Eastern Europe PCooling Your Optical Drive
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september 2007 MAXIMUMPC 111
MAXIMUMPC
’s
PC-Punishing
games
We’ll walk you through the 10 most
technologically advanced games
either out now or on the horizon.
Does your system have the huevos to
handle ’em.budget build-
it Challenge
In a timed competition, two
Maximum PC editors must each shop
for and build a functioning PC, with
less than a grand between them!
Whose will be the better performer?aWesOme Web
aPPs
We know, hype about Web 2.0 is
everywhere (shoot, even Gordon’s
mom is into it!), but we’re going to
sift through all the sissy stuff and
show you THE new-gen websites a
PC power user should care about.IN
MAY CAUSE
SWELLING OF
ANKLES OR FEET
LETTErs PoLICy: MAXIMUM PC invites your thoughts and comments. Send them to
[email protected]. Please include your full name, town, and telephone number, and limit
your letter to 300 words. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. Due to the vast amount of
e-mail we receive, we cannot personally respond to each letter.sE nIor EDITor GorDon MaH UnG rEsPonDs:
The good news is that the steps required to
secure one app will work for most others. First,
you need to secure the BIos with a password
and change it every month. you should also lock
out the UsB ports to prevent the use of UsB flash
keys to install or run applications and UsB Wi-Fi
adapters. also, it’s a good idea to remove the
floppy and optical drive from your boot order to
prevent Timmy from booting off of either of those
devices. Then, you’ll need to physically lock the
case so that little Timmy can’t just reset the BIos
to undo all of your changes.
When you get into Windows, you’ll need
to set up a limited-access account for your li’l
troublemaker instead of allowing him to use an
administrator account. To do that in XP, go to the
Users control panel, select Timmy’s account, and
set the role to Limited User. (Be aware that this
will prevent many games and even some basic
apps like CD burners from working properly.)
This should be enough to keep all but the
most industrious tykes from disabling the protec-
tion apps. If Timmy is really enterprising, you
might want to consider random room searches
before lockdown, err, bedtime.WoULD yoU L IkE soME C HEEsE
WITH T HaT?
The very fact that it will take a Core 2 Extreme proces-
sor, two gigs of Corsair RAM, and an $875 8800 XXX
Edition videocard to run Supreme Commander in SLI
and still average under 40fps makes me wonder about
the future of gaming. That seems to be a pretty big
investment for a $50 game. I am still using my trusty
6800 GT and will not even attempt buying this game
for my rig. Why bother? Unless gaming vendors can
start designing their games for reasonable hardware,
we may as well pitch our PCs and give in to the Xbox.
For the price of a full-featured gaming rig, we could
even buy a big-screen TV.
—Jim HallEXECUTIvE E DITor MICHaEL BroWn rEsPonDs:
What can I say, Jim? PC gaming can be an expen-
sive hobby. But you need to remember that you’re
not making the investment for a single game.
and wouldn’t you rather see developers push the
envelope and take advantage of the latest hard-
ware than lag behind the market in an effort to
sweep more customers into their nets? Console
game systems challenge the PC status quo when
they’re first announced, but they’re usually sur-
passed by PCs by the time they’re a year old, andthey look like toys as they near the end of their
useful lives. and there’s not a damned thing you
can do about it because they’re closed systems.
PCs can be upgraded to whatever the state of the
art may be for many years after their introduc-
tion. Having said that, skipping one generation of
videocards isn’t a bad idea for a cost-conscious
gamer. I think you’ll find skipping two in a row to
be painful.CaBLECarD ConUnDrUM
This is in response to “Attack of the Home Theater
PC” (August 2007). The CableCard fiasco you
experienced is nothing new. I’m a field service tech
for my local cable company and will say I’ve seen
more problems related to CableCards than I care
to shake a stick at. I saw one TV that produced a
black screen the first time it was turned on in the
morning; turn it off and then back on and it’s fine
for the rest of the day. I personally went out to this
customer’s house four times for this issue. We
replaced everything from the out main line to the TV
itself and replaced the CableCard multiple times.
I wouldn’t blame Comcast for your issues. I would
blame the problems on ATI and CableCard. That tech-
nology has yet to earn its merit, especially since right
now it’s a one-way communication device. People
who buy products for CableCards are going to be out
of luck once two-way CableCards are introduced. This
is not a good time to get a CableCard.
—Jim A.EXECUTIvE EDITor MICHaEL BroWn rEsPonDs:
velocity Micro reconfigured, retested, and resent
the rig they’d provided us with earlier, so we’re
going to contact Comcast and try again—look
for our coverage at http://www.maximumpc.com.
s1 Digital still hasn’t received its CableCard
tuner order, and voodoo has since decided that
the technology isn’t mature enough for the com-
pany to even offer. The CableCard tuner market
is clearly not in good shape, and I can’t help but
believe that this is going to ripple through the
entire media-center PC market.
I’m not personally bothered by the one-way
nature of the current technology, because I
almost never use on-demand or pay-per-view
services, but we’ll certainly continue to make
our readers aware of that drawback. But it will
become a moot point if the companies involved
can’t get the technology to work in the first
place; wherever the problem ultimately lies, I
see very little mainstream value in high-priced
media-center PCs that can’t be connected to
digital cable or satellite Tv.october
ISSU
e
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