In Depth: Why are games so terrified of sex?
Ah yes, sex. Where would we be without it? Certainly, it'd be easier to find parking spaces, but much tougher to find a date to the movies (or perhaps a reason to go on a date in the first place).
Yet despite the fact that most would agree that a good horizontal rumba is rather better than, say, a good session of genocide, the number of real PC games that have dared take on more sexual subjects can practically be counted on the fingers of one hand and… oh, behave.
See, your smirk is the problem. Games have always had an uneasy relationship with sex. From the outside, many seem to be pandering to the egos and fantasies of little boys – developers falling over themselves to create bouncy barbarian maidens in chainmail bikinis, glistened oily hunks with ridiculously large swords, gangsters doing deals in strip clubs, and lithe athletic heroines with chronic back-ache.
Female characters get it the worst, whether it's trying to fight in high-heels or freezing to death in arctic tundra, or suddenly finding that heavy all-covering platemail suddenly morphs into something low-cut that shows off lots of belly, no matter how it looked on the dead orc it was taken from.
For the most part this is as far is anyone dares go. Actual nudity, graphic sex scenes, or even characters commenting on the fact that the team's new Paladin looks like she funds her adventures down the local docks are never actually mentioned, leading to the most incredible coyness.
Take Grand Theft Auto, whose gangsters happily murder, swear, drink and make up whole new laws to break… but where do they hang out? A seedy bar where they can ogle girls in bikinis that could easily go in a PG-rated movie, if not for the naughty language.
When the player romances one of the possible girlfriends in the game, do we see any action? Nope, just a few sound effects played over an external view of the city.
Too hot for screen
It's no surprise that developers are scared. Putting sex into a game not only makes it harder to sell (at least in the US, where the dreaded Adults Only rating keeps titles out of the bigger stores), it paints a bright red target right on its face for the pundits and talking heads.
Two games in particular have faced this in recent years, Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and – more bizarrely – the brilliant Bioware RPG Mass Effect.
GTA is easy to understand – it's a game the moral majority has always hated, so finding out there was a sex-based rhythm game called Hot Coffee buried in the code was like Christmas.
Never mind that it was as objectively erotic as banging Barbie dolls together, and consisted of nothing more than two fully clothed, entirely consenting adults dry humping for a few seconds, the scandal was enough that when GTA4 came round, the worst Rockstar did was the tongue-in-cheek 'Warm Coffee' achievement during romances. Although the first DLC, The Lost And Damned, did slip in a naked politician's dangling penis.
Interestingly enough, a very similar mini-game also appeared in the adventure game Fahrenheit - a quick-time-event involving moving the mouse forward and backwards in time with the main character's thrusts. Silly as it sounds, it worked OK – although the scene was removed for the American release.
Mass Effect's controversy on the other hand was just mindblowing. Its most graphic sex scene consisted of a couple of flashes of a blue woman's bottom and a little obscured side-boob.
It took place almost at the end of the game, between characters who had come to know and care about each other, on the cusp of a mission that was almost guaranteed suicide. It was clean, classy, and so inoffensive that even psychologist Cooper Lawrence described the controversy over it as "kind of a joke".
Who is Cooper Lawrence, you ask? She's the psychologist who didn't actually bother watching the scenes in question before going on Fox News to publicly condemn the game's sexism and objectification of women. Nice one, Cooper. Thanks.
Even worse was one conservative blogger, Kevin McCullogh, who described the action like this: "It allows its players – universally male no doubt – to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to 'engage' and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54-inch screen, HD clarity as the video game 'persons' hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of."
To clarify: No. Just… no. On every level, no. Still, all this did apparently have one effect. Bioware's most recent game, Dragon Age, also has sex scenes. In style, they're very similar to Mass Effect's, with one key difference. This time, the characters keep their knickers on at all times. So far, no controversy.
Of course, none of this means that there haven't been sex-focused games. They've just typically been in their own cordoned-off part of the industry, rather than on the shelves of your local store.
The first to be treated like a proper game was Sierra Online's Softporn Adventure, an awful text adventure game about a man trying to get laid in a sleazy gambling town. This was later remade as Leisure Suit Larry, although what most people don't realise is that this was more a parody of the original than anything else, and that its designer, Al Lowe was far more entertained by humiliating his new creation than interested in arousing the player at the keyboard.
These early games suffered from the fact that text adventures simply aren't sexy, the graphics of the time weren't up to much, and games themselves were still at a Donkey Kong level of complexity.
Most were less games as interactive versions of a horny, somewhat disturbed 14-year-old's notebook, ranging from Atari games like Custer's Revenge (a naked, erect Custer crosses a screen to rape an Indian maid) and Bachelor Party (a Breakout game with ladies instead of bricks), to PC titles whose names really say it all: Strip Poker (served up in sizzling, sexy… er… greyscale), Astrotit (an interactive discussion of Wittgenstein and how his philosophy relates to the quintessential existential crisis), Drive-In (get to third base at the movies) and Granny's Place (not remotely what you think, but we'd hate to spoil that mental image…)
All these games were from the 1980s, before the PC gaming market really started. After that, developers realised that with the growth of graphics, and the increasing scale of the market, this was the perfect time to establish sexuality as a core part of what mature games could handle, and move the market onto a whole new level of advanced characterisation and social worth.
No, just kidding. They made Sex Vixens From Outer Space, Leather Goddessses of Phobos, Girlfriend Construction Set and Butt-Slam, the PC's only dedicated multiplayer board game about sodomy. Makes ya proud, doesn't it?
CONVENIENT STRAPS: Nice of the mad scientist to put the restraining bands right there. Wouldn't want the poor girl getting embarrassed or anything
Then, as now, anyone hoping for any real excitement from any of these games would have been sadly disappointed. The coyness was already in place as early as Leisure Suit Larry in 1987, where the sex scenes were obscured by a giant bouncing CENSORED box. Others, like Coktel Vision's Emmanuelle, hid the 'good' stuff under incredibly tedious adventure games that bordered on abuse for self-abusers.
Love games
One thing that hasn't changed over the years is that sex-heavy games are typically awful. Fortunately, there are exceptions to that rule: for instance, 2005's Playboy: The Mansion is a perfectly solid tycoon game, and Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail a fine adventure game, but they're few and far between.
One of the worst ever is the most recent Larry game, Box Office Bust, which features some of the worst platforming action you're ever likely to play, characters who look like they've escaped from your worst nightmares, and hysterically for a game which opens on the line "I'd fuck a cliff", a cowardly lack of even nudity.
It's even worse than the previous low watermark: Lula 3D, because while still unbelievably terrible on every level, at least that one offered some entertainment value by being headfizzlingly insane. Not many games feature random shoot-outs with the police, catapulting dogs at Mount Rushmore, or end with a drugged up pornstar shooting imaginary skeletons with a handgun in the middle of a psychedelic New Orleans.
