"What do you mean I've been playing games on the wrong power setting?" Here follows the pitfall of laptop gaming and being an (at times superbly) ignorant bastard like myself:

So this all came about due to Dreamfall Chapters and it at first seemingly horrible performance in the big hub zones. Turns out I've been playing on this here gaming lappie of mine for the last two years on a battery savings mode, which actively throttles my hardware usage well below of its actual capability, without even knowing it. The result? Me being of the impression that my lappie was much more underpowered than it actually is. Yeah, I still can't quite believe how fucking dumb I was there. Good thing then that I heeded RTG's FAQ advice then.

As soon as I lifted those power restrictions DC ran remarkably well; in fact, it runs perfectly smooth in those trouble zones. That made me question what other games would suddenly benefit from this change, so I started some tests, and it appears there are quite a few that do. Where I had odd sound crackle problems in Fract OSC (I figured I'd star there since it's also a Unity-based game) they completely disappeared. Train Fever runs even better now. RCT 3 may have had the odd slowdown before on bigger parks/vistas, but they vanished once switching to higher gear. Age of Wonders 3 runs lovely zoomed-in or out on high settings now, which stuttered before unless I dropped graphics quality. Rise of the Triad didn't run so well even with settings lowered and now it's smooth sailing on high.

I am also willing to bet that those rare slowdowns in Witcher 2, Bioshock Infinite, and Legends of Grimrock 2 could have been completely avoided as well as having Wolfenstein The New Order, Battlefield 4, and Interstellar Marines running even better. Funnily, and not surprisingly, this change did absolutely nothing for HoMM V. Still runs like crap with its notoriously horribly optimized engine.

All that just due to two quick clicks of the mouse. Ridiculous, isn't it? You can imagine how stupid I felt at that point. All's well that ends well though, so I can very much still expect to get some good mileage out of my lappie. Which is good, since that allows me to keep saving up for a (comparatively speaking) really powerful gaming desktop... which is likely not to happen for at least another year. Possibly two, depending how well my lappie will be able to keep up at that point.

As for now, I just keep it on low power for the oldies and high for the new and/or demaning games. :)

So, there you have it. Got any really stupid self-inflicted tech-related problems to share? I'm all ears!

This kind of thing happens to the bests of us.

I have an embarrassing one:

I think this was back in the 386 or 486 days, it was pre-pentium. The company was small and had no IT department yet, my boss had bought a processor replacement for his work PC that ran faster (I don't remember how) and asked me to change it for him, I installed it backward (It was actually possible back then) and fried his motherboard. In the end I think he was happy that he had a good reason to upgrade the whole PC.

Thanks for posting about this (both here and in the Dreamfall thread). It's good to know and spread knowledge about these types of general pitfalls of PC gaming.

Similar situation involving my inexperience with NVIDIA Optimus:

http://www.gog.com/forum/shadow_warrior_series/problem_bug_blank_empty_boxes_instead_of_menu_options

(Summary: NVIDIA Optimus automatically switches between integrated graphics and a discrete GPU for longer battery life for laptops. It's nifty, but for whatever reason, Shadow Warrior was not triggering the transition to GPU usage.)

The power savings mode :P

Actually my gaming rig runs most of the time on power savings and i've had almost no hickups, only a few games actually seem to require the full power...

Curiously i never touched Power Savings before something like last year, as my computer seems to have a heating problem on the CPU and fries if you go too high for the CPU, however 50% & 75% seem to work fine (Damn prebuilt).

I still recommend turning off services and stuff you don't need, like themes and turning off all eye-candy.

I right clicked on a shortcut file and selected open with and left the 'always use this program for this type of file' option selected. Took me weeks to figure out why all my shortcuts were launching gimp or whatever it was. What's worse, stupid vista had no way to undo this besides fixing it in the registry.

Heh, my friend bought a huge monitor for gaming with ~140 Hz refresh rate. He used it for several months and was so proud of it. Then I came to visit him and checked that he was still having 60 Hz set in Windows screen configuration panel :)

LOL That's a good one.

