Posted 07/20/09 at 08:00:00 AM by Will Smith

In times of hardship, it’s important that we, the people, step up and do our civic duty. That’s why, in light of the harsh economic conditions we all face today, I implore everyone to spend more money on computers. LOTS more money. With hardware vendors reporting the worst holiday season of all time, they desperately need you to buy more components and build new PCs. And so-called “budget” machines won’t cut the mustard. You need to buy $1,000 CPUs and multiple $500 videocards. Think 6GB of RAM is enough? Think again. Now, all this PC construction will undoubtedly require tough sacrifices in other areas: Your kids may not get to go to “college.” You may need to cut back on your “food” budget. You may need to turn off non-essential services like “water” and “garbage collection.” Just remember that baloney and ramen taste better when you have a rig that can run Crysis at 2560x1600 with everything turned all the way up. Yes, power user, some things are worth tough sacrifices.

Wait. That’s terrible advice.

Continue reading after the jump!

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Posted 07/06/09 at 09:00:00 AM by Dan Stapleton

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a proper FEAR game. After Monolith’s 2005 original, there were a couple of very mediocre expansions made by a different studio. When Monolith got the franchise back, we expected great things from its second outing; sadly, FEAR 2: Project Origin never really comes into its own.

As a shooter, it brings nothing new to the table—it tries to excite us with the exact same slow-motion combat system that made the first game captivating four years ago, but is simply not enough this time. Even though the enemies are a little more lifelike than most shooter foes, in that they can realistically vault over obstacles and blind-fire at you from behind cover, fighting legions of mercenaries and clone troopers gets old after a few hours. A few sections with agile wall-crawling enemies are the only engaging moments, but everything else is typical shooter fare—that includes sections where you drive a giant mech and mow down enemy soldiers like cutting grass. It’s been done before, and even though it looks pretty here, it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

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Posted 07/06/09 at 08:45:00 AM by Will Smith

Here’s the thing about Mirror’s Edge: It’s 85 percent awesome, and we’re as surprised as anyone that the part that’s awesome is the first-person parkour. The running, jumping, and climbing bits are utterly engaging and even transcendent. There’s something liberating about leaping fearlessly from rooftop to rooftop while fleeing from a nebulous anti-freedom force. Unfortunately, for every high you get while soaring through the sky, there’s a painful low in the form of a combat sequence.

And therein lies the rub. The rooftop chases, where the designers were free to build many-pathed courses through the map, are sublime. By confronting the player with a constant stream of risk-vs.-reward decisions—do I take the risky jump to shave some seconds off my time, or the safe jump to avoid death?—and increasing your players speed as she successfully strings together long combos, the game is elevated from the run-along-a-path-on-the-rooftops experience it could have been into something emergent and amazing and wonderful.

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Posted 07/06/09 at 08:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

I’m in the middle of building the Pro Gaming PC from your website (www.maximumpc.com/tags/parts+guide) and I have a question about the operating system you recommend. The Vista 64-bit Home Premium on your parts list is the system builder pack, intended for system builders only. I am a home user.

I went to Microsoft’s website and looked up the OPK preinstallation information. I have to register with my business information, of which I have none.

Should I send it back and purchase the end-user’s version? Please respond... I am on pins and needles waiting for the reply.

—Debra Hodge

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Posted 07/02/09 at 07:30:19 PM by Michael Brown

Optoma picked an appropriate moniker for its Lilliputian-size video projector. The Pico PK101 isn’t just small, it’s almost inconceivably tiny. It measures just 1.97 inches wide by 4.06 inches long by 0.59 inches thick, and it weighs only four ounces.

Texas Instruments’ DLP (Digital Light Processor) technology deserves much of the credit for making such a product possible. DLP projectors create an image by bouncing light off microscopic mirrors arranged in a matrix on a semiconductor. Each mirror represents a pixel in the image and swivels to either reflect light through the lens or to an internal heatsink. Toggling these two states on and off creates a grayscale. Color pixels are created by using either a color wheel or a colored light source. Optoma uses a non-replaceable LED for its light source, which it claims should last for 20,000 hours. There’s a tiny speaker and a 0.5-watt amp onboard, too.

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Posted 07/02/09 at 07:00:03 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I downloaded memtest86+ 1.65 (on the recommendation of your magazine) and tried it out on one of my systems. I cannot get past the “auto” running memtest86+ to finish booting to Windows XP Pro. My system is an AMD 2.2GB dual core with 2GB of RAM on a TForce 550 SE mobo. How can I stop memtest86+ from automatically starting every time I boot? I assume there is an autoexec.bat file that is running. Memtest86+ ran for nearly 48 hours non-stop without ever finishing the tests. Is this normal? Should I have let it run to completion?

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Posted 07/02/09 at 11:59:25 AM by Gordon Mah Ung

Get Robert Stack on the phone! In what could be the greatest tech unsolved mystery since the disappearance of Intel’s Tejas, someone has kidnapped Premiere Elements 5.0 and 6.0!

Just kidding. There’s no crime here unless you believe that it’s flat-out wrong for Adobe to jump from version 4.0 to version 7.0 just to ensure that Premiere Elements matches version numbers with Photoshop Elements 7.0.

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Posted 07/01/09 at 08:00:00 PM by Michael Brown

We’re unabashed fans of HP’s Touch-Smart desktop machines, so we were really looking forward to getting our digits on the new technology in a convertible touch-screen notebook PC. But our eager anticipation only made the reality of the TouchSmart tx2 all that more disappointing.

This is the first convertible touch-screen PC designed for the consumer market, and its underlying hardware—which in our review unit included AMD’s best mobile CPU—delivered enough horsepower for this machine’s touch-screen elements. Benchmark performance, on the other hand, was dismal (more on that later).
 
You can use the TouchSmart tx2 as a conventional notebook PC or rotate its 12.1-inch screen 180 degrees, lay it flat, and use the machine’s tablet functionality. The 1280x800 touch screen uses active digitizing technology and supports the use of either a fingertip or a digital pen (as opposed to the simple stylus that HP shipped with its first-generation TouchSmart desktops). The digital pen delivers hover feedback (it doesn’t have to touch the screen to activate user-interface elements, such as tooltips) and considerably more precision than a fingertip.

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