This kind of goes along with the Left 4 Dead thread, but it can make a difference in other games also.

So what's your Steam handle?

Mine is Destructis

This way we can get some matchups in games with more adults. Might be worth stickying for a little while also.

Cool idea.

I'm panzermeyer72.

195th_Moses i think

Might just be Moses

We have SimHQ group....you can find many handles there.

Ah cool that would be great. I don't use Steam all that much so will need to mess with it to see if I can find the group.

I think I can invite you to the group since I'm one of the admins for it. I'll try and do that tonight.

rehtnap24 with the alias of Panther.
I'm already in the SimHQ group.

Joined the SimHQ steam group. I should be on quite a bit this weekend. Just remember that I am noobflesh and will die ALOT. Would love to do some vs if we can get enough people playing L4D.

Richarad here, it is a junk mail corruption of my official 1st name Richard, but I kinda like the sound of it, so have been using it. Will have to look into the SimHQ Steam group!

My handle: Sista Soul-Jah'

and if you see me in Counter Strike, TF2, etc... shoot me because I pretty much suck.


...........Sista Soul-Jah'

I joined the group, my nickname is uhm... Husar.

You'll be assigned to playing Zoey the girl. All newbies to the game play that character.

joined! |PTC|MutuallyAssuredDestruction

I'm already in the SimHQ group as - drum roll please - ....Biff99!

At least I have a nice butt.

I usually play Louis because I'm well endowed.

I have just been playing left 4 dead single player so far to learn the ropes, but last night I started to have video problems on Dead Air. Right from the start with the plane passing over the greenhouse, I got lots of sound stuttering and little off color patches started to flash in and out on the entire screen. Sometimes if I did nothing it would clear up, other times it got worse quickly and locked up the screen, and I eventually had to power down, because ctrl-alt-delete would not stop the madness. I thought my graphics card was Kaput. Today I went to the nvidia site (I have a GeForce 6800 GTX) and installed the latest drivers. Did the same with my sound card (sound blaster X-Fi). I tried a couple of undemanding games and they seemed to work OK, but when I tried the L4D it locked up several times in rapid succession. Then I took the video card out and blew it clean thoroughly, and I hate to admit, it was pretty dusty in the fans, and a little on the cooling fins. Booted back up and promptly lock back up in L4D. I could go online, work on Excel, look at videos, etc, but as soon as I tried the game, the screen goes to tiny geometric patches of odd colors. I went to Best Buy thinking of getting some advice, or a newer card, maybe an 8 or 9 thousand, but all of them are now PCI-e and I have an AsRock K8Upgrade-1689 motherboard with 1 AGP and 4 PCI slots, no support for PCI-e. Best Buy had no motherboards, and I am not well informed enough to pick the best for the money there anyhow. Back home, put the card back in. Watch some video, answer emails, check some forums, and give the L4D after a dinner break with the computer off to "cool down". Tried L4D on the first map, and it worked fine. I did not retry the Dead Air map this time, kinda tired of hard stops and rebooting. At one point this afternoon the sound started crackling like the computer was on fire, then screeched a bit until I turned the amp off. I think I may check with the guy who built this one for me, and see if he thinks a new motherboard and better graphics card would work, and save a bit of dash. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it!

Well after all that writing above, I decided to try the Left4Dead game this morning and it seemed to work fine at first, after a few minuted it started getting the clipped audio and occasional video freezes with the odd colored patches like yesterday. I decided to turn off all the other stuff that normally runs in the background with no apparent difficulty, and the first thing I tried was Zone Alarm Pro, which gets virus and spyware updates frequently, and I also turned off the scans, just leaving the firewall on. That seems to have fixed the trouble, since I have now played Dead Air all the way through and No Mercy up to failing to get on the chopper. I suspect that it was just too much load on the CPU or something. I did have to restart in Safe Mode last night, after the screeching audio and wonder if that could have reset something important that I don't know about. I do remember having to turn off lots of background stuff in the past, but I have 2 gigs of memory now and rarely bother.
Any input welcomed, at least I'm not having to buy another computer just yet, and have time to consider what I want and can reasonably afford.

Chef

Coasty, make sure you turn off that option that says "multicore processing". That fixed my problem. Do you have an NVidia video card?