your PC to find out how to put your PC into Safe Mode.

4. Use a Firewall program - For anyone on a DSL or cable connection a personal firewall keeps viruses, hijackers and hackers from your computer. Since you are constantly connected to the internet by using these connections there is a constant threat that others may try to access your computer. There are free firewall programs available for download.

5. Run a Spyware program - Another important tool, is a spyware search program. When you download something from the internet sometimes other software is included. This software is called "spyware/adware" and it can do many things to harm your computer, including letting someone from another website see what websites you surf in order to send you advertising. Other spyware are more malicious and try to steal your passwords or other personal information. You should run a spyware checker at least once a month or at any time you are experiencing problems with your connection or computer speed.

6. Run a hi-jacker search program - Another important program to have is a hi-jacker search program. A hi-jacker changes your homepage to a different search engine page and can also block links to common search pages. They are trying to force you to use their homepage. Some of the hi-jacker's homepages are not pages you would like your children to see. You should use a hi-jacker search program at least once a month or whenever you are having a problem with your homepage.

7. Clear your temporary files - Sometimes your PC's virtual memory will become full. When this happens your computer may run slow, give you error messages or freeze during a program. This happens because everything you do on your PC - every picture on every webpage, every document you type, every photo you change - is saved somewhere on your PC, even after you have left that page and closed the document. In order to erase this memory you need to do the following steps:

Open your internet browser -> Go to "Tools" -> "Internet Options".

A box will pop open. It should be open to the "General" tab.

In the center of the box is a section marked "Temporary Internet Files".

Click on "Delete Cookies" and "Delete Files" one at a time. This will delete the temporary files that are clogging the PC's memory.

8. Change your history options - Another way to clean out your computer's memory is to change how many days it saves visited pages. You will find a "history" box in your internet options. It asks how many days you wish to keep pages in history. This is the part of the computer that saves all pages you've visited for as many days as you wish. By saving these pages for a smaller number of days you can clear up more of your PC's memory.

9. Clean out old files - Periodically going through the files in My Documents or other folders you have set up and deleting or archiving them on a CD can also help your computer's memory and performance. Do you really need to keep a saved copy of last semester's English term paper? If not, delete it. You can also go through the programs on your PC from the control panel and delete those you no longer use. Don't delete any of the shared files, though, if it asks, because that can cause more problems.

10. Reboot the PC occasionally - The last thing that is very important to do but seems simple is just to turn your computer off periodically. Your PC needs to be restarted in order to reset itself after new programs or equipment is installed. It also erases the virtual memory from the last session and goes through a self-diagnostic to look for any problems. It sounds like a simple solution, but most problems can be fixed simply by restarting your PC.

Troubleshooting your PC's problems doesn't have to cost a lot of money or require technical expertise. By using just a few software programs and common sense most problems can be stopped and you will find that your PC has better performance and reliability.

Have any other tips on better, let us know...

Until next time....

The browser wars are back!

At the turn of the century, Microsoft brutally vanquished Netscape in the browser wars. For a while, that victory appeared to be permanent. The battle had been a pretty ugly one: A federal court found that Microsoft illegally used its Windows monopoly to expand Internet Explorer's market share; Netscape never recovered from its loss. For most computer users, though, the browser wars were sublime: The Web browser was "invented" in 1992, and within five years, with hundreds of developers at both Microsoft and Netscape pumping out code, browsers became fast, stable, and capable of some very neat tricks.

These days, Web designers boast about all they can do with AJAX, the set of technologies that allow Web sites to emulate desktop-app behavior like drag-and-drop (ie Google Maps). AJAX runs on code that was created by Microsoft and Netscape as competitive weapons during the browser wars. Yes, today's glorious Web was made possible by yesterday's bruising business confrontation. All of us should rejoice, then, at the dawn of Browser War II.

Google has released a Web browser called Chrome. This new piece of software enters a crowded field of browsers looking for your love. Microsoft with its final revision of Internet Explorer 8,.(Both Chrome and IE 8 run only on Windows, though Google says it's creating versions for other platforms.) In June, Mozilla put out Version 3 of its popular open-source, cross-platform Firefox browser, in Version 3.1. The Norwegian software company Opera also released its latest eponymous, innovative, cult-hit browser. And Apple is now working on the next version of Safari for Mac and Windows.

All this competition is great news, because the world desperately needs a better Web browser. For at least the past four or five years, Firefox has been the gold standard among techies; I've been using it as my primary browser for at least that long. I loved it, I appreciated its smart, clean user interface, its tabs (although all browsers use tabs now, at the time when I moved to Firefox, this was the only browser to do so) and keyboard shortcuts, and most of all—Firefox's killer feature—its ability to run a wide range of useful third-party add-ons. But Firefox is hobbled by a couple of major flaws. It hogs system resources: Use it for a while, and it eats up huge chunks of your computer's memory, eventually slowing browsing to a near snail pace. Firefox is also prone to crashing: Load up an errant Web page, and you risk bringing the program to a halt. (This problem makes session-recovery add-ons like Tab Mix Plus essential.)

