Because I’m located in New Zealand, I got used to playing World of Warcraft with a ping of around 350-450ms. This means that there is usually around a half a second lag between when I hit a key and when the server acknowledges the key press. The performance tends to deteriorate when I’m in larger encounters such as raids.

As I’ve now got to a point where I need to raid to get better equipment, this has caused me a lot of pain. Even though I’m on ADSL2, I used to get frequent disconnects when the WoW servers thought I was not responding.

This post is to help people who:

• Frequently disconnect on every large encounter.
• Suffer from significant frame loss on large encounters.
• Suffer from random disconnects even when doing nothing

There are various things that one can do to improve system performance. I’ll detail out the five main things I did to ensure that I remain connected and can respond in a timely fashion during my play sessions.

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As part of coming back, there are a few additional changes we need to make to the site. This includes incorporation of a new theme and look & feel.

We have now put in a placeholder theme until we work through all the kinks. On the whole, it doesn’t look that bad actually. Am working on a suitable logo that will replace the horrible over-size Impact font in the header.

Old Site Theme:

New Site Theme (work in progress):

With more changes on the way :)

I’ve got to admit that over the last few months I haven’t been giving this blog much attention. This is due to a variety of reasons including work, personal life and World of Warcraft to which I’ve returned to spend more time in the virtual world.

In saying that, I’ll be making an effort to return to blogging albeit with a slight difference in terms of topics for the blog. I’ll be broadening it a bit to cater for my current interests which includes everything so far on the blog and extending it to online gaming, coding and UI design.

If there is anything in particular that you wish me to write about, please let me know.

Some of these articles have already been drafted and expect to see them released in the coming weeks.

Dee.

In my previous articles, I’ve listed of ways to get the best use out of Windows Live SkyDrive. This has consistently been one of the most read posts on my blog especially around using Gladinet to set up Live SkyDrive as a network drive on your computer.

Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.

In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example,  Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….

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A while ago, I looked at a screen capture tool that I used for quite some time called Cropper. I’ve recently been introduced to an alternative that has replaced all my screen capture requirements and is now my primary tool for capturing screenshots and screen casts.

Having been around for a few years, TechSmith has improved Jing’s capabilities as a viable screen capture application and has resulted in a user-friendly and robust application.

This is one of the few applications where I do not feel the need to write extensively about the product due to its excellent website. I would advise my readers to go there for more information as it is quite comprehensive in explaining how to use Jing.

The only thing I would suggest here is that Jing by default has a set of buttons so when you have finished capturing a screen, it can “save to disk”, “capture to clipboard” or “upload to screencast.com”. I personally do not like the “upload to screencast.com” button as its too easy to hit and I’m frequently capturing screens that are commercially sensitive…

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While ITunes as an application makes it easy to move music from your computer to your iPod or iPhone, Apple has made it intentionally difficult to move the other way back.

There are many reasons why you may wish to copy the contents of your iPhone across to your PC. I recently installed Windows 7 on my main machine and am now facing the possibility of having my music collection wiped and restarting from fresh. This is a daunting task as I always keep my music library as tidy as possible so that I can locate and play my music quickly and easily.

Thankfully, there are many third party products out there that can back up your music collection straight from your iPod/iPhone to your PC. I ended up using SharePod because it was simple to use, uncomplicated and best of all FREE.

In order to back up all or selected songs, follow the steps below:

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