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This charity event, Extra Life, is sponsored by the Sarcastic Gamers community. I am posting this story to see if there is any interest in doing this at this community. Although I myself, may not be able to participate.

It is once again time for ESWC, which is the Electronic Sports World Cup. This is for any of you that are interested in watching gaming on a higher level. I had the pleasure of attending as a CS gamer many years ago when it was held in Paris. The price money are pretty good, I believe $40,000 for the winners.

I particularly like to follow the CS matches, especially the girls :) Some of my old teammates will be competing in San Jose this year. Their team is now called Les Seules. There are many well-known male teams as well, such as SK Gaming, and a bunch of big American teams as well. This tournament will crown the world champions. You can go to hltv.org and get the hltv ip's when they become available. The tournament starts on Monday, August 25th and the times are shown on http://www.eswc.com/grandfinal/sanjose2008/

Every since Microsoft released windows server 2008, the server OS for new generation of windows (vista), many rumors about it have been floating around on the net. so i decided to get a set and try it myself!
Microsoft tagged the OS with a $3999 for OS with 25 activation on an enterprise edition of the OS. a bit expensive but its the business world...right, let's move onto the OS.
I used the 64 bit OS which seemed like a pretty good choice for my weak little amd athlon x2 6000+ and I Bought a couple new hardware items to test it as well as satisfying my own personal needs! :)
Installing it was a breeze, click a couple of the buttons and a small wait of around 20 minutes, all set and ready to go! Unlike windows vista, server 2008 came with most of vista's feature disabled for optimized server environment, we can see how much *CRAP* vista has even Microsoft decided to disable tons of them! Anyways, it doesn't feel like a workstation to me when all these funky worthless features were disabled so I decided to turn them all except for a few I know that will extremely hinder the performance of the machine. after around 4 or 5 seconds on Google, I found a website http://www.win2008workstation.com/ which proves to be very helpful at some tips and file downloads.

I did most of the stuff, didn't enable superfetch, aero themes, windows search (i hate this thing...) and a couple other worthless things. so by the end of the game, my windows server 2008 is running pretty good... well with a couple of BSOD (you can find one in the forum oO) but they were fixed one by one :) seeing that not many people are interested in knowing wtf is going on with the OS exactly, I won't try to explain them, but its a heck awesome OS to use compared to vista, it feels like its windows vista with none of vista's failures! and well.. a lot faster too in my opinion. Windows server 2008 doesn't *play games* as good as Windows XP, but that's all in acceptable range. Another cool thing about windows server 2008 is you can choose what to install and what not to install, a lot of services you can just omfgwtfbbqpwn them with server manager which came with the OS. Being too lazy to test the awesomeness of the OS myself, i dug around and found this "http://recoverymonkey.net/wordpress/?p=72"; you can clearly see windows server 2008 surpasses vista and xp in some critical areas.

Currently I have tested a couple of games which includes counter strike:source, this turned out to be somewhat miserable but it's probably due to my configuration, but it runs SMOOTHLY 95% of the time. also I tried call of duty 4 modern warfare, was great except the graphic driver kept rebooting itself which turns my screen black every once in a while for around 5 seconds or so resulting in death :) but highest 160fps and average 110fps in 1680x1050 with highest settings and 4x AA, decent really. thanks to my video cards of course :) I also tested crysis in dx10, Bioshock and some other stuff. most software's work on Winsrv2k8 but a few don't. I ran into a couple alone the way and had to work around them which took a crap load of time in the end, a good OS, worth using, and a nice replacement for Windows XP (actually no if you plan on gaming and don't give a shit about dx10) that is.. if you can afford it.