A newly released pre-alpha version of Opera promises to radically improve the browser’s performance and speed of displaying and loading websites. The official developer website even claims that “[Opera 10.50] is fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10“. Since Google Chrome has been the fastest browser on the market so far, followed by Apple’s Safari browser, we may have a new player among the best-performing browser.
I downloaded and tested Opera 10.50 and found out that it actually is much faster than before, but also very unstable. I ran Peacekeeper three times, the first time it went well, the second time it was much slower and the third time it didn’t start the benchmark and showed just a blank page. I had to re-install Opera in order to fix this problem. But please keep in mind that this is a pre-alpha release and not meant for everyday use.
In comparison to Chrome 5.0.307.1, Opera 10.50 lost by 12.8%, which is actually a big improvement compared to Chrome 2.0.170 and Opera 9.64, where Opera lost by 60.2%. Safari, once the fastest browser, scored 28.6% less than Chrome, thus giving up its second place to Opera.
Considering the fact that Opera is still pre-alpha and that the development team will improve it before releasing the final version, one can expect Opera’s Peacekeeper score to increase again, bringing it dangerously close to Chrome.
Yesterday evening, the Closed Beta of Battlefield Bad Company 2 started. I managed to secure a beta key and get the game installer and immediately started testing. First of all, a few screenshots and performance information, but more information and a video will follow! There is a torrent download for Battlefield Bad Company 2 that’s working quite well in contrast to the official EA servers or other mirrors that are really overloaded and keep crashing all the time.
The beta supports multiplayer and includes only the gamemode “Rush” with the map “Port Valdez”. Official sources say:
The Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC beta will feature Port Valdez, a new vehicle focused map where up to 32 players will compete against each other as either the US or Russian armies in the game’s Rush multiplayer mode. Players will have access to five land and three air vehicles where the Russian side can use everything in their arsenal including Main Battle Tanks as well as the fast-moving Quad Bikes and Mobile Armored AA. The fight will also be packed with plenty of infantry combat fought alongside the waterline towards a great oil industrial landscape in the Alaskan mountains.
Being based on the new Frostbite Engine, the game has quite high system requirements:
Recommended Frostbite PC Specifications for BFBC2 & BF1943: Processor: Quadcore Main memory: 2GB Graphics card: GeForce GTX 260 Graphics memory: 512MB
Especially explosions are really nice in this game, thus I created a “flip-book” of pictures (click to enlarge):
If you forgot your your Windows account password, it got hacked or some virus changed it so you’re not able to access your computer any more, you can use the following tutorial to restore and reset the password. This method will also work for Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP and Windows Vista!
WARNING: Please do not use this method for illegal activity such as hacking passwords without the other user’s consent!
Your Windows passwords are stored in the Windows registry. In order to reset them, you need access to this registry without running Windows. Luckily, there is a tool called “Offline NT Password & Registry Editor” which contains a small Linux kernel and drivers for your hard drives. Download the tool from this server or the official website.
Extract the RAR archive. Now you need to create a bootable device in order to run the tool: Using a CD: Just burn the ISO file to any empty CD and proceed. Using a USB memory stick: Format the memory stick in FAT32 format (rightclick it and choose “Format”) and enable “Quick Format”. WARNING: When formatting, all data in the memory stick will be lost! Open the ISO file with WinRAR (or any similar program) and extract all files onto the memory stick. Start the console (Press WINDOWS + R and type cmd, press ENTER), enter the drive letter of your memory stick (e.g. L: ), then enter “SYSLINUX.EXE -ma L:” (replace L: with your drive letter). This will set the boot record for your memory stick, enabling your computer to use it as boot device.
Now plug in the USB memory stick or insert the CD into the drive of the password-locked computer and switch it on.
When the BIOS image is showing up, make sure you enter the “Boot Menu”, usually by pressing F12.
A window should pop up asking you to choose the device to boot from. Select CD or USB HDD.
After a few seconds, this screen will show up. Just press enter to boot normally.
Now a lot of text will appear on your screen while the system is loading drivers for your hardware. Just wait until it comes to a stop and waits for your input. Now the tool is asking on which partition your Windows registry files are located. Usually, this would be the first partition, but since there is a small (100MB) backup drive in Windows 7, you should take the next one, enter the number below and press enter.
Next, it asks for the path to your registry files on the drive. These are usually fine, just press enter to continue. When the files are located, you can choose what to do. Enter 1 and hit return for “Password reset”.
Then you have to select “Edit user data and passwords” by entering 1 again and pressing Enter
Enter your account name from the list and press Enter
On the next screen, enter 1 to “Clear (blank) user password”. You may also select 4 to “Unlock and enable user account” if you have entered the password too often and it is locked. If that’s all you wanted to do, enter ! and press return to quit.
Enter q again to leave the next menu and write the files by typing “y” in Step 4.
Now your password has been reset, just restart your computer normally and you should be able to log in to Windows again!
