Sniper Spotted! Sniper Spotted!

I've been playing a lot of the Battlefield 2 demo lately with one of my mates, it's been good fun, we'd head from base to base, working as a tight team, killing the bag guys, stealing their transports and taking their bases for our own. Usually I'd be playing as an assault class soldier armed with a rifle and not much else, it's good fun, going around the place killing random bad guys and what not but recently I've been experimenting with being a sniper and that's an interesting experience.

Mad dashes for cover, followed by scoping out snip points, then another mad dash to the nearest ladder, praying no one sees you as you climb up. Then quickly hitting the deck to make your self less noticeable, crawl into position, then you wait. And wait. And wait. All the while scoping out the area for the enemy, half of them are out of range, so there's no point in shooting them, the other half are in transports of one kind or another. Then, eventually you spot one lonesome guy out in the open, you track him, waiting for the right moment to shoot, trying to anticipate his next move, he stops and crouches down, you line up the sight, pull the trigger. And sigh as you miss miserable.

Thankfully it's not always like that, there are times when you just cap them in the head from 200 meters away or more first time now that's a good feeling. What's even better is when another sniper has spotted you, a game of cat and mouse break outs, the war around you is forgotten about, all you care about now is killing the fucker who just took a pop at you! Let me retell the story for you....

I was at the top of a crain, I mean right at the top, sitting on the main arm, sniping any enemy troops foolish enough to get to close to the base below me. Then a sniper took a pop at me, it was none other than my mate (cheeky sod!). I quickly found out where he was and sought cover behind some of the architecture of the crain, peering out to find him, it didn't take long, laying down on the top of a hotel a good 250-300 meters away (half the width of the game map). We exchanged a few shoots, he then duct behind the roof exit structure and so I waited for him to pop out again, which of course he did, I then lined up my shoot, he evidentially thought he was safe, hardly moving from his spot, I raise my sight, taking distance into account, pulled the trigger, and he toppled over, one shot kill! Now of course in the intervening time between his first shot and my killing him I nearly missed some guy making his way up the crain so naturally I was able to deal with him quite easily being so much closer and watched as his lifeless body tumbled back down the ladder and crashed into the floor below.

It things like that, that make being a sniper fun, sure there are times when you're just scanning the horizon begging for someone to rear their head but all it takes is for a bullet to whizz past your head for the real game to begin.

This is Benji Dude, asking you to take a walk in my shoes.

Yay! For computer troubles!

So a couple of days ago my PC started playing up. It first started with with just the internet being abnormally slow, at the time I thought nothing of it, especially as my dad's PC was a bit slow surfing the internet as well. However this problem seems to have spread beyond my PC, random intervals my internet will dive for about 20 seconds, pages will just sit there doing nothing, supposedly loading but then without warning the page will load. That's not the end of the world I suppose but the main problem, the one really affecting my PC is when I open a program, any program, even spider solitaire causes the system to go into melt down, CPU usage will sky rocket to 100% but there's no apparent program or process using all that processing power, the odd program will spike to 50%+ but then go down again a few seconds later. This'll last for about 5-10 minutes, leaving me with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs (or whip out my good ol' DS, I'd forgotten how good Polarium is!).

It seems to be a pretty common problem, a search on google turns out hundreds or results (as per usual) all detailing the same problem (minus the internet stuff, evidently a different problem all together). So you'd think I've have this issue sorted in no time, right? what with all those results on google. Well no, while loads of people seem to have the same problem (100% cpu usage for no apparent reason) there seems to be a 101 reasons as to why it happens, some people have fixed it by turning off windows automatic update, some have re-installed zone alarm, a few have had problems with the latest version of Winamp (version 5.52 for those of you who want to know), some have taken the drastic measure of wiping the hard drive and starting afresh. so far I've only the first of those, along with some other things like cleaning up my cache and registry, doing a very probing virus/spamware/malware scan, they turned a couple of things, none of which would cause the system to become unusable.


Despite all this though I think I know the true reason why my system is fucked at the moment, and it all comes down to one games company, EA. I downloaded the demo to battlefield 2142 and when I first ran the install exe things started to go tits up, coincidence? Maybe, I'm not so sure though. Either way I've uninstalled the demo but the damage seems to be done. I wasn't a big fan of EA before and if that demo does turn out to be the cause of my troubles then my opinion of them will plummet even further, as far as I'm concerned their only saving grace is Criterion, the makers of Burnout, while buying them out wasn't necessarily the best thing to do, they did have the smarts to just leave them to it.

Anyway 100% CPU usage, annoying. Any suggestions as to how to fix it are more then welcome.

This is Benji Dude, asking you to take a walk in my shoes.

Edit:
Well I seem to have fixed, seems the source of all this grief was Zone Alarm. Sorry about that EA... kinda...