New Year Diet Resolution

Its the the 7th of Jan 2012 and Donald our Chief Computer Engineer has managed to find some Mince Pies!!

And at reduced price :)

Donald, we really appreciate your kind thoughts but our waist lines might not!! 

Ah well time to sample them :)

Skint after Christmas? Try Indie games!

Well, I hope everyone has had a very merry Christmas, and thoroughly enjoyed their New Years celebrations!

I hope Santa brought you plenty of gadget-gifts to keep you suitably informed and entertained over the coming year; however if you're anything like me and dreading to check how many digits are missing from the bank balance, but still can't resist the urge to get some new games to play on your new toys, then you should take a look into Indie games.

Indie games are games which are created by small groups of people, or even single-handedly by an individual! This means that they have usually created the game as a hobby, and without any financial support of a large publisher, such as EA Games, Bethesta, Blizzard etc. Because indie games don't have the overheads of these large businesses, such as marketing, staffing, blah and blah, they normally only charge a few quid for them!

Now, you must be thinking "a game, made by some guy in his mothers basement charging me £2... sounds rubbish.". This may have been true a few years ago, and maybe even now, but the indie gaming market has developed massively in the last year. This is primarily due to more and more people having access, and faster access, to the internet. Ultimately the indie market success has come down to two words: "Digital Distribution", which has allowed easy and quick market access for the indie developers.

I personally love indie games, the nature of them being developed by a team or individual with an idea, without a publisher ball and chain around their ankles demanding they make billions of dollars from it. I find that this allows indie games to be more creative and I'll tell you now there are a lot of abstract indie games out there which are a lot of fun!

I think that's about enough of me waffling about the games and show you some!

One of the major indie game developers which have seen leaps and bounds of success over the year are Mojang. Mojang are the creators of the hugely popular Minecraft, which when started by a single developer, Markus Persson, is Sweden has grown into one of the largest indie development teams. You can find their website here: http://mojang.com/

Another great source of indie games is on the popular gaming platform Steam; a list of indie games on Steam can be found at: http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Indie/

And finally one of my personal favourites, http://www.humblebundle.com/ . The humble bundles are 'packs' of games which you are free to choose how much you pay for them, and a percentage of what you spend goes to charity! Isn't that great? You get a bunch of games, for whatever price you want, and you're helping a charity!

These are just a few places to get indie games, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, out there which are a lot of fun to play for very reasonable prices.

I hope you go forth into the indie gaming world and enjoy all the games as much as I have, and in doing so you are helping grow the developers and community, which will only lead to expanding it more!

More Hours Means More Free Coffee

With the computer repair workshop being open until 6.30pm on Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday evenings, it means that we'll be able to get more of the longer more complex repairs done in one working day rather than having to split them over 2 working days.

It also means that The Boss will have to supply more free coffee!!!

http://www.pcsolutions.co.uk/news/laptop-and-computer-repair-facilities-perth-extended.html

Computer Engineer's Delight

There were nearly fisty-cuffs in the workshop when a long standing customer asked if our engineers could have a look at fixing her grandson's Christmas present:

A quick check revealed that the aerial for the remote control unit had become detached so the problem was very quickly solved.

However, as I'm sure you will appreciate, the testing took a bit more time to complete :)

I would confirm that present has been returned to owner! 

Over Clocking Mother Board in the Extreme

Just been told that we are going to get our hand on the latest mother board for Gamers from MSi to build a totally awesome gaming PC

http://www.pcsolutions.co.uk/news/msi-releases-over-clocking-dream-mother-board.html

Please let me be the Engineer who gets this 'task'!

FACT: Hard Drives Fail!

Over the Festive Season the computer repair workshop in Perth dealt with a higher than normal work load of computer hard drives that had failed or where about to fail as in this case:

Notice the continuous blocks of RED. In this case we were able to clone the entire drive onto a new one and the client's data is safe - for the moment.

The are some things in life that are fairly easy to guarantee:

1. Tax & VAT will increase
2. Same for fuel
3. All hard drives WILL fail at some point!!

So just because you have a copy of your data on your computer's hard drive, and some of you will have backups on external hard drives so Bonus Points for you.

BUT your computer and external hard drive both share communal power and the same room so the one disaster can wipe out BOTH

The more copies of your vital data that you have the more changes you have of recovering your data. On site and off site copies are essential. 

Leave a protected copy of your data with a distant friend or member of the family.

For really important stuff also email a copy to yourself and leave in on your web mail!!

So please, please take care of your precious irreplaceable photos, documents, music etc etc 

'Normal' Computer Repair Service Resuming Tomorrow

Our Computer and Laptop Repair Center In Perth will be open from 9am tomorrow to assist those who have suffered computer problems over the Festive Period or if you just fancy popping in for a fresh brew of coffee and a chat with one of our Computer Engineers :)