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New versions of these popular virtual machines (also known as emulators) have recently come about. In our old comparison we took a look at 4 games, and we do the same again here. Last time, VMWare Fusion was the winner. This time… it’s Parallels. You’ll see why as you read ahead.

VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels 5 were tested, using a Windows 7 Professional 32-bit virtual machine. Windows 7 was chosen because both Fusion and Parallels now support it, and with XP being continually phased out (and Vista being bloated), it’s the operating system that most people are likely to choose.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the 4 games chosen this time around. I’ve packed the screenshots at the front with a tiny explanation, and if you scroll down a bit further (about 1/2 way through the article, you’ll see the actual writeup.

Mass Effect (click to see full size):

Both actually had the error message you see on the right. After playing with the Windows Compatibility mode stuff, I managed to get to the error message on the left.

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Halo CE (click to see full size)

The left side (Parallels) was nice and fast – the 59 FPS you see was the lowest it got, and that was just for the screenshot. Not so on the right side (Fusion) – it looks like snow in the right image. It’s just missing textures. At a whopping 2 fps.

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Knights of the Old Republic 2 (click to see full size):

Both were very playable, but Parallels offered a perfectly smooth experience. Fusion played quite well, but crashed in the “Advanced Video” option menu.

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Cities XL (click to see full size)

Just Parallels is shown, because Fusion only lasted about 5 seconds – not enough time for a screenshot.

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Now for a little detail… We’ll start with a disappointment, and then cheer everyone up a little with Read more…

It’s do-able. That said, it wasn’t fun.

I’ll try to walk through the steps it took. Much of this is done by memory, but I just finished, so it’s fairly fresh in my mind (although I’m rather sleep deprived at the moment so bear with me).

It’s worth noting that I used an ATI 4850 video card. If you go with an nVidia card, it may be a lot easier (try it on your own before paining yourself with this process).

Network, video, sound (at least 2-channel anyway), microphone are working. Sleep isn’t (so disable it in the Energy Saver section in System Preferences)

The stuff you might need:
-Retail Snow Leopard disk (hopefully you’ve bought it already)
-An existing install, or Rebel EFI otherwise (it’s a free download).
-USB hard drive or USB memory stick
-the MyHack installer
-Netkas’s PC EFI v10.5
-Voodoo HDA
-Kext Helper

Huge thanks to each of the Read more…

A couple CPM advertisers I’ve run on the Warcraft-Maps site were Burst and ValueClick. I ran a few others as well although they were lesser-known names and I dropped them because not only did they not pay well, but they ran some questionable ads.

Last year I had a little surprise in that Warcraft-Maps.com was listed as an attack site. Turned out that either Burst or ValueClick were running some not-so-nice ads and got the site flagged. It did eventually un-flag, but I wasn’t thrilled.

I always thought ValueClick was the problem. They’ve got a huge amount of ads running on their network, and they don’t seem as selective as Burst!. You can imagine my surprise a few minutes ago though, when Kaspersky did the little “violin” when I visited my site. Turned out Burst doesn’t behave so well after all. Read more…

I believed in you. I thought you had potential. But apparantly I was wrong. May whatever God you believe in… have mercy on your soul…. This court stands adjourned.

Q – “All Good Things…” – Star Trek: The Next Generation

DMOZ was arguably once a strong, vibrant, quality directory. But my, how things have changed. It’s about time that Google re-evaluated their usage of dmoz.org as a weighted directory.

Three years back, I submitted one of my sites to the DMOZ. The site in question is listed in the side-bar, and has been mentioned by USA Today, the New York Times, and WKYC (an NBC company), amongst many other places. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a fairly popular resource.

If you haven’t picked up on it already, the site is called EyeglassRetailerReviews.com . Whether it should or shouldn’t be listed isn’t the question, but I mention it to show that I have a good idea what I’m talking about below in regards to the problems I noticed with a certain category in the Open Directory Project (ODP) below… Read more…

I’ve been hooked on Kaspersky for a while now. Periodically we’d have something that slipped by some of the free anti-virus programs, and since Kaspersky and NOD32 were the only strongly recommended ones out there that were low on bloat, I tried them both and settled on Kaspersky.

This year, we grabbed a 5 user license for Kaspersky Internet Security. Some of the family’s been switching to Mac’s, so we only needed 4 licenses for the remaining PC’s. It was a bit pricey for the license from the Kaspersky website (buying a couple 3-user packs from Future Shop, Best Buy, or London Drugs when they go on sale would have been cheaper). In any case, we still had 1 left over.

You might imagine my surprise when today I found this message on one of our machines though: Read more…

I’m a huge casual Sim City fan. By that I mean I’ll play it for a few days at a time, then take a break for a few months, then come back to it. The Sim City franchise has been great – I could go into details about the joys of everything from Sim City for SNES all the way up to Sim City 4, but I’ll spare the details.

Unfortunately, Sim City 4 is effectively where the franchise died. It’s odd because usually a franchise dies after a horrible game, not after an amazing one. And SC4 was definitely an epic success. EA tried to play off of the name with Sim City Societies, but everyone knows that Societies was never a true Sim City successor.

Years went by, and rumors of “the next Sim City” came and went. Finally, a real competitor came about, and was finally released earlier this month: Cities XL.

So, without further ado, let’s compare Cities XL and  Sim City 4.

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The short version first:

Sim City 4 has Read more…

Recently, I switched most of my sites to another server.

After about a week of not receiving any messages through the contact form on one of them, I suddenly realized… “ya know… it’s been a while”. I tried sending myself a test message through the contact form, and never received it. Sending from another email account worked though. Strange…..

Before going any further it’s worth noting that I’m using Google Apps on the aforementioned site for mail (gmail for domains).

To narrow down Read more…

If you’ve tried to clean up your Joomla template, something may have perplexed you at one point or another. There’s no mention of mootools or caption.js in the template file, yet these 2 things end up in the HEAD section of all your pages anyway.

If your site is pretty basic, you probably don’t need them, and having them load every time just makes it that much more painful for your dial-up viewers. Heck, mootools.js alone is 74 kb !

So how do you get rid of mootools? It’s pretty simple code that you throw in your template’s HTML fi Read more…

While looking for a way to convert MP4 to FLV, I came across a couple free programs. Since I had problems finding free programs to convert videos to flash in the past, I’ll list them here. While both are free, neither are open-source (if anyone knows of an open source converter feel free to leave a comment).

That said, both of these do work well for the simple task of converting to flash video.

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Any Video Converter Read more…

So… Install Windows 7, hook up the Samsung ML-1210 printer, and…

…well not much happens. If you’ve gone to Samsung’s site, you may have found 2 possible files to download (technically more, but only 2 that have any hope of working), and you’ll find that neither seems to work well.

The Universal Print Driver will install, and you’ll probably get it to even find your ML-1210 eventually. If you get farther than that, congratulations! You’ll have gone farther than I was able to with that package.

The GDI driver on the other hand will refuse to install. Windows will pop up and ask if you want to try compatibility mode. Unfortunately, it’ll still refuse.

The solution?

No, it’s not a Lexmark E210 driver this time (I tried it… no such luck).

The solution is simple, but not elegant.

1) Download the GDI driver install package from Samsung’s site. If you’re lazy Read more…