DESTRUCTOID's Team Fortress 2 for Beginners

Reverend Anthony over at the DESTRUCTOID gaming site has written a great set of beginner guides to the different classes of the rather excellent Team Fortress 2 game that came out of beta today. He's provided some tips for each class as well as a general post full of common tips.

I've found them quite invaluable in getting to know the game quickly!

Demoman
Engineer
Heavy Weapons Guy
Medic
Pyro
Scout
Soldier
Sniper
Spy
General Tips

Technorati Tags: TeamFortress2, Valve, PC, Gaming, Andrew Beacock

Increasing your USB gaming mouse polling rate with USB Mouserate Switcher 1.1 (usbmrs11.exe)

In my last post I talked about how to check your gaming mouse polling rate with a Windows utility called mouserate. You may have noticed that my polling rate was way above the standard 100Hz - in this post I'll tell you how I did it. This obviously only works with USB mice but there are not that many PS/2 gaming mice sold these days.

Important Disclaimer: Although I have not had any problems since running this patch, there have been reports on various gaming forums that people's mice or other USB devices have stopped working as a result of applying this patch. For some people it was fixed by choosing a slower patch rate but I wanted to mention this, as if you follow my instructions below and something goes wrong with your setup - your on your own... (it might be best to have a PS/2 mouse handy or know the keyboard shortcuts to revert the patch).

Ok with that disclaimer out the way, let's get stuck in and really ramp the polling speed up. First download USB Mouserate Switcher 1.1 by Anir. I had problems using the "Softpedia Mirror (US)" link but the "Softpedia Mirror (RO)" one worked fine. When you double-click usbmrs11.exe you are presented with a screen explaining what the tool can do. Clicking the "patch" button moves you to the screens that let you choose what speed you want to try. With each page it asks you if you want to change to that speed. It starts with 250 Hz/4 ms (slow), then 500 Hz/2 ms (medium), and then the fastest setting 1000 Hz/1 ms (the next page asks if you want to revert to the very slow Windows standard of 125Hz/8 ms).

If you answer "yes" to a question it patches the usbport.sys USB driver and asks you to reboot for the change to take effect. When you reboot is when you will find out if the patch has worked or if it has caused some or all of your devices to stop working.

If you have problems with any of your USB devices then try choosing a sightly slower setting first, if that doesn't work you will have to use the tool to restore the original Windows version - remember your USB mouse might not be working at this time, hence the reference to the PS/2 mouse above.

Once you've patched and rebooted, rerun mouserate to see what your new average polling rate is. Please leave me a comment below to let me know if it works (or not), and what average rate you are able to get. Also let me know if you think it makes your aiming and gaming any better.

Technorati Tags: Mouse, Gaming, USB, Andrew Beacock

Check your gaming mouse polling rate with mouserate.exe

I'm not a big PC gamer but I do enjoy the odd hour online playing ET (Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory). Recently I've been disappointed with my accuracy and aiming, I just seem to always miss when in the middle of a frantic firefight.

I had read on an ET forum that a good way to improve your aim was to download and consume 'Aiming by RaZiel'. After reading some of the documentation and watching a couple of the movies in this pack I wanted to try and 'tweak' my mouse configuration.

One tip was to increase the mouse polling rate within Windows so that it would be read faster and therefore give a more accurate reading on the mouse's position. One way that you can check your mouse polling rate is with the rather handy 'mouserate' by Oliver Andreas Tscherwitschke.

It's a tiny download that contains a simple executable file that pops up a window which gives you an area in which to move your mouse around, and a list of the polled rate on the right-hand side (along with an overall average).



When I first ran this program with my Microsoft optical Intellimouse plugged into the PS/2 port (via the green USB adapter) I got an average reading of just less than 100Hz. I then tried plugging the mouse directly into a free USB port and got pretty much the same readings so at least I know that the talk of PS/2 mice giving a steadier polling rate must only apply to 'true' PS/2 mice, not USB mice with PS/2 adapters.

Try it out and see what polling rate you get, I would be interested to hear what you have to say.

P.S. Have you noticed in the picture above that my polling rate is a fair bit higher than the 100Hz that I've talked about? More in a future post... ;-)

Technorati Tags: Mouse, Gaming, Enemy Territory, Andrew Beacock