TRUE MADNESS: We'd show a sex scene from Lula 3D, but they're just too rubbish
Non sex-focused games can still have a little fun, but it's usually more restrained; restricted to the occasional set-piece here and there. Sometimes, it's just to try and set the mood, or when seen early in a game, to try and hint that if it's offering nudity so easily, imagine what might be coming up later fellas if you stick with it.
The random naked ladies at the start of 1992's Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender (yes, really) and Les Manley: Lost In LA both pulled this trick. Lost In LA promptly followed it up exactly once, with a truly hysterical 'mud wrestling' scene that barely bothered with the wrestling bit, never mind the mud.
Most never even go that far, if only because games that have to rely on this kind of method for keeping players around rarely have anything else capable of keeping their target audience playing. These aren't great games.
For the most part, we like to think of sex as a positive thing: fun, romantic, often a bit silly. If that side gets little real attention in games, it's hardly surprising that the darker elements are almost unheard of, outside of the occasional character background story in an RPG, or as another threat for the hero to step in and prevent, such as the classic damsel in distress routine, whatever the specifics or maturity level of the situation.
Dragon Age is one of the few to take it further. The City Elf origin story, taking place on the day of the player character's arranged marriage, is all about a local lord showing up and kidnapping the women from the ceremony (including the player, potentially) for a very specific kind of party.
Your job involves saving the day, as usual, and the player is never in the position of being a rape victim themselves, but it's still a very dark opening, even for a game that's not afraid of being nasty. As long as everyone keeps their pants on.
There have been others however, to various degrees, that have taken the next step. Most famously, Phantasmagoria features a scene of husband-on-wife assault, in a game where the player controls the wife. It's actually very tame by any non-gaming standard, lovemaking turned violent rather than an outright rape (not that we're defending him!), and like most games end up resorting to, clothed dry-humping rather than actual sex.
THE DARK SIDE: Japanese eroge games bounce bizarrely from sexy slapstick to incredibly horrible scenes of rape
The fact that it was one of the earliest mainstream full motion video games added much of the impact, especially as the player character, Adrienne, slumps to the ground in tears afterwards, but it's still very tame compared to any TV show or movie covering the same kind of subject matter.
Cyberdreams' I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, based on the short story by Harlan Ellison, featured a more psychological example. With the world turned into a radioactive hellhole, an evil supercomputer called AM is passing the centuries by torturing the last five members of the human race.
The only woman of the group, Ellen, is a rape victim whose experience has left her traumatised by enclosed spaces and the colour yellow, so, of course, her challenge in the game is to explore a cramped yellow pyramid, with AM adding insult to injury by bringing her rapist back from the dead.
As with the other stages of the game, the way to win is to make each character in turn defeat their personal demons and fatal flaws, and it's saying something that Ellen's isn't the darkest of the set; that prize goes to Nimdok, the former Nazi concentration camp scientist who AM feels an unsurprising kinship with. Oddly, he wasn't in the German release of the game…
Do it yourself
But back to lighter stuff! If developers are often petrified of nudity, modders aren't. The humble 'nude skin' has been a regular fixture in games ever since they went 3D. A switched texture here, a new body mesh there and ding! Instant fan-service!
Obviously, this is pretty tragic stuff, but it's an almost inevitable part of popular games now with vaguely attractive female characters. The first Dragon Age mod was a transparent bra to try and get round the main game's prudishness.
There are patches for everything from Quake 3 Arena to Half-Life 2, with players even now gawking at World of Warcraft Night Elves who have no idea they're now dancing au naturel, and in a zombie apocalypse not far away, a Zoey trying to work out why Francis' clothes never seem to get ripped to shreds by Left 4 Dead's zombies.
The nude skinning gets especially strange with story-based games. By now, you'd think Valve would have prepared for it enough to slip in a "Sweetie, you forget something?" from Eli when Alyx Vance shows up wearing nothing but a belt, but no.
In other games, it really gets ridiculous: such as in Oblivion, where there aren't just competing groups of anatomically correct figures, but people modding them with new outfits to wear. Just occasionally though, it can make sense, like the Fallout 3 Sin City mod, which adds back some of the seediness that old-school Fallout players missed in Bethesda's largely innocuous wasteland, or giving the Grand Theft Auto gangsters an actual strip club to visit.
Mostly though, it's as grown-up as Power Rangers. Nude mods have largely taken over from the classic practical joke, claiming that a particular game has a nude code in it. Unsurprisingly, Tomb Raider was the most commonly cited one, with one cheating device actually using a picture of her clothes flying off along with the words 'GET THE CODE' in an advert.
HIDE AND SEEK: Even games that are comfortable with sex scenes like a bit of the old peek-a-boo
The traditional gag was to see just how much people would do for a glimpse of polygon flesh, like finishing a level on the hardest difficulty in under 30 seconds, or some ludicrous 'turn around 30 times counter-clockwise, then fifteen clockwise and press all buttons' nonsense that would make the victim merely think they'd just done it wrong.
In practice, one of the few games that let you do anything even close was Max Payne 2, which offered a code that let you replace Max with any character in the game, including the naked version of Mona Sax that was only used for a cut-scene where he sees her in the shower.
Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude also offered an 'Everybody Naked' option for finishing the game, which, again, got taken out of the original US release (but got put back in again for a separate Uncut version later). Not really a cheat though, even if many did just download a savegame to access it without finishing the game.
The next generation
Can we expect games of the near future to cast off their childish roots and embrace sexuality in a smarter, more mature way? No.
As nice as that thought might be, right now the games industry, as a whole, remains petrified of the idea, ensuring the same split between the companies desperate to avoid potential controversy and those actively courting it for promotion's sake.
There are individual titles trying new and interesting ideas, including Heavy Rain on the PS3 (one scene involves a player character having to do a striptease for a criminal, with the idea being more to pass the feelings of degradation over to the player rather than arouse them) and Dragon Age, which offers everything from a genuinely tender romance to a casual off-screen foursome, but for the most part, this is going to be terra controversial for as long as the mass-media continues to have gaming in its crosshairs.
This will, of course, change in time. Just as the breaking of the Hays Code let films enter a world where couples didn't have to be married to enjoy a Scene Of Passion, and comics escaped the dreaded Comics Code Authority, games will reach a point where any arguments can be with individual titles, and a Grand Theft Auto or Call Of Duty isn't treated as a representative of all games.
For the moment though, expect more the same naughty bikinis and peek-a-boo immaturity, because they're certainly not going anywhere.
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The Nintendo Wii is 'a virus' says ex-DICE boss
Ex-DICE boss and hardcore game designer Fredrik Liliegrin has labelled the Nintendo Wii a "virus" and says that it is "not a video games machine".
Liliegrin is CEO of Antic Entertainment, a developer that claims to produce 'casual games for the hardcore'.
The ex-DICE boss told GamingUnion: "Wii, to me, I would describe it as a virus, that doesn't stick. Everyone comes home, it's a toy, people have got to realise the Wii is a toy, not an entertainment-focused product.
Anti-Wii rant
"People come home, someone, they play Wii for a bit, feel it's really cool, blah blah blah, they go out and buy one. Ask people how often they play the Wii, that are not the core game consumer that buys one because they have an Xbox 360 and a Wii or a PlayStation 3 and a Wii.
