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L.A. Noire PC Lag Fix

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Are you suffering from extremely low frame rates on L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition (PC)? well it seems to be a known issue and there is a fix for it, which may or may not work for you but it certainly did for me. Step 1: Open up the game launcher and select 'Options'. Step 2: In the Command Line type in "-str" with out the "". Step 3: Save and launch the game. This should give you better frame rates, at lease playable rates. as per the game readme file the above procedure enables a single threaded renderer, which may improve performance or compatibility on some systems.

L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition - PC (Review)

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Another one of Rockstar Games console ports to the PC - L.A.Noire the Complete Edition is a great game barring a few niggles that probably come from porting the game from a console to the PC. Rockstar seem to have made this a habit of releasing games for consoles and then porting them. Read on for my detailed review of the game. Plot (Rating 5/5) This has to be the games biggest strength and selling point. This game seems to have pioneered a concept that I hope many follow. The story is centered around the crime scene in the post war 40's Los Angeles, you play detective Cole Phelps a war veteran who has joined the LAPD, as he investigates crimes from car theft to gruesome murders. I'll keep it at that for now since i don't want to leave spoilers for those looking to play the game, but rest assured this is one plot that will leave you thinking about its events for a while after you turn in your badge. Gameplay (Rating 4.5/5) The game throws you right into the action fro

Gaming Lag Fix..

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For a few months my once ‘high end’ gaming laptop the Asus G50-x5 has been annoying me with serious lag spikes while gaming, this would occur 8-10mis after starting a game and last for about 4-5mins with frame rates dropping as low as 4-5fps, this made most games unplayable. For a while I thought it’s probably time for it to hang in the gloves and look for an upgrade, until I realized that the games that worked earlier without a hiccup were now unplayable. After some googling and upgrading my display drivers (with no luck) I realized I needed to open it up and clean its innards. Turns out the heat-sink was clogged with dust (practically mud!!), living in Mumbai can have that effect, no matter how clean you keep it and besides this laptop is almost 3 years old now, so a good flush of its guts was much needed. I have opened it up in the past for the occasional cleaning, but never specifically looked for the heat-sink vents, which as I learnt is what matters most. With the vents to the h

Flashing Cyanogen on your rooted HTC Desire

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So if you have followed the one-click root process to root your HTC Desire, here's the next step from there. Now that you have root access what are you going to do about it! Well, you flash a ROM of your choice. I chose Cyanogen which is supposed to be one of the best ones, and with a not so complicated process. Here's everything you will need: Download the latest version of Cyanogen . I'm using 7.1. Download Google Apps (This is optional, I did not need this. I manually downloaded the google apps) Pre-Flash Process: Connect your phone to the computer. Mount as Disk Drive. Find your phone as an extra drive under 'My Computer', open it up and place both the .zip files in your SD Card. Remember both these file names! Turn your phone off. Unplug from computer. Flash Process: Hold your phone's power key & volume down key at the same time, until the screen comes on. It should load into what is called the Bootloader. (You will k

Rooting the HTC Desire

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After a year of enjoying my HTC Desire as it came, I finally gathered the courage to root it. You need not just courage but enough reason to root your phone. It is a stressful, exciting process leaving you very hungry! :P My Reasons to root are as follows: 1. Battery life 2. Low Memory Problems 3. No Gingerbread update from Desire. 4. Wanted more apps on my phone. 5. A year old phone. I could either now change it or root it and make it brand new. 6. Also, My phone turns a year old on Oct 29th, & what better present could I give it, than a completely new look? :P With my reasons in place to root and the courage I needed to go ahead, I finally decided that October 26th, 2011 would be the day I would choose to root my phone. I chose the easy one click root method by unrEVOked . This root program was orginally developed for the HTC Evo but can be used for quite a few other HTC phones as well. Pre-Root Process: Click on the link above. select your phone model and let that download and

My first Android - the Google Nexus S

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Its been a week since I got my first Android device - the Samsung Google Nexus S (Thanks to Nats for the early Birthday present), and I'm entirely loving the phone. The clean Google experience is just how Android is meant to be, and the ability to customize any and everything on the phone is simply amazing. Coming from a Nokia E71 this device is quite a step up in terms of usability and features, this is truly worth the upgrade in every possible way and in my opinion the Google Nexus S is the best Android device considering the Price to Value ratio. At just under Rs.20k, this is definitely the Android device to beat. From my early experience with the device (1 week thus far). the only con I could come up with is the battery life, and the only reason its a con is since I'm coming from a Nokia E71, that said the battery life still seams to be better compared to other Android devices out there, The other thing i noticed the phone is that with alot of activity the phone requires

Desire(ing) Gingerbread?