I also have been a victim to power savings mode. It affected my USB 3.0 speeds to be that of 2.0 and I dealt with that for almost a year before knowing that turning power savings mode was the key.

Re-installing windows and getting everything back to my preferred preferences
is always a massive headache and LOTS of swearing....

I'm trying to remember the specifics... I was called to a neighbor to help them with their slow computer, and it was incredibly slow, like 10 minutes to boot and another 5 to load anything. Glancing at the task manager they had 256Mb of ram and they were using 800Mb... So obviously it's a Virtual Memory problem because they are trying to do way too much...

So i went to services and disabled a whole bunch of crap, automatically starting programs, pre-loaders, etc. When i got it down to about 100Mb the computer ran the speed you would expect it to, and had just enough memory left to run a browser or one or two applications at a time...

Seems like a lifetime ago...

Back in the 286 days, my PC had a 220/110V voltage switch on the back of the case. Our mains voltage is 220 V, and that was what the switch was set for, but I foolishly flipped it while the computer was running just to see what it did (I was 7 years old at the time). In the brief two seconds that followed I heard the fan starting to spin wildly, there was a faint electric flash and everything shut down. We had to take the computer for a repair.

Funnily enough, whenever I tried to do something complex with electronics, e.g. program a VCR, my parents would always tell me, "Be careful with what you're pressing, you might cause a malfunction!" I always laughed, thinking "C'mon, they couldn't have built a button that would break the device, could they?" In this case, it appears they had!

The big red self-destruct button?

I don't quite understand why the power settings would be throttled in AC power by default. Maybe to keep the lappie cooler, but then I like to use the setting in AC that Windows (games) get all the power they need automatically, if the need arises. The CPU doesn't have to run at 100% if I am merely staring at the desktop, but it should be possible to rise to 100%, if I e.g. run some newer game.

I've actually also used the opposite, ie. intentionally throttling the CPU speed even in AC power, because those darn Infinity engine RPGs like to waste all the CPU cycles they can find:

http://www.gog.com/forum/baldurs_gate_series/baldurs_gate_12_enhanced_editions_also_100_or_50_cpu_usage/page1

Luckily the Enhanced Editions don't seem to have the same issue.

As for self-induced tech issues... Some months ago I wanted to expand the RAM of my old retro-gaming desktop from 768MB to 1GB (or even a bit more), in order to run Linux Mint a bit better on it. It has apparently been awhile I've added DIMMs to a computer, because I foolishly thought they are symmetric, ie. it doesn't matter which way you insert them, as long as the connectors point downwards.

So there I was, trying to cram them in in full force, just thinking it is very tight (insert a sexual joke here about a priest and virgins etc.). I think in one I was even able to get it locked in the wrong way, kinda. It still didn't feel quite right so I checked it more closely, and came up into conclusion that it isn't fully symmetric, the small knob on the DIMM connector was a little bit to the side from the middle.

Ok, I re-inserted the DIMMs the right way, but I'd get only warning beeps from then on when I powered up the PC. It didn't matter which DIMM I inserted to which slot or even tried to power on without any DIMMs, always the same warnings. So I took it then I caused some real damage to the motherboard, probably.

Either way, I just salvaged some parts of that PC for possible future use (the power unit, graphics card etc.), and bought a similar retro-PC from the net for 20€. All is fine now, just have to be more careful and read the instructions from now on.

I'm especially angry to myself as I am not really a novice in inserting and extracting DIMMs. I've done it before to both desktop and laptop PCs, and even at work for certain server blades. Yet, in this case I acted like a total newbie, not knowing A from B. Maybe the lightning was bad or my eyes have gotten worse or something....

Worse – it was rather innocuous-looking.

On that note, it's actually funny that the whole power conundrum never occured to me before even though I've actually played around with power settings before: namely creating a new even more CPU-speed throttling mode so I could properly play Eador: Genesis.

Does the power saving remain active even with the power cable inserted? Or did you really use the battery while gaming? O_o
Anyway, that's the problem about technology that decides for you without a warning :P LOL at the (many) people who spend a fortune on devices and cannot even use them...