"The people that only own the Wii, ask that consumer how often they use their machine. They just don't use it, it was cool, but they're not gamers, so they put it away.
"Other than the Wii Fit phenomenon that helped a lot of people get a nice cutie voice telling that they're fat and need to go work out, they need to find other alternatives. Nintendo is smart in that way in that they realize this is not a video game machine, this is not a games game machine."
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LG's first Windows Phone 7 Series handset spotted
Microsoft has been demonstrating the first official hardware prototype of an LG-manufactured Windows Phone 7 Series handset which is due for commercial release later in 2010.
Windows Phone 7 Series was the big news to come out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month, and a Microsoft rep pulled out this first concept handset when filming the Engadget podcast in New York this week.
Keyboard and touch
As you can see from the above picture, courtesy of Engadget, Microsoft's new mobile handset will feature a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen.
Engadget mention that the new Windows phone is slightly thicker than an Apple iPhone, which one would expect from a handset featuring a slide-out keyboard.
The phone also features a 5 megapixel handset. However, with September looking like the earliest possible date this handset might be available to the great unwashed, there is still plenty of time for Microsoft to up the specs and add in new features to the first Windows Phone Series 7 mobile.
Via Engadget
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Why Sir Clive Sinclair doesn't use a computer
Sir Clive Sinclair released the ZX80 thirty years ago this week. A small plastic home computer that cost a mere £79.95 in kit form (and £99.95 assembled) that was to fundamentally change the ways in which we interacted with our TVs for ever.
In a recent interview to celebrate the thirty year anniversary, Sir Clive made the remarkable admission that he doesn't use a computer these days and that he despises the distractions of email.
ZX profits and email nightmares
Sir Clive also recalls how the ZX80 and its successor the slim black ZX81 made Sinclair and amazing £14m profit in a year, which he admits would still "be a lot today."
"The sad thing is that today's computers totally abuse their memory – totally wasteful, you have to wait for the damn things to boot up, just appalling designs," Sir Clive told The Guardian. "Absolute mess! So dreadful it's heartbreaking."
Rather shockingly, Sir Clive adds that he doesn't use a computer or email at all, but that "the company does."
He continues: "Well I find them annoying. I'd much prefer someone would telephone me if they want to communicate. No, it's not sheer laziness – I just don't want to be distracted by the whole process. Nightmare."
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Review: MOApps myTexts snow 1.6
Fans of distraction-free writing are well catered for on the Mac. Full-screen editor WriteRoom is excellent, and the superb Scrivener offers a similar mode, as does Pages and the idiosyncratic 'writing environment' OmmWriter.
myTexts snow is another option in this field, although one perhaps even more unconventional than OmmWriter.
In a way, myTexts snow feels more like an iPhone app than a desktop one – it abstracts file management, aiming to be an all-inclusive environment.
The sidebar enables you to title and tag documents (or 'entries') and also acts as the means for accessing previous work. Smart folders can be used to group entries based on tags, or you can manually select an item from the list at the foot of the sidebar.
When it comes to writing, myTexts snow is competent and responsive. The main writing area optionally highlights the current paragraph and feels much like a speedy typewriter.
The toolbar offers word and character counts, sliders for amending margins around text, and access to File, Export and Print buttons. And although the app workspace is plain text only, you can open Word documents and export to RTF, ODT, PDF, DOC, DOCX and other formats.
The problem is the overall approach feels alien and isn't sleek enough to warrant perseverance. The inability to sort sidebar entries is a bizarre omission and the search field can't search within documents.
WriteRoom and Scrivener are superior writing tools.
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Digital Economy Bill may destroy free public Wi-Fi
The Digital Economy Bill in the UK could well wipe out free public Wi-Fi access in universities, libraries and independent cafes across Britain, if new reports are to be believed.
Some British legal experts think that the penalties associated with failure to comply with the new requirements of the Bill might well mean that independent caffs, universities and local libraries may face huge liabilities – and thus that it would be safer for them to simply switch off un-password protected free Wi-Fi access for their students, visitors and customers instead.
Outlaws open Wi-Fi
Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet that the Bill will effectively "outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses."
She continued: "This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in.
"Even if they password protect, they then have two options -- to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café."
You can see more on the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in this explanatory document.
Universities in a muddle
Lord Young, a minister at BIS, says libraries can not be exempted because "this would send entirely the wrong signal and could lead to 'fake' organisations being set up, claiming an exemption and becoming a hub for copyright infringement".
And as for universities, Lord Young adds: "it does not seem sensible to force those universities who already have a system providing very effective action against copyright infringement to abandon it and replace it with an alternative".
However, "[Universities] don't know if they're subscribers, ISPs or neither," argues legal expert Lillian Edwards. "If the government is not clear, how on earth are the universities supposed to respond? This seems almost unprecedented to me, for a government document."
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Review: Intego VirusBarrier X6
When it comes to Mac security, Intego is a veteran, publishing blogs and bulletins as well as producing software. It even has the dubious honour of being taunted by a line of malware code; high praise indeed.
They have now combined VirusBarrier and NetBarrier (a personal firewall) under one banner. Enter VirusBarrier X6.
We tested the Standard (two-user) version of VirusBarrier X6 on a 2.4GHz Intel iMac and a 2.16GHz MacBook.
As ever with Intego products, installation was smooth, with a separate uninstaller provided.
Taking a quick perusal of the available preferences, we set up trusted zones – that is to say, files and folders that don't need scanning (why scan your backup when it's already been scanned?).
When we isolated both Macs from our network and introduced a selection of viruses to their hard disks, VirusBarrier responded with commendable alacrity.
However, it needed directing to the actual files when the same viruses were inserted on a USB flash drive (a common source of infections), unlike Norton AntiVirus, which routinely takes a more aggressive approach.
We'd have to say that in combining features of VirusBarrier and NetBarrier, Intego has over-egged the pudding, producing a product that's over-complex for the general user.
A free product such as ClamXAV plus judicious changes to Mac OS X's own settings would work for most of us.
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Review: Hyperbolic Tidy Up! 2.1.4
As your hard drives fill with photos, music files, images, documents, movies and apps, you could waste substantial storage space by holding duplicate copies of the same file. Tidy Up! 2 is here to seek them out.
There's a comprehensive range of search modifiers on offer, and you can set specific exclusions, which is especially useful if you use Time Machine.
On completing a search, you can manage or delete duplicates, with options to burn them to disc, archive in another location or label them in Finder for later identification, among other things.
You can replace deleted files with aliases or symbolic links, which is excellent if you want to dump the duplicates but retain the overall organisation.
Although sleek, attractive and Mac-like, Tidy Up! 2's interface is a bewildering warren of panes, collapsible listings, settings, inclusions, exclusions, options, modifiers and checkboxes. And that's just in Basic mode.
It's easy to make contradictory selections and not even realise it, with your second selection negating your first. Consulting the 83-page manual, you get the hang of it in the end, but you need to familiarise yourself with how it works before you can even begin to use it efficiently.
