Call of Duty Black Ops 2 signals Death of XP for PC Gaming

The release of Call of Duty Black Ops 2 was by all accounts an unprecedented success. It was the largest pre-ordered title in gaming and many consider it a candidate for game of the year and are listing it as a must have. A large number if these orders were for PC gaming. Call of Duty Black Ops 2 will run fine on lots of systems, especially on ours (Psychsoftpc Gaming Computers).

What is not being generally reported is that this game will not run on windows XP based machines. This title was written and compiled to take advantage of all the features of DX10 and its outstanding graphics support. That means it will only run on systems that have Windows vista or above. In truth, windows XP is a very old operating system, but it is stable and many gamers out there have steadfastly kept it on their machines even though it is limited by being 32 bit only and can only run DX9 graphics.

For years now, PC gaming publishers have supported Windows XP based machines by releasing titles based on DX9 or with dual support for DX9 and the awesome graphics available in DX10. With the release of Call of Duty Black Ops 2, that should change.  I expect more and more publishers to stop supporting DX9 and Windows XP from now on. It is easier and makes for better gaming to support the latest Direct X versions and just stop supporting Direct X 9.

So, if you are one of those stubborn Gamers out there who have upgraded your machine's hardware but stubbornly refused to abandon windows XP, you need to reconsider or, like that guy in left 4 dead, be left behind. Windows XP support is going away and if you want to continue to game on your PC, you need to upgrade your OS.

Obviously, we have some really nice gaming computers with the latest OS, Windows 8, and the latest drivers to run Call of Duty Black Ops 2 or any other DX10 or DX11 game out there and all those to come. But if you're just looking to upgrade your operating system and keep your machine,  check out PCMover Windows Upgrade Assistant as they say the ONLY way to do an in-place upgrade to Windows 8. It will even move you from 32 bit to 64 bit so you can take advantage of all that extra RAM you could put in your system. Either way, new system or old, it's time to upgrade.

Your Gaming PC Friends @ Psychsoftpc

Buy Psychsoftpc Gaming Computers Here

So, if you look to the right, you will see a small gadget that will let you buy our Psychsoftpc Gaming Computers right here from our PC Gaming blog.

This will add your choice of one of our Psyborg Extreme Gamer PC models to a Google Wallet cart (that's what they're calling it this week, the name can change with the weather) and check out using a credit card. We chose three models of our gaming computers to feature here. All have NVidia Kepler Geforce 6XX Video Cards and Intel Core i7 Processors. If you are looking for AMD Radeon based Gamer Computers, you'll have to visit our web site and go to our Psyborg Extreme Gamer PC page here: www.psychsoftpc.com/psyborg_extreme.htm.

On another note, the Kepler based K20 Tesla supercomputer cards are out and we are now putting them in our Psychlone Supercomputer Tesla machines. These new cards double the amount of CUDA cores and greatly improve the processing power and effectiveness especially in double precision mode. we think Kepler is awesome, so go have a look here: www.psychsoftpc.com/psychlone_tesla.htm

Your Gamer friends @ Psychsoftpc

Assassin's Creed 3 Boston Teaparty

Here's some Assassin's Creed 3 Boston Teaparty action from Jessica Chobot and the folks at G4

your Gamer friends @ Psychsoftpc

for Halloween this year, here's our favorite smart little witch

Have a happy and safe Halloween from your gamer friends @ Psychsoftpc

Make Windows 8 look like Windows again

Windows 8 is almost here and, with it, the smartphone style interface. On a desktop? Seriously? if you're like us, you hate the phone style interface. Oh, and they changed Windows Explorer, too. No more nice, clean "look at my files on my hard drive". If you want to go back to the good old windows 7 style interface, the one you're used to, the one that actually looks like the Windows you've known since Windows 95, desktop and all, use this free utility. The nice thing about this is you can switch back and forth, so if you ever want your PC to look like a phone, you can go back. But really, why would you?

Windows 8 Metro UI Switcher

Your Gamer Friends @ Psychsoftpc

Assassin's Creed 3 in Boston

A major part of Assassin's Creed 3 takes place in our home town of Boston. Here's some of the action taking place around town a few hundred years ago.

Your Boston Gamer Friends @ Psychsoftpc

Google Shopping Bad for Small Business

Okay, this is not my usual topic of pc gaming, but Google just converted Google Product Search, which allowed you to list your products for free, to Google Shopping, which uses the same format but now costs money per click. So Google sticks it to the little guy again. Now they say they did this to get more quality ads, but this just doesn't ring true. Small businesses created quality ads and spent more time on them than the deep pocket big guys because that's how we compete.

If you are up against a more powerful opponent, you have to compete with smarts and guile. I know that's what we did. And we consistently outperformed our bigger competitors because we @ Psychsoftpc paid attention to detail and created better product descriptions. Products being offered by a Fortune 500 company or a small business all showed equally under the old system. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. We were playing on a level playing field for once and could compete on quality not on who has the most money. I'm sure that other small businesses did the same.

Now all that's changed. With a pay per click system, our ads just won't get shown unless we pony up the dough. And of course, we can get outspent by our richer competitors. For example, Google showed that for some of our products, our gaming computers or graphics workstations, to show, I would have to bid $4.00 per click!! So the statement that ads would show based on quality not necessarily cost per click is wrong. The deeper the pockets, the more your ads will show and the better position it will have. Let's face it, the big guys don't have the time or desire to put great effort into creating better quality ads, and now they don't have to. They can just outspend us little guys and dominate Google like they do for other Google ads.

I know a lot of small businesses depended on Google Product search to attract customers. It was free, a level playing field with the big guys and dependent on quality not on how much you could spend. Google Shopping is going to cost small businesses everywhere in revenue, customers and, if they wish to continue having their products continue to display in Google Shopping, advertising money. And it turns out pay per click is only the beginning. Google intends to implement a percentage based system. That's right, Google will collect a percentage of every product sold as a result of a Google Shopping search. With margins so tight, who can afford that? The big guys of course!

Well, enough rants on Google Shopping for now. I promise to get back to gaming next time.

Your Gaming Friends @ Psychsoftpc

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