Last December shortly after Christmas I decided it was time to change a few things to make my laptop a little more gaming friendly.
I thought to myself "How can I make this better without spending a bunch of money on internals?" and the answer I came up with was simple: new external parts.
Most people when they hear gaming upgrades think graphics cards, motherboards, RAM etc. when really unless you're trying to build a gaming rig all you need are a couple simple tweaks to make your average PC more gaming friendly.
First on my list was a headset. I cannot stress enough how hard it is to find a decent one that will last more than a couple months. Walmart used to carry some cheaply made ones that worked for a while but would end up losing a connection somewhere in the cord rendering them completely useless. At $20 a pop it wasn't so horrible every couple months to go get a new pair but over time it adds up so instead I decided to go with a higher quality pair made by Plantronics. The Plantronics GameCom 367 Closed-Ear Gaming Headset is a BEASTLY set of headphones let me just say. I was so excited when I cracked these monkey's open I couldn't wait to turn the volume all the way up and listen to some Parkway Drive. The 40mm speakers make for ridiculously amazing volume along with the noise canceling foam around the ear pieces. The mic is hidden in the left side of the connecting band and flips down when you need it. One thing that makes these headphones special is that they're stereo headphones but they have a unique balancing property that lets you hear different things in each speaker depending on how the music is mixed or whats going on in your game of choice.
Second thing on my list was a new mouse. A simple three button mouse is cool... if you like getting your face torn off by zombies or smashed in by some 10 year old kid playing a Paladin. For this reason it was imperative I found something with a few extra buttons and better response. I really didn't want to go with a Logitech or Microsoft mouse because often times they're products while good, are over priced. I went with a relatively cheap solution to my problem, the Gear Head Wireless Optical Tilt-Wheel Mouse. This mouse is good for what it is but I found a couple problems with it. The software that comes with it wouldn't load in windows 7 under compatibility mode or just in general. Tech support on the Gear Head website was practically non-responsive and when they did finally get back to me, they referred me to 1 of 3 posts on their website I had already read to no avail. Another problem I found with it was that when the batteries got low the buttons randomly assigned themselves to opening Firefox and MS Outlook making them entirely useless for the purpose intended when I bought it. A simple change of batteries oddly enough fixed that problem. All in all it's a decent product if you're not concerned with assigning buttons outside of a game.
Outside of those two things I bought a USB hub which has nothing to do with gaming but makes it easier to turn my two port laptop into a 5 port beast. I don't really want to talk about that because to be honest, the thing was kind of a piece of junk.
The good news however is that now my laptop is much more gaming friendly and I'm a much more sane person because of it. Remember kids, kill zombies not real people.