But is it worth the effort? For systems managers and the technically minded, quite possibly. It's powerful, efficient and extremely versatile. Those who want something that just works should look elsewhere.
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In Depth: Complete guide to making your PC quieter
Stop, relax and take deep breaths. If shutting down your PC, and bringing a halt to its grinding whirrs, hisses and juddering clicks, ever gives you the same sense of relief as finishing a gym session, then it's time to drag your PC to the sound doctor.
As with fast cars, there's a conventional expectation that powerful computers have to sound like they're trying to break the land-speed record, but with a bit of understanding about airflow theory, and a few bits of specialist kit, you can transform any PC from a furious elephant into a sleeping kitten.
Whether you're attempting to quash the intrusive drone of a top-end gaming PC, or stop your media centre PC from distracting you during intense, quiet moments in movies, there are loads of ways in which you can calm the noise from your PC's mechanical guts.
In fact, the raucous racket that's associated with PCs has become such a common complaint, that there's now a huge industry dedicated to making components specifically to sort it out.
There's plenty to consider here, from alternative CPU and GPU coolers, through to dampening the rattling clicks that come from your hard drive. Of course, some methods are much more effective than others, so over the next few pages we'll show you which remedies we recommend for curing your PC's sonic ailments, and why.
We'll tell you all the basics that you need to know about airflow, which kit is best for the job and what sorts of factors you need to consider when you're installing your new kit.
But doesn't making your PC quiet mean you'll have to make sacrifices? Well, yes it does. You may not be able to overclock your CPU to the edge of hell and back, but you'll be able to get close to the first lava pool.
It's surprising how much quieter you can make your PC with just a few tweaks, and without sacrificing too much in terms of performance. You can still build a high-end powerhouse PC that doesn't sound like it's harbouring a Lancaster Bomber within its whining insides, and you can easily dampen the din from a slim line media centre PC too.
Foam matting
One slightly different approach to reducing your PC's noise is to use foam matting to create a sound absorbent barrier between your PC's insides and the outside world.
Kits such as the AcoustiPack Lite (£23) enable you to line your case with an acoustic barrier, but be warned that these kits are really just one gun in your arsenal when it comes to silencing your PC, and they're not the all-silencing panacea that some people expect.
Your case's airflow system will have been designed to draw in air from very specific places, and there will often be carefully positioned vents on your case's side panels, as well as the back. These are unfortunately where a great deal of the noise in your PC escapes, and it would also be thermal-suicide to cover them up with foam matting.
If you block a crucial part of the intake or exhaust system then your airflow system stops functioning properly, meaning you have to increase your fan speed to make up the difference, which will negate the whole point of the matting in the first place.
If you get the balance right, however, then kits such as these can still make a difference. If you cut the matting to avoid any vents, and stick it to your case's front and side panels, then you may not block out all the noise from your PC, but you will block a fair chunk of it.
Bear in mind that this kind of matting doesn't actually produce a sound-proof barrier, either, but rather absorbs certain frequencies. You may find that a kit such as this won't make your PC quieter, but it will certainly block some of the annoying trebly frequencies that come from your fans.
Airflow principles
The first factor to consider is airflow. Most PC cases draw in air with an intake fan at the front (usually at the bottom), and then expel the air via an exhaust fan at the back. The idea is that air flows in one direction over the components, before it's then pushed out.
Basically, your case will have an intricately engineered airflow system with which you don't want to interfere. Even passively cooled components, such as motherboard chipsets, still rely on airflow. After all, the heat needs to go somewhere once it's been spread out by a heatsink.
Some specially-designed chassis enable you to use the chassis as a heat-dump via heatpipes, but these have been specifically engineered for this purpose. You'll need to stick with the principle of airflow in a standard PC case, but you'll be surprised how quietly an air-cooled system can run with the right components.
Noise measurements
There's a common misconception that installing larger fans will make your system noisier than using smaller ones, but the opposite is generally true. The bigger the fan, the more airflow it can push out at a lower speed. Not only does a fan's noise level increase as you increase the speed, but so does its frequency – and it's that high-pitched trebly drone that's the most grating to human ears.
The most common noise measurement you'll see on fan specifications is the decibel (dB), which defines the sound pressure level in relation to the limits of the human ear. A quiet office has a decibel level of around 30dB, and a standard human conversation with someone a foot away measures around 60dB. At the other end of the scale, a loud rock gig will hit around 110dB.
This is only a measurement of sound pressure, though, which is why some fan manufacturers, such as Arctic Cooling, also quote fan noise using a psychoacoustic measurement such as 'sone'. Although human hearing has a frequency range of 20Hz to 22kHz, the 1kHz to 5kHz bracket is the most sensitive.
A sone is made up of 40 phons, where a phon represents a 1KHz tone at 1dB. This means that one sone is a 1KHz tone at 40dB, and two sone represents double the loudness of one.
Some manufacturers, such as Zalman, also quote decibels using the A-weighting (dBA), which weighs the curve in favour of the 1KHz to 6KHz frequency. Even so, both irritating and tolerable fan noise can still fall into this frequency bracket, so dBA isn't a foolproof measurement. Use these ratings as a yardstick for comparison, but always check reviews of fans to get an idea of their noise level too.
A noise level under 20dBA or 1 sone is a general area to aim for here.
One of the main culprits when it comes to causing fan noise is the CPU cooler. Both Intel and AMD's stock coolers may be fine at keeping fiery temperatures under control, but they also make quite a superfluous din.
Fortunately, this can solved quite easily by buying a third-party cooler. An affordable, and extremely popular, example cooler is Arctic Cooling's Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 (£23), which is compatible with both Intel and AMD's recent socket designs.
With its 92mm fan, aluminium heatsink tower and copper heatpipes, Arctic Cooling claims that this cooler is capable of cooling a Core 2 Quad Q9950 to 52.6°C, while revving the fan at just 2,500rpm and generating a noise level of just 0.8 sone.
Meanwhile, the Intel stock cooler had to spin its smaller fan at 2,850rpm to cool the CPU to 64.3°C, which resulted in over double the loudness at 1.75 sone.
With any tower-shaped CPU cooler such as this, make sure that the fan is positioned facing the front of the case, so that it's drawing air from the intake fan through the heatsink's fans, where it can then be expelled by the exhaust fan.
However, while the Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 is great for dual-core and low-end quad-core systems, the fan noise can get particularly annoying when it spins up to a high level, which it will need to do on high-end, quad-core processors, especially if they're overclocked or based on an older, hotter core.
There are plenty of higher-end alternative coolers out there to choose from, but a great affordable example is the Scythe Kama Angle Rev B (£33). This mastodon of a cooler positions its huge 120mm fan at a 45° angle, so it draws in air from your intake fan over the heatsink before it goes out of the back.
The heatsink's L-shape will also make it effective in cases that have a blowhole at the top, such as Antec's P180. At its lowest speed, the fan is quoted as having a noise level of just 6.4dBA, and goes up to 24dBA at its highest speed. Be warned, though, that it's a monster, so measure the room around your CPU socket before you order one.