If your computer crashes or is somehow malfunctioning, a BIOS update may help. I tried to run Microsoft Virtual PC on my Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P mainboard with AMD Phenom II X4 955 processor, but it refused to start due to lack of Hardware Virtualization support although I enabled it in the BIOS setup. Updating my BIOS to the latest version with Q-Flash using an USB memory stick helped, so this tutorial will show you how to do it.
Extract the 7-zip archive to some folder, e.g. C:\bios_flash\
Plug in your USB memory stick and format it using the FAT32 file system (enable Quick Format).WARNING: When formatting, all data on the memory stick will be lost!
Go to the directory with the extracted BIOS update files and locate the actual BIOS data file, called something like M79XTUD4.F7, where the .F7 stands for version 7 and the stuff before for my mainboard model. Copy this file onto the freshly formatted memory stick
Restart your computer. When you see the BIOS image, press END to enter Q-Flash mode
A blue box will show up asking you what to do. First of all, backup your original BIOS to your USB thumbdrive. Select “Save BIOS to Drive”, then your USB memory stick and type in a name for your backup. Once you press enter, it will start backing up your data which may take up to 5 minues.
Once you are done backing up, return to the previous menu and select “Update BIOS from Drive” and locate the BIOS file you downloaded. Press enter to start flashing. WARNING: Do not switch off your computer while flashing your BIOS. This may permanently corrupt your mainboard!
When the flashing is finished, restart your computer, enter BIOS setup (press DEL when seeing the mainboard image) and “Load Optimized Defaults”.
After loading the default settings, “Save and Exit Setup”. Your computer should start normally with the latest BIOS version, hopefully solving the problems you encountered before!
If you did any adjustments to the BIOS before (enabling Virtualization, memory timings, CPU clock, etc.) you will have to set it again.
If you have problems following this guide, please comment! You can take good pictures of your computer screen using the Xshot! camera stabilizer!
When trying to play Medieval II: Total War multiplayer in LAN mode, you may encounter the problem that the players can’t see each other in the lobby and can’t find the hosted game despite of correct versions, network configuration and firewall settings.
There is a quite easy fix for this problem, just follow the steps below:
Browse to the directory containing Medieval II (e.g. C:\Program Files\Medieval II Total War)
Open medieval2.preference.cfg with notepad
Scroll down to the [network] section and edit the following line saying “use_ip = “. Put your LAN IP address after the equals sign and save the file
Restart the game, now everything should work nicely!
If there are any other issues, please comment and I will try to help!
The new version 4.0 of Google Chrome (currently Beta) enables the use of plugins and extensions in your browser. Extensions are a long requested feature for Chrome and one of the only reasons why many users still favored Firefox over Chrome.
In the Google Chrome Extension Directory you will find many interesting extension, but the one I waited for a long time is one that blocks annoying advertisements on websites. With AdThwart, there finally is such an extension and I will show how to use it. There was a trick to do block ads with earlier versions of Chrome, but using the official extensions is much more comfortable.
Make sure you have Chrome 4.0 or later. Click at the tool button (top right corner) and “About Google Chrome” to see your version. If it’s not 4.0 or later, download the Chrome Beta here.
Once installed, you will see the options page. By default, the filters EasyList and Extra filters are enabled. You may choose another filter for your country.
Now most ads on websites should be gone.
If there are still some remaining, you can use the Easy Filter function to block them as well. Click on the devil-button on the right side of your address bar and select “Easy create filter”. Then click on the element you want to block or hover over it and press CTRL + Shift + E. Return to the popup and confirm that you want to block that element.
If you for some reason don’t like AdThwart, there is another ad blocking extension called simply AdBlock. I didn’t try it, but looking at its rating of 4.5/5 stars, it seems to be quite good as well.
Currently, Google is testing a new search interface for their websearch somehow reminding of Bing. This new interface is supposed to make searching easier by putting all the useful filters and kinds of search in a bar on the left side while displaying the search results on the right side.
Although this interface hasn’t been released for the public yet, you can try it already by following these easy steps:
Open a new browser window or tab and go to this URL: http://www.google.com/ncr By using the “ncr” statement, you make sure that you’re not redirected to a local version of Google (e.g. .de, .cn, .co.uk, …)
Paste this script into the address bar replacing the URL: javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”); This will set a cookie telling the search to use the new interface
Go back to google.com and start searching!
There is also a nice comment on the bottom of each page with customized search telling you that you’re awesome!
If you have a Google account and use the Google search while logged in, the search engine will try to improve your results by relying on keywords you searched for before and on the websites you visited. In the official help file, they describe this personalized search as follows:
When you search using Google, you get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations, and other personalized features. By personalizing your results, we hope to deliver you the most useful, relevant information on the Internet.
If you use personalized search and have the new beta search interface enabled (enable the new Google Search Interface), Google will show this message on the bottom of each search results page:
multiplayer in LAN mode, you may encounter the problem that the players can’t see each other in the lobby and can’t find the hosted game despite of correct versions, network configuration and firewall settings.