Barely a year after its launch, the HTC Desire is struggling to keep up, HTC officially announced yesterday that it wouldn't be able to update the HTC Desire to the latest version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread, due to it not having enough onboard memory to handle HTC Sense and Gingerbread together. They have seemed to have backtracked and their latest update does say that they will still offer Gingerbread, probably fearing the uprising all over Twitter and Facebook by disappointed HTC Desire owners who've been waiting Gingerbread patiently and not rooted their devices. Well HTC we'll believe it when it comes. I certainly think it is a strong case for Google to step in and set down some ground rules for manufacturers using Android. This isn't the first time HTC's last gen flagship device has been left out in the cold. Earlier this year HTC announced that their latest version of Sense would not be supported on their older models which weren't even a year old at t

And the Sensation is here...

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Finally Smart Phone makers start considering India as a genuine smart phone market, launching their latest and greatest phones in their line up few weeks or days after their global launch, First the Nexus S, then the Galaxy SII and now the HTC Sensation. (Apple however still doesnt think this is the way to go making their fanboys(girls) having to wait atleast a year before they can officially get their hands on the latest iphone). The much anticipated HTC Sensation is up for pre-order on Flipkart for Rs.30,999 which seems like a pretty good price point for what it offers. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up against the seemingly faster Galaxy S2 however as far as User Interface, form factor, qHD resolution goes the Sensation does seem to have an edge. Key Specifications: - OS:      Android Gingerbread with HTC Sense 3.0 CPU:      1.2 Ghz Dual Core Processor Battery: 1520 mAh Primary Camera: 8 MP with Auto Focus & Dual LED Flash Resolution:  540 x 960 pixels Scree

Fix iPhone error 1015 and get your iphone out of Recovery Mode

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Bricked your iPhone trying to update to the latest iOS while already on a iOS4.+ Jailbreak? or just stuck with the iPhone in recovery mode and unable to restore it with iTunes because of the error 1015? Its probably since your earlier Jailbreak had a higher baseband than the iOS version you tried to update to (thanks to the ipad iOS), so iTunes wont let you downgrade your baseband thus failing half way through the insall leaving you in no-mans-land and the dreaded 1015 error, Fear not! This is fixable. A friend of mine learnt this the hard way but we fixed it eventually. Try and follow the below steps and you should be up and running in mins. Download the iOS 4.1 from here to your desktop Now you need to plug your phone to your computer and with iTunes open put your phone into DFU mode. (Hold the Sleep and Home button for 10 seconds, now release the Sleep button and continue holding the home button for until iTunes recoginises it.) Your display on it. (*this will only work in

Hacking the HTC Desire

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So its been awhile since I blogged and I decided to make a come-back with an update on my phone. No it's not a phone review yet, but that is on the list too. So the HTC Desire is a super phone and I've loved every bit of Going Android. The Android Market has so many applications to download and explore, loads of games, books, health apps, wallpapers, media and loads of widgets. There's just one thing that stops me from downloading unlimited and that is the issue of Android 2.2 not letting you save your apps to the SD Card. This means everything I download or atleast most of the apps I download gets stored on the internal memory - 512 mb giving me the *beep beep* Low on Storage Space alert.* The good news is, that there is a solution with Android 2.3, but what until then? Well, I just went ahead and hacked my phone. Here's how. Download SDK from here - http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html. Extract the files. Copy the second folder into the sdk named "andro

Samsung Google Nexus S in India

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Looks like Samsung & Google have finally decided to officially launch the much awaited Nexus S. It has been avialable for a while now from various sellers on ebay for about 30-35k INR, without a bill or samsung support and warranty. However now with an official launch on the cards we should see the brand new Nexus S in India by early April,  Flipkart states the phone comes with a 1 year Samsung India warranty and will be priced at Rs. 27,999, you can pre-order it here .   A notable change is the swap of a Super AMOLED display with a Super Clear LCD, much like the Nexus S being launched last month in places like Russia, what would also be interesting is to see is if Samsung swaps out the Hummingbird processor with the OMAP one thus using an inferior GPU (i.e. a PowerVR SGX530 GPU instead of the more powerfull PowerVR SGX540) which could make this handset over priced. A few specs: - 4-inch Super Clear LCD screen at 480x800 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash HSDPA su