Chill the pixel
Next comes the graphics card, which is where you'll often find those hissing little 40mm and 60mm fans. Thankfully, most new graphics cards only spin up the fan when a 3D game is running, but this isn't always the case, and that spinning fan noise can still really get on your nerves when gaming, assuming it's not being masked by all the explosions.
Thankfully, there are alternatives, and a fine example is Zalman's VF1000-LED (£33), which makes just 18dBA at its slowest speed of 1,400rpm. This cooler has the standard mounts for many of ATI and Nvidia's GPUs. Plus, if you have a Radeon HD 4870 or 4890, you can add Zalman ZM-RHS-90 heatsink (£5) to thoroughly cool the graphics card's MOSFETs.
Meanwhile, if you have a dual-GPU card, such as a Radeon HD 4870X2, or a more powerful single-GPU card, such as a GeForce GTX 285, then it's worth taking a look at Arctic Cooling's Accelero Xtreme range (£50).
With three 92mm fans, Arctic Cooling claims that its Accelero Xtreme 4870X2 cooled a Radeon HD 4870 X2's two GPUs down to 46°C while only emitting 0.5 sone. Compare this with the 96°C and 4.5 sone of the stock cooler, and you can see what a massive difference we're talking about here.
Bear in mind that you'll need space for these coolers, though. With an Accelero Xtreme, your card will require three motherboard slots, rather than the usual one or two.
Passive cooling
Couldn't you just remove the fans altogether? Well, yes, but this isn't a decision that you should take lightly. Passive coolers such as Arctic Cooling's Accelero S2, as well as Zalman's VNF100, can be attached to many different GPUs, and the latter also enables you to mount the heatsink on the back of your graphics card, so that it doesn't take up any more slots than is completely necessary.
However, you won't be able to cool your whole PC passively. The idea behind passive processor and GPU coolers is that they take advantage of the airfl ow already passing through your case. This isn't necessarily a bad idea, but you'll want to keep an eye on your CPU and GPU temperatures (more on this later) if you're only using passive heatsinks.
Basically, you'll need to make sure that you have plenty of airflow coming from your case fans passing over the coolers.
We now come to case fans, and you may not even need to replace the ones that are currently in your case. One of the main issues with fan noise isn't the fan, but the fact that it's screwed directly into a metal case, causing unneeded vibrations. A simple way around this is to isolate it from your case using rubber mounts, or a sleeve such as the Fansis rubber gasket (£3.39).
Alternatively, there are plenty of quiet fans available that will enable you to push plenty of air through your case without making it end up sounding like a helicopter. The bigger the better here, so if your case contains 80mm fans, but has mounts for 120mm fans, then replace your existing fans with the latter.
Good examples of quiet fans include the Noctua NF-P14 FLX (£20) and the quirky-looking Coolink Ultra fans (£11).
Finally, we have the PSU. If your computer has a standard, unbranded PSU, then this is more than likely to be the noisiest player in your PC. There are plenty of quiet PSUs available that cut out this kind of noise dramatically, such as the Fractal Design Newton models (from £109).
Spinning down
Your next job is to slow down those fans, as even a quiet fan will make a noise like a wind tunnel at full speed. Most current motherboards make this an easy job, as their power connectors can accommodate PWM control. This enables your motherboard to adjust the voltage applied to each fan on the fly, depending on the temperature.
However, many people prefer to have a PC that's consistently quiet all the time, and not every fan can be controlled by PWM either. Your solution here is to venture into fan controllers.
In the early days of modding, plucky enthusiasts found that you could place a resistor in the middle of a fan's 12V power cable to step down the voltage applied to a fan. These days, however, you can spare yourself any soldering work by ordering a ready-made Zalman RC100 (£2.50), which is available in both 5V and 7V versions.
A similar effect can also be achieved using a Molex splitter cable. A Molex cable gets power from your PSU's 5V and 12V rails, and a Zalman ZM-MC1 cable (£2.60) enables you to connect a case fan to just the 5V portion and keep the noise right down.
Plus, if you want to achieve this effect with several fans, then the Fractal Design Fan Power Splitter (£13) will split the voltage from a Molex cable into a number of different voltages and power up to 16 fans, and it will also sit neatly in a slot backplate.
Bear in mind, however, that fans require a minimum voltage to spin up, and not all fans can run on 5V. Your fans' minimum voltage is usually listed in the specifications, so check this out first.
If you want a bit more control over the speed of your fans, then it's also worth investing in a fan controller, which introduces a variable resistor to the circuit to vary the speed. One classic example is the insanely cheap Zalman FanMate (£4), which will control one fan.
However, if you want to control several fans, it's also worth investing in a multiple fan controller that slots into a drive bay. The Scythe Kaze Master (£30), for example, allows you to control four fans while also providing temperature and fan-speed read-outs.
Alternatively, there are also ways in which you can take advantage of PWM control via software. One example is SpeedFan, which tells you the speed at which your fans are spinning, and enables you to adjust the speed with fine-grained digital controls.
Usefully, it also probes the thermal diodes of some of your components, so you can see the exact effect that your tweaks are having on system temperature. When you've reached the level of fan noise with which you're happy, head to SpeedFan's Charts tab, tick the boxes for the temperatures you wish to monitor (CPU cores are key) and then run a CPU-intensive application.
A good example is the CPU torture test in Prime95, which will comprehensively hammer the CPU. Leave this running for an hour or so and keep an eye on the temperature, and then look at the log chart in SpeedFan. If your CPU is going into dangerous temperature-territory (the temperature threshold varies between CPUs, but as a general rule you want to keep the core temperature under 70°C), then you'll need to increase the fan speeds.
You can perform a similar job with your graphics card. AMD's latest Catalyst drivers feature a fan speed control in the Overdrive section, but your best friend when it comes to GPU temperatures and fan speeds is the venerable RivaTuner, which does a fine job of probing both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.
In the app, click on the triangle next to 'Customize' below your graphics card's name, then click on the picture of the graphics card, go to the Fan tab and tick the box that says 'Enable low-level fan control'.
Another useful feature to found in RivaTuner is GPU temperature monitoring. Again, click on the triangle next to 'Customize' and select the icon with a magnifying glass over a chip. You'll then be given a series of graphs. Hit the 'Record' button at the bottom and run a GPU-intensive 3D game for a while. You can then quit out of the game and check the temperature read-outs.
Check the sorts of temperatures you should be looking for on your GPU online, and make sure that nothing is going into the danger zone. This is particularly useful if you're using a third-party GPU cooler hooked up to a fan controller.
Hard drive noise
Once you've tamed all your fans into submission, your final port of call is to deal with the grinding clicks from your hard drive. As with case fans, hard drive noise can be dampened by isolating the hard drive from the rattly, metal cage it sits in with rubber mounts, such as the Scythe Hard Disk Stabiliser II (£6.84).
If you want to go one stage further, then you could also considering investing in a complete enclosure, such as the Smart Drive 2002C HDD Silencer (£70), which will muffle those mechanical grumbles even further.
