Well as most people know the latest patch is out ready for the new expansion set next month. You will most probably find that your addons do not work as this is a big patch and not a standard one. I have been doing testing over the past few months of patches on the PTR server for Blizzard so am pretty familiar with the new changes. Your best option for addons is to go to the following: 3.0 Survival Guide.

A lot of very good and well known addons do not work, including Bongos 3 and MetaMap. These are the main two addons which are widely used and recognised by wow players. They have an alternative to Bongos 3 which is called Dominos. I don't know if they are going to update the MetaMap addon, I really hope they do as I had custom options on it. If not I will try to edit it so the old version works still. The last update for MetaMap was made 6 months ago so it doesn't look promising.

Well I have just added a few minor updates to the About Me section of the site, I forgot to add the information about the Intranet based CRM system I had to create. I am also going to be upgrading some php stuff on the site so if something doesn't work I wouldn't worry too much!

Well I have just updated my About Me page with more information on my programming background, how I got into computing and went on to become a Software and Web Developer (a pretty boring read really!).

Well I thought it would be too much messing about to send back my old graphics card which broke, so I ordered a new one which would also be a better choice of card for upcoming games etc. It is a Asus 8800GT 1GB. I really like the card and am hoping to add a page with some proper benchmarks on it. At the moment it's not running at it's full capability due to 1) My power supply only being 380W and 2) A serious letdown on 1GB of System Memory! Here are a few photos of the card (note the 80mm cooling fan! - Click to enlarge):

I got a game with it, which was Company of Heroes, I downloaded all the patches for it which was about 400mb and have yet to play it properly! On running Guitar Hero 3 on this new card it was pretty amazing, graphics wacked upto full with full lighting and 'Packed Crowd' ran very smooth indeed. Not one bit of lag whatsoever! Keep coming back to the site as I should have some proper benchmarks for this card and some photos!

Well I was playing World Of Warcraft the other day and noticed a bit of FPS lag, I thought nothing of it and 2 hours later on loading the computer crashed and restarted with lines going all down the screen! This card was a Inno3D card which only lasted for a year at the most, the card was a 7800GT. I contacted their technical support which was a complete waste of time! They told me to re-install windows when I had already told them that the computer wouldn't even boot into Windows?? I also said that I thought the ram had gone on the board.. I sent them the following photo of my screen...

As soon as I sent them this screenshot of lines all over the place they emailed back and said... "Yes it looks like a card error which may be the memory" I was like well what did I say in the first place? Anyway, my own fault I guess for buying a cheap card in the first place!

Well, the new season of Singles bowling has just started and I'm really looking forward to this season to be honest! In the 4v4 league my team managed a win of 6-2 to the team which was 1st place for 6 weeks at the start!

I am now playing in the new season of the singles league as I said above. Really feeling competative and wanting to up my game this season, the first week saw me play a new player to our league from another bowling centre... I think he is a proper bowler and obviously he's in it to win the money. He was really competative so I thought "You want a game you got a game!" I really hate the competative players, and when I play them I always make sure I play well.

Anyway the first game I scored 191 scratch and he scored 205 scratch (damn just missed that one). Ended up me winning 8-0 in the handicap league which has put me 3 pins average below my brother who is in second place! I'm liking the look of the table at the moment! The only thing with playing well is the handicap drops, as it was the first game I think my next 3 matches goes off this average, which my average has gone up to 170.

Hey there, well I know I have not posted anything for a while! Basically I have been busy sorting out the new bowling season and that. Also been on WoW a bit at nights with my guild. I leveled my Paladin finally to level 70 from level 45 (I think it's been level 45 since like 2 years ago!), the character currently has 3/5 Season 2 Arena gear as I have not really worked on the gear much, but basically I now have 3 character on Draenor which are level 70!

I have been asked to maybe play as a Paladin when Wotlk comes out as a main raiding member of my guild, which is all good fun... but the leveling of 3 characters is going to take time and they want to be raiding within 3 weeks of the release of Wrath Of The lich King! I have added my Paladins armory page to the links on the side, although theres not much nic gear to be shown!

Well I thought I would finally upgrade to Windows Vista so recently ran the vista upgrade suggestion program which suggested that I got home version (pfft). Anyway I have just put Vista Ultimate on my pc yesterday, only thing is the rating is down a bit due to using an old IDE hard drive and lacking in RAM (I wanted to upgrade before putting Vista on), but still I thought I would install Vista Ultimate just to try it out more than anything.

As soon as I put it on I had the Service Pack on a usb stick so installed that right away before anything else, then went through the normal things you do when installing Windows and put Comodo Firewall on and antivirus, this was all before I setup the network properly. I also installed the Nvidia latest Drivers and tried to find some drivers for my Sound Card, managed to get the 'Card' working, but there seems to be no Driver support for the Live Drive which means I have no option for recording my Guitar or a microphone port...

I then thought 'hmm I better setup the network and get all the updates for windows', what a bad idea as soon as the updates were installed (or some of them) after the first reboot windows would no longer see my network or gateway.. Found out that with a certain update Windows Vista stops Comodo Firewall from working for some unknown reason. So I had to un-install Comodo and re-setup the network, then reboot about 3 times before Vista wanted to see my Network and Gateway!

Anyway I finally got the Network working and installed the rest of the updates, I decided to test out Gaming on Vista straight away and installed Command and Conquer 3. Got into the game and setup the settings with everything on Full, and the graphics on Ultimate. I noticed a bit of a difference between Vista and XP for gaming. I don't know if it's just this game but the game seemed to run a little bit faster and I found copying files a bit better on Vista.

With all the problems I faced in installing Vista I think I am actually going to use it as soon as I get my RAM upgrade, when I do I shall install it on my SATA hard drive but for now I am going to stick to XP as the RAM useage in Vista seems a bit of a problem even when running a overclocked Dual Core system.

Well I decided to get this game as I have always been into C&C games and Red Alert games. I ran the tournaments on Wireplay back in 1996 for Command and Conquer 1. Anyway the game is pretty good, I have been playing on campaign mode mostly and have only played the GDI missions so far, got to the bit where you have to fight the alien race which is really hard! I tried out the alien race on multiplayer and it's way overpowered, although the alien units do move quite slow.

This game seems a lot harder than all the others, and I was surprised at how few missions there were against Nod (only about 12 or something?). Warhammer - Dawn of War seems to be a bit better I would say as it's a bit more advanced and the single player is great. I have played most races on Dawn of War and the whole storyline is pretty good. I still quite like C&C3, lets hope Red Alert 3 is good (which it probably will be!).

Well I just got Guitar Pro 5 yesterday the full version with RSE (Realistic Sound Engine). It seems a lot better for playing along to than the midi version and Powertab. Most of the files which you download from ultimate guitar tho are guitar pro 3 files, but it still adds the effect of whatever guitar the user has input to the file. If anyone knows of any other pro tab software which is better than Guitar Pro then let me know!