Dear Wandy - Issue #187

Format PC

Price Unknown

Manufacturer Unknown

Contact Unknown

SIX OR EIGHT?
Q) I'm waiting for the release of Gears of War for the PC and I've decided I need a new graphics card. I just don't want to be stuck with old graphics. I've decided I'm going to get either an XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB for £187, or an XFX GeForce 8600 GTS XXX for £141.

I don't know which one to get, and in addition I'm stuck with XP, because I didn't take advantage of Acer's discounted 'Express Upgrade to Windows Vista' program, which ended back in March. This also means I can't play Lost Planet. Can you help?
Sam Manning

A) You don't need Vista to run Lost Planet, as the game is designed to run on both DX9 and DX10 hardware. Having said that, the list of officially supported cards is depressingly small. If you're using Vista, you're restricted to NVIDIA's GeForce 8 Series, and if you're an ATI owner running XP, only the more recent Radeons will work. Not that I could get the demo to even load.

As for your predicament with Gears of War, gamers should aim to buy the most powerful card their budget will allow, or be prepared to drop the detail levels to compensate. After all, it's one of the most graphically advanced games around right now. If you have a £200 budget, XFX's 320MB GTS will serve you admirably - it's a great card at a great price - but you won't be able to enjoy the DirectX 10 capabilities you crave until you spend a further £100 on an upgrade to Vista.

TROJAN WORSE
Q) Help! I recently browsed to a website through search-engine results and I'm now receiving a Windows pop-up every minute warning me that my computer is making unauthorised files and that I should scan to remove and detect viruses. The pop-up doesn't look legitimate, and I'm worried about security on my PC.

I'm running Windows Vista Home and have run a virus checker. It found a Trojan, which I immediately quarantined, but the pop-up is still there and becoming annoying. I've tried to remove the infected file, but can't find it on my system. I hope you can point me in the direction of a solution!
Tracy Hall

A) There are three ways for non-techies to get shot of unwanted crap on their system. The first is to download, update and scan with a free anti-virus product such as Grisoft's AVG Free or the AOL edition of McAfee VirusScan Plus.

The second way is to use a dedicated anti-spyware suite such as SpywareBlaster. The trouble with these utilities is that they work best when preventing infections rather than cleaning up afterwards, and there are now so many terrible products exploiting the market that many users are even more exposed than before.

The third method is to use a passive reporting application such as Trend Micro's HijackThis, which is a widely used anti-malware tool that generates an exhaustive list of processes and registry entries responsible for running programs behind your back when you start Windows. The list can be saved to a log file and subsequently copied and pasted to security forums.

In your case, the best course of action is to visit www.trendsecure.com to download and install HijackThis. When running the program, click the 'Do a system scan and save a log file' button and upload the log contents to a new thread on the Dear Wandy forums.

Once we've worked out what's causing your pop-ups to appear, we can advise you of what changes you need to make to your system and I can let everyone here know what happened next month.

BT HOME SNUB
Q) I've encountered an issue logging into Steam servers: when I access a game, it gets stuck at 'Sending Client Info'. A quick trawl of Google shows I'm not the only one, but nobody has a solution.

I use the BT Home Hub that comes with BT Total Broadband Option 3. Within the Home Hub, I've turned on and off a variety of game setups (which automatically set up port forwarding for you) and tried creating the port forwarding manually from settings suggested at portforward.com.

I had it all working when I first set it up, but I then turned it off before going away for a week. This lost all my settings, and
I've had the connection error ever since. I had the same problem with a BT Voyager 205 router, which was solved when I found a hacks page telling me to increase some server-timeout value.

Outside of Steam, the only game that required me to change the router's configuration was Battlefield 2, where I needed to manually setup port forwarding before the server list would refresh.

As I work for BT and thus get the Home Hub for free, I would like to stick with it rather than buy a different router or reinstall my old one. Do you have any suggestions to get me playing online?
Name and address supplied

A) The BT Voyager 205 problem was caused by the default maximum number of IP connections being too low, and the default TCP/UDP timeout values being too high. It meant that people running BitTorrent - or any other peer-topeer program requiring a large number of open connections to work - suffered huge slowdowns. It also meant that when Counter-Strike players refreshed their long server lists in Steam, the router would make multiple connections and
refuse to drop the dead ones. It gave the impression that Steam had frozen. I'm telling you this in the hope that I can help existing Voyager users fix a common issue, and also to lead you gently into a rant about avoiding BT's home networking products, even though you work for them.

I've always been a BT broadband user, but rather than switch to one of their overwrought new 'Option' packages, I chose to stick with what works best: nofrills DSL. I'm now paying a low monthly subscription and I'm enjoying trouble-free internet with all the machines on my network. OK, so I miss out on free WiFi minutes and I don't get great savings on
travel, leisure, food and drink, but then I've never been a sucker for that crap.

In addition, I don't need to forward ports when playing games - not for Steam, not for Battlefield 2, not for anything. It all just works, and unless you're hosting servers it should work for you too.

If you've been sniffing around the web, you'll find a considerable number of BT Home Hub users are experiencing the issue you describe, which leads me to think it's no coincidence you're a Home Hub user too. It's not a problem with Steam, Steam games, Windows, the internet, global warming or the US sub-prime mortgage market. Whatever it is, it's exacerbated by the fact that your BT Home Hub upgrades itself automatically, which might explain why it was once working and now isn't. In short, you have little control over the damn thing.

In your shoes, I'd double-check that I wasn't running some super-excitable firewall software, then either wait for Valve to publish a workaround or buy a decent wireless modem/router such as DrayTek's Vigor2700G. I'm serious - this is a problem that's unlikely to go away, so you need to consider other options

Phil Wand