Bear in mind, however, that hard drives get very hot when they're running at full whack, so make sure you have plenty of airflow going over an enclosure such as this. You can also monitor the temperature of your hard drives via SpeedFan.
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Review: Bare Bones Yojimbo 2.1
The founder of Bare Bones Software calls Yojimbo a 'digital junk drawer'. It's an honest description of a tool that won't transform your Mac life, but helps you rationalise and keep track of odd documents that inevitably accumulate on your hard drive.
You can copy files to Yojimbo in many text and image formats, as well as PDF and HTML, and tag them with descriptive keywords if you wish, then dump the originals in the Trash.
Importing documents is easy, via either drag and drop or a dialog, and if you want to import a non-supported file type (such as a spreadsheet), you can print a PDF directly to Yojimbo from an app that does support it.
Bookmarklets are also provided to let you export pages from your web browser into Yojimbo, and text or URLs can be dispatched from apps via keyboard shortcuts.
Once your junk is safely stored, you can search for tags or text, and use labelling and grouping options to bring order to the chaos. Other handy features include document encryption.
It all works – everything is extremely configurable. The Help facility is useful, and you can sync with MobileMe. Yojimbo doesn't make you work hard – you can just use it as an alternative to a cluttered Desktop if you like, or take a more rigorous approach by tagging thoroughly.
Version 2 brings new tagging features, as well as incremental improvements elsewhere. In the next upgrade, we'd like to see support for more file types.
Related Links
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In Depth: How to detox and spring clean your Mac
Tired? Sluggish? Lost your get-up-and-go? Yes, Mac, we're talking to you! You used to be so fresh and sprightly. But you've been working long hours and not looking after yourself, and now you can't seem to do things as quickly as you used to.
Like the journalist's liver, one organ in the Apple corpus is particularly susceptible to deterioration: the hard disk. While just about everything else inside a computer is an immobile slab of semiconductors, the hard disk is a big box of spinning plates with the mechanical sophistication of a 1985 Austin Maestro.
And it has, like Peter Mandelson, more jobs than it probably ought to. Most of its time is spent picking up after RAM, catching whatever falls out as apps are flicked between and documents are worked on. Exhausting as it is, this is a mere hobby.
Its primary function is to store all your stuff. At this it excels, providing the kind of wide open digital spaces that, however many images you shot with your camera, would happily… hang on, it says here it's full!
What's filling up your hard disk and RAM, and distracting the attention of your CPU? How do you find the culprits, and is it safe to remove them? Can you make more room?
Step this way for solutions to all these problems, and a lot more besides.
Seek out excess baggage and slim down your OS X installation
Your Mac's hard disk has a hard life. Not only is it the permanent repository for all your applications, documents, music and movies, it also houses the operating system that makes everything work, while serving as temporary storage space for whatever you're busy with.
Little wonder, then, that when the drive gets clogged, your whole system suffers. The smaller your disk, the more likely you are to have problems – but even big ones can fill up. The amount of free space available on the current disk is shown by default at the foot of each Finder window.
As a rule of thumb, you should keep at least 10% of your main hard disk (the 'startup disk') empty so that it can run efficiently. Bear in mind that some of your hard disk is taken up by Mac OS X's virtual memory swap file, where it stores data needed by the currently running apps that won't fit into your Mac's actual memory (RAM).
These days, that typically runs to tens of megabytes. So on a Mac with a 250GB drive, say, you can expect to store well under 200GB of your own data before hitting the buffers.
A full hard disk has a number of consequences. If it's really, really full, you'll start seeing messages such as 'Your startup disk is almost full', or warnings that something can't continue until you make some space.
In other cases you may not get an alert, but things you're expecting to happen just don't. This is because apps are trying and failing to store temporary data on the hard disk – which is generally the only place they can put it.
A nearly full hard disk also makes it harder to read and write files, and since your Mac is constantly swapping data between RAM and 'virtual memory' on the disk, that inefficiency can make everything a little bit slower and less responsive.
Space invaders
Clearing out your hard disk begins with working out which files you don't need. It's largely pointless opening each folder in turn and flicking through it for anything that looks unnecessary; you could delete hundreds of files without making any significant impact.
The trick is to focus on big files. Chucking out one video clip could save more space than sifting through all the text files you've ever saved.
Use Spotlight to find large files wherever they may be lurking. In the Finder, press Command+F for a search window. At the top-left, set the first drop-down menu to Size (you may have to go via Other) and the second to is greater than, then set the size to, say, 50MB. Let Spotlight do its work for a minute or two and you'll know which files are taking up substantial space.
Click a file within the search window to reveal its location in the status bar below, and press Command+Delete if you want to trash it.
Unfortunately, Spotlight isn't as helpful as it could be. File sizes aren't listed in the search window, and you can't sort by size; you have to use Command+I (Get Info) on each file to see its details. Annoyingly, searching by size only finds files, not folders, so you may spot a 60MB Photoshop file but miss a folder of 60 1MB images that are equally redundant.
For a more complete picture, there are third-party utilities. GrandPerspective, free to download, uses colour coding to reveal what kinds of files are hogging your hard disk, as does Disk Inventory X.
More informative is WhatSize, which costs $12.99 (just under £8) but has a free demo version to try on folders up to 20GB. DaisyDisk is pricier at $19.95 (about £12) but free to try for 15 days.
Need to know
When hunting for deletable files, watch out for large anonymous-looking files that you may not recognise but do, in fact, need.
A classic example is if you use the Entourage email client that comes with Microsoft Office. And, as if to illustrate the proverb about eggs and baskets, it stores all your messages in a single file, called Database.
This lives in ~Documents/ Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/Main Identity, and can get rather unwieldy: one of ours currently stands at 14GB. Obviously you can't just delete this, but you can hold the Option key while starting Entourage and take the option to compress your database.
Among the more expendable data likely to be lurking are the disk images (DMGs) that you download to install new applications. Once you've installed the app, you don't need the disk image any more. It's only your registration details that you really need to keep. So you might want to do a Spotlight search for .dmg and bin what you find.
Mac OS X itself comes with various files that may not be relevant to you, and as long as you're careful you can get rid of some of these. For example, in /Library/Printers you'll find folders full of printer drivers and help files for all the major manufacturers. You can always get the software for a new printer from the manufacturer's website or the driver CD.
Another sizeable chunk is taken up by files for the many different languages that the Mac OS supports. You can safely delete the ones you don't use with Monolingual. Similar options are available within utilities such as WhatSize.
Cut out what you don't need, consolidate what you do
The first rule of deleting unwanted files is not to delete them until you're quite sure they're unwanted. It's all too easy to get carried away and bin everything that takes up more than 5K and doesn't immediately strike you as essential. This is a recipe for calamity.
Of course, the Mac has its own way of saving you from yourself, known as the Trash. Remember that trashing a file – whether by dragging it to the Trash, right-clicking it and choosing Move to Trash, or selecting it and pressing Command+Delete – doesn't actually erase it: open the Trash and it's still there, until you hold the mouse button down on the Trash icon and choose Empty Trash, at which point everything within it is erased from the disk forever.
