Tag Archives: Hardware

Google Chrome being unresponsive or unusually slow? Here’s a fix!

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In recent weeks I’ve been finding my favourite browser, Google Chrome, walking on thin ice. It used to be a seriously speedy browser dancing from page to page… OK, cut the fairy tale. Nonetheless, it was getting increasingly slow performing basic tasks like opening new tabs and launching video playback. It even seemed to cause mouse lag when multiple tabs were open.

Nonetheless, I was fiddling with settings and finally seem to have found a reasonable solution. It seems hardware acceleration has been a relatively new feature for Chrome (available from early 2014-ish). but many seem to be reporting this has led to Chrome becoming slower rather than faster.

Try turning it off using the instructions below and see if it makes a difference.

  1. Type chrome://settings into your address bar. Alternatively, click on the Google Chrome customize button (far top right button in Chrome with the 3 lines, then click Settings)
  2. Scroll to the bottom and click Show advanced settings…
  3. Scroll all the way to the bottom and find the System section. Untick Use hardware acceleration where available. Chrome will tell you it’ll need to restart, so do that by clicking restart (or closing Chrome fully and reloading it)

Try browsing to some sites now or opening some new tabs. I noticed an immediate improvement myself, but let me know if it makes any difference for you.

nVidia GTX 550Ti Review – mid range graphics card, good for OEM PCs

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I know this card has been out for some time now – but I don’t really ever need state-of-the-art graphics cards for my gaming needs. To be honest,  most of the games I play are at least a year old and aren’t stupidly power hungry. However, my ATI Radeon HD4550 was really starting to show its age a bit, so I decided to fork out a bit and move up the scale.

So I found this card. It looked good to me – it’s the Asus model which has a 900Mhz processor clock with 1GB GDDR5 memory, which seemed like a huge step up from my previous card. I found it for around £85 from the good people at CCL (I’ve used these guys frequently before – very good company), so I went for it!

I’m pretty impressed with it, to be honest. It’s no rocket launcher, but it can do ~30fps in GTA IV on full settings at 1440×900, which is plenty for my needs. It also seems to be quite happy with Test Drive Unlimited 2 at full settings – which is another game I do play when I get the chance.

Generally, I’d say it’s a mid range card – it’s not capable of today’s games at full settings but it’ll certainly achieve good mid-range settings and it does have good specs to play with. If you’re looking to build a mid-range machine that needs to play high quality, full HD video then this won’t bat an eyelid. My only real issue with it is space consumption – my micro ATX case is now full to the brim, and the card has also covered one of my PCI-E x1 slots up, which is a nuisance. Think I’m going to find myself buying a new computer case soon!

Very nice PlayStation remote controller developed by individual

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Yes, I know, GEEK! doesn’t usually talk about news related to games and games consoles, but this something I really wanted to mention.

Just spotted this on the internet (see below). It’s a remote PS3 controller which has been handmade by an experienced individual.

It features a 5” wireless LCD, sound, all the controls you’d expect, a 1.2GHz wireless controller, a mini-USB input, charger input, and headphone port.

For a handmade product, it does look pretty amazing.

Image

Sadly, the creator doesn’t mention the wireless range (or at least not at the time of writing).

Still, it’s a pretty fantastic concept that will probably interest many gamers. According to the creator he will be selling the device as soon as a minor sound issue is fixed. Any guesses on what it might go for?