Admittedly, I'm not an ordinary Web user—I use my browser as a research tool, mail app, calendar, media player, and a tabbed to-do list. I live and breath the internet, I can't be without it... At any point during the day, I've got three or four browser windows open, each with 10 to 15 Web pages running in tabs (at least). I understand that this bespeaks a kind of insanity, but with Web sites growing ever more useful and Web users growing ever more addicted, it's the sort of insanity that afflicts an increasing number people.

The wonderful thing about Google's new browser, is that it's been built with the singular purpose of handling a hefty workload. While I'm not yet ready to switch to Chrome as my permanent browser—it's got some odd user interface quirks, lacks a few useful features, and doesn't have Firefox's hordes of plug-ins—I've found it to be impressively fast and stable. So far, it's run everything that I've thrown it's way without bringing my computer to a halt. For that alone, I really think that Google's on to something.

Just as Windows runs Photoshop and iTunes at the same time without letting each bother the other, or getting in each others way, Chrome lets its processes do different tasks in parallel. If one Chrome tab is busy loading Google Reader, another Chrome tab won't be crimped while refreshing the CNNSI.com website. Best of all, if one process crashes, your full browser session remains intact. I've inadvertently learned many different ways to make Firefox crash; none of these tricks worked on Chrome. The best I could do was crash a single process—this brought down an individual tab, but Chrome as a whole, kept running.

There are several more under-the-hood improvements. Google claims that Chrome beats other browsers at "garbage collection"— the computer-science term for how a program gets rid of memory it no longer needs. Better garbage collection significantly reduces how much of your computer's resources an application consumes. Google also wrote its own JavaScript virtual machine—the engine that runs all the fancy AJAX code that powers complex new Web apps—that it claims is faster and more stable than other browsers' scripting engines. Though I found Chrome speedy and less demanding on my system's resources than Firefox 3.0, its advantage isn't unsurpassable—Lifehacker's tests give the memory and speed edge to Firefox 3.1.

You aren't likely to notice Chrome's tech improvements when you load it up for the first time. What you'll see is a clean, minimalistic app, one missing several features that you're used to in other browsers. For example, Chrome presents no good way to manage bookmarks. Still, there are some innovative features. Instead of an address bar and a search box, Chrome uses only one input bar in which you're free to type either something like "ebay.com" or "policies of Barrack Obama" Chrome is smart enough to figure out when to take you to a Web page and when to perform a Web search. It also lists other recently visited sites containing ebay, obama, or other like terms.

I found some of Google's other user-interface tweaks a little more annoying than useful. Chrome places its row of tabs in the title bar, an area that in most apps isn't used for anything other than displaying the name of the program. This saves space on your screen, but it also eradicates one of the main ways people have grown accustomed to using tabs in browsers—you can't double-click the tab bar to open a new tab, like you can on every other multi-tab browser. (Double-clicking the bar in Chrome resizes the window.)

This is a petty nitpick, obviously. Chrome is very much a work in progress, a beta program that I expect will improve dramatically in the months to come. It shares two advantages with Firefox: Chrome is open-source, meaning outside developers are free to extend and improve it. And Chrome includes a plug-in infrastructure that lets people create add-ons. Because it's new, neither of these features is very important just yet. But if Chrome catches on, developers will likely build these and other great programs for it; theoretically, people could even take the best bits of Firefox and Chrome and build another single awesome browser.

For Google, Microsoft, and Apple, the browser fight is a means to other ends. Microsoft, which holds more than three-quarters of the browser market, looks at the Web as an extension of its operating system. As more of our programs move online, Microsoft fears that we might have little reason to stick to Windows; it sees control of the browser as a way to control the future of software development. Google seems to want to be in the browser business to fight Microsoft. The company's revenue comes entirely from the Web, so it's got to be wary that most of its customers come through software created by its main rival. (Google substantially underwrites both Firefox and Opera, which both feature Google's search engine as the default.) Apple, meanwhile, needs a browser to beef up its own platform—not only on the Mac but also on its phones and iPods.

Sure, these aims aren't entirely noble. But who cares? As the giants duke it out to come up with the best product, they'll copy and improve upon each other's innovations, bringing new features to all browsers. Chrome's immunity to crashing, for instance, is sure to push both Mozilla and Microsoft to improve their browsers' stability. Perhaps soon you'll be able to load up any browser you like and watch two dozen YouTube videos at once without fearing a crash—just like the Web was always meant to be used.

The gloves appear to be off!

Until next time........