It's only then that, having binned a number of unwanted files, you'll see an increase in available disk space. This makes it tempting to empty the Trash immediately after dragging a file to it to check the effect on your disk usage, but resist this if you can: the longer you leave deleted files in limbo, the better the chance of realising before it's too late if you still need them.
But maybe your hard disk is full of files that you do still need. In that case, rather than erasing them you just need to move them. The best place for them to go is usually an external hard disk. These are quite affordable, starting at around £75 for 500GB, and work at pretty much the same speed as your main hard disk, so there's no disadvantage in using them even to store files you use regularly.
Simply plug the drive in, drag all the files across that you want to store on it, wait for the copy to complete, then delete them from your main hard disk – and remember to empty the Trash.
Just don't try moving applications or system files across, as these need to live on your startup disk.
To move your iTunes Library, follow the instructions here. If you use the Time Machine backup system (included with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and higher), it's best to avoid storing other files on the drive you use for Time Machine, partly because they won't get backed up and partly because there's no way to tell Time Machine how much of the drive to leave free, so you'll end up fighting with it for space.
But Time Machine will coexist quite happily with another external drive and keep its contents backed up, as long as your Time Machine drive isn't significantly smaller than the total of your other drives.
Alternative storage
With a MacBook, keeping an external hard disk attached isn't so practical, although some neat portable models are available. But you might still be able to identify sets of files that you don't need every day, such as a collection of your previous work, and move these to a desktop drive – or to another Mac with a roomier hard disk – from which you can access them when needed.
Files that you only rarely need, or are keeping because you're obliged to but will probably never use, could be moved to DVD instead; spending a few minutes burning 4.5GB of data is worth it to free up 4.5GB of disk space.
Another option is online storage. The easiest way is to use your iDisk, if you subscribe to Apple's MobileMe; since this is constantly accessible in the Finder, you can copy files to and from it at will – though watch out not only for the 20GB storage limit, but also, if you'll use these files a lot, the 200GB/month data transfer cap; you can double these for an extra £30 a year.
Alternatively, if you have some server space, perhaps from your broadband ISP or as part of a web hosting plan, you should be able to access it via FTP, either by pressing Command+K in the Finder and typing an address beginning ftp:// or using an FTP utility such as Transmit 3 ($29.95, about £18, or free to try).
You'll need the appropriate username and password from your service provider. On most broadband connections, uploading your files will be fairly slow work, but you can then download them when needed at the full speed of your connection, so it can be reasonably convenient – and of course you can access this data from different Macs and locations too.
When archiving files – that is, copying them to other media and then deleting them from your Mac – always remember you're not 'making a backup'. A backup is a second copy. If that data is really important to you, make two copies, in different places, before you choose to trash the original files.
Invisible enemies
Aside from the files that you can see are taking up space on your hard disk, you might wonder about files that you can't see. There certainly are plenty of these around on your Mac, including system caches, which automatically store regularly used data to help make Mac OS X and your applications run more efficiently.
Various utility programs offer to 'clean' your caches, including OnyX and Cocktail ($14.95, or £9). This may help to avoid caches becoming bloated over time.
Don't assume, however, that deleting caches will necessarily serve the purpose of freeing up disk space and streamlining your Mac. Caches aren't a bad thing; the system uses them to improve performance, and in any case, if you delete them, they'll simply be recreated next time you restart your Mac or switch user accounts.
So cache cleaning isn't a panacea, and it's generally fair to say that if Mac OS X is hiding something from you, you should probably take the hint and leave it alone, unless you have reason to believe it's causing a problem.
Reclaim disk space, one application at a time
Removing applications from your Mac won't usually have any direct effect on its performance or reliability, because apps don't do anything until you run them. But there are a few exceptions, and deleting large applications can certainly free up some disk space.
In most cases, it's easy to get rid of an app you don't need any more. Just drag its icon from the Applications folder to the Trash. Goodbye, app. (Dragging the icon off the Dock, on the other hand, doesn't delete anything; it just means the icon won't appear here in future, except while the app is running.)
There are a couple of reasons for us to look at uninstalling in a bit more detail, though. One is for the benefit of anyone who's switched to the Mac from Windows.
There's a good reason why Windows comes with an uninstall utility in its control panel. When you install a Windows app, not only does it add several kinds of files in different places, it also updates the Windows Registry – essentially a big list of all the stuff that's installed on your PC. The Registry is notoriously prone to getting so messed up that your system grinds to a halt.
Even when you correctly use Add/Remove Programs to manage your apps, rather than trying to install or erase them manually, things can still go wrong – and over time they almost invariably do. Mac OS X has no Registry to worry about, and handles apps with a lot less hassle. Even so, deleting an app's main file (which, as we'll see, isn't exactly a file at all) doesn't always remove it and its effects from your Mac.
Package deal
When you open the Applications folder and find the icon that you'd double-click to run a particular app, what you're seeing is a 'package' (also known as a 'bundle') that looks like one file but in fact contains several. Its Kind is listed as Application, and if you hit Command+I to Get info you'll see its file extension app.
In many cases, everything the app needs can be stored within this package, which is nice and neat. All the Apple iLife apps work this way. To see what's inside the bundle, right-click it (or Ctrl-click with a single-button mouse) and choose Show Package Contents.
You'll first see, tautologically, a folder labelled Contents. Within this are various subfolders, such as Frameworks and MacOS. Open these in turn, and you'll see a whole load of stuff that probably means absolutely nothing to you. But you get the idea.
It's fun to have a look in Resources, because it houses a lot of the icons and user interface graphics used within the app. You can open these in Preview or Photoshop, and you could even customise the app by editing them, but this isn't quite as straightforward as it looks (icons are accompanied by masks, for example, that need editing to match).
As far as uninstalling is concerned, dragging the application to the Trash will delete all of these bits and pieces. Some apps, however, come with additional resources – such as plug-in folders and PDF user guides – that won't go inside a package. These are generally contained in an ordinary folder along with the .app.
For example, Adobe Photoshop CS4 lives in a folder called Adobe Photoshop CS4. To delete such apps, you need to drag the whole folder to the Trash. Check first that it doesn't contain anything you might want to keep.
If you're removing the app because you've installed a new version, you may be able to transfer plug-ins, custom settings and so on. This is usually just a matter of copying them to the same-named subfolder within the new app's folder.
It's worth checking on the maker's website whether existing plug-ins will be compatible with the new version, and for obvious reasons you should take care not to replace new plug-ins with older ones. Always run your new app 'clean' before transferring any existing plug-ins or settings, so you'll know what's to blame if it crashes or behaves oddly after you add them.
If it does, remove them all, perhaps to a new folder somewhere else on your Mac, and add them back one at a time, quitting and relaunching the app, to identify what's causing the problem. Similarly, if you're deleting a game from an old Mac because you're now using it on a new one, you may want to copy across your saved games.
In any event, it's wise to leave the Trash unemptied for a little while after binning an app, so that if you discover you're missing something you can rescue it. (Regular Time Machine users will have this ability regardless, of course.)
Bits and bobs
Beyond the files in their packages and folders, most apps also store a couple of other data files on your Mac. Preference files, with the extension .plist, live in /Library/Preferences, or the equivalent inside your home folder (check both), and contain user settings.
It's usually pretty obvious which preference files belong to which app, but if that's too fiddly for your liking, AppTrap is a free utility that automatically offers to remove the appropriate preference files whenever you trash an app. Then again, these files are usually tiny and carry practically no risk of causing errors, so arguably you might as well leave them alone.
Some apps have additional support files that may be much heftier. These generally live in /Library/Application Support, or the equivalent inside your home folder, and may be named after either the app or its maker.
Think twice before deleting items that may be used by more than one app. Finding all the related files for a given app may take a bit of lateral thinking: GarageBand, for example, keeps around 250MB of audio samples in /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple/Apple Loops – so they're well worth removing if music-making isn't your thing.
Kill memory leeches, discover hidden processes and more
You've chucked out the excess baggage from your Mac, but to get it moving as fast as possible you may also need to scrape off some barnacles. While it's good to prevent unnecessary files filling up your hard disk, the contents of your Mac's memory will have a more direct impact on performance and reliability.
Mac OS X comes with a tool to reveal what's going on in your system memory moment by moment. It's called Activity Monitor, and is found in Utilities within your Applications folder.
Run it and, in the drop-down menu at the top, choose All Processes. This way you'll see everything that's running, as opposed to My Processes, which only covers what belongs to your user account. In the listing below, under Process Name, you'll see all the applications that are currently running, with their familiar icons.
Along with these will be lots of other stuff you don't recognise at all. Much of it will be integral to the operating system, but you may be able to spot non-essential OS X and third-party processes that you can do without.
The first column to look at is CPU: this shows how much of your Mac's processor time is being taken up, right now, by each process. (Click the CPU tab at the bottom to see the total that remains 'idle' – in effect, the processing capacity available for the next thing you try to do.) Anything above zero is worth looking at.
For example, you're quite likely to find that your favourite web browser is merrily eating up processor cycles, to the tune of 10% or more, even when you're not using it. You can free up this processing power just by closing the browser windows you've left open. When an app is running but not currently doing anything, it should normally use no processing power; it's the exceptions you're looking for.
Besides the apps you've deliberately launched, CPU time may also be taken up by programs that load by default whenever you start your Mac: check your Login Items (in System Preferences > Accounts, as mentioned earlier) and compare the names against the active processes. Some items won't show a Dock icon or any other visible indication that they exist, which is why Activity Monitor is so useful for spotting them.
Identity parade
How can you tell what the more obscure processes are and whether they're essential? If you don't recognise an item's name, do a Google search for it – you'll very often find out what it is. Some processes belong to apps: for example, Adobe Creative Suite apps use something called FNPLicensingServ to manage their licensing.
It's easier to identify these processes if you set Activity Monitor's listing to All Processes, Hierarchically, so each process appears below its parent. Don't interfere with a process that belongs to an app, or you'll probably crash the app.
Having identified a process you want to kill, just click it and click the Quit Process icon at the top-left, then choose Quit, and if that fails, Force Quit.
It makes sense to force quit any process that's highlighted in red, because it's stopped responding – crashed, in plain English – and is using memory and processor time to no purpose.
First, though, go to View > Send Signal to Process and try Interrupt – this just might jolt an app out of its stupor.
When any process fails to quit on request, send a Hangup or Kill signal in the same way to make it stop. If that still doesn't work, note its PID (on the left), then run Terminal (found in /Applications/ Utilities) and type kill followed by the PID. Press Return.
Remember, these are last resorts: try quitting apps normally first to avoid losing any work. Note that you can click any of the headings in Activity Monitor's table to sort by that criterion. Sorting by CPU usage may not work because the figures change too fast; it may help to select View > Update Frequency > Less often.
Sorting by process ID can be useful because higher numbers are allocated to more recently started processes, so if your Mac has just begun to crawl you know which are the likely suspects. Also note the Kind heading at the far right.
If you have an Intel Mac, any app that shows anything but 'Intel' in this column is an old PowerPC program relying on Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation technology. That will tend to use more memory and CPU time. If there's a native Intel version available, consider upgrading.
At the foot of the Activity Monitor window, the System Memory tab is worth a look. As we saw earlier, VM size is the amount of hard disk space currently reserved for virtual memory, which may be gulp-inducingly large.
Active plus Inactive represents the data that your Mac is juggling between RAM and virtual memory to keep everything running, while Wired is the core data that has to be stored in RAM to keep the current apps running.
The pie chart on the right represents your RAM; ideally, there should be plenty of blue and green as well as red and yellow. If it's very red, think about installing more RAM (or running fewer apps at once).
Keeping fit
Activity Monitor is a bit unwieldy as an at-a-glance indicator of performance, but a very good third-party tool for that purpose is iStat Menus, which is free. This shows CPU, disk and memory indicators in your main menu bar that reveal more detail with one click, letting you keep an eye on your system at all times.
Finally, utilities such as OnyX and Cocktail promise performance improvements by de-cluttering various aspects of your system. They're worth a try, as long as you note the possible consequences of each action.
Many users swear by them, and they can come in handy to troubleshoot niggles or spring-clean your system when it feels sluggish, but we're not convinced you need to use them regularly. After all, Macs are designed to run smoothly by themselves, and most of the time that's exactly what they do.
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New glasses-free 3D game for Nintendo DSi
Nintendo has released a new 3D game for the DSi in Japan which uses the devices in-built cameras to track the position of your eyes in relation to the two screens, and then delivers a 3D game world in line with the position of your head.
It sounds a little bit confusing at first, but if you watch the YouTube demo of Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda, you quickly see that the depth illusion works. Really well.
Inside the looking glass
So it looks like you are actually able to find the shapes required in the game's puzzle's inside or somewhere behind the DSi's 2D screen.
How does it do this? Simply by using the front camera of the DSi to track your eyes' position in relation to the angle the two screens.
The game then changes the perspective of the 3D camera in sync with your eyes, to create this fantastic 3D illusion.
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US soldiers allowed to use Twitter and Facebook
US troops are now allowed to use Twitter and Facebook following a recent review of internet use by the US Defence department.
A number of sites blocked by the Pentagon in 2007 - including YouTube – will all now be unblocked and accessible to soldiers in war zones, allowing them to stay in touch with their loved ones back home far easier than ever before.
US Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has a Twitter feed with over 16,000 followers.
This Web 2.0 phenomena...
"We need to take advantage of these capabilities that are out there - this Web 2.0 phenomena," said David Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary of defence for information technology.
"And what we had were inconsistent approaches. Some websites were blocked and some commands were blocking things.
"The idea is be responsible and use these tools to help get the job done," he added.
"There are two imperatives. One is the ability to share information. The other is about security - we need to be good at both."
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