Xbox 360 Red Ring Of Death (RROD)

Personally I do not own an Xbox 360 but I have of course heard all the problems regarding the problems known as the Red Ring Of Death.

A couple of friends of mine have recommended a guide that allows people to fix the problem themselves, if you'd like to give it a go Click Here!

I believe it's delivered electronically allowing you to get started immediately.

Guides coming soon

What would you like to find out, leave a comment and I will do the research as best I can and come up with an easy as possible solution.

Extracting .rar files

Coming soon...

No really I mean it, I'm not just saying it. This will be ready on Monday 2nd June.

Torrents Eplained

The world of torrents can be a wonderful way of sharing files over the internet but can also be terribly confusing at times.

Ths brief guide is has been designed to compliment my post on downloading Nintendo DS games and it is this file type that I will mention in this post, although the idea is the same for any file type.

Introduction

The basic idea behind torrents is a powerful way of sharing files with other people over the internet. The more files that are being shared the quicker the download of those files will be. It is therefore obvious that the more popular something is, the more people wll be sharing it and the quicker the download will be.

The world of torrents will open a whole new catlogue of jargon for most people so rather than explain the processes and risk confusion I'm simple going to list the steps I use one by one so it can be easily followed.

Summary

1. Download and install the uTorrent program for free.

2. Search for and download the files you want using a torrent search engine like Pirate Bay or BTJunkie.

3. Files will download and store in your downloads folder ready to either use or extract before using.

Step 1

The first things that's needed is a "torrent client". This is a program that is installed on you computer that downloads the files you want from all the other people with that file. My personal favouraite is a small little program called uTorrent, download the "Get uTorrent x.x.x stable" file from here http://www.utorrent.com/download.php for free and follow all the instructions to install it.

Step 2

You are now ready to look for your files on the internet using a torrent search engine, there are plenty of these around but I use http://thepiratebay.org/ for my Nintendo DS downloads and http://btjunkie.org/ for everything else.

Using Pirate Bay as an example, use the search box to search the file you want and then select the file from the list that is produced by clicking on it's name. On the next page will be a link inviting you to "download this torrent". Clicking this will open a "file download" box, here you want to click Open instead of save. Doing this automatically opens your newly istalled uTorrent program and will present you with a list of the files that you have just selected to download, there may be just one but in some cases (NDS games in particular) there will be many to choose from. After selecting the files you want click ok and they will load into your program and will automatically start downloading.

The files will now download and the speed of this will vary upon many many factors and will also constantly change throughout the time it takes to download. The main factor to look out for would be the number of people currently "sharing" the file, to get an idea of this, look at the number of seeds, the higher the better.

Step 3

Once the download has finished the files will be stored in the Downloads folder of your Documents. Depending on the type of file you downloaded, it will now either be ready to use or will require a bit more work first. Most files will be ready to use, e.g most music files will already be in mp3 format and will play in the normal way.

In order for downloads to be quicker, many files are compressed first to make them smaller which means you will need to "extract" them before they can be used. These file are most likely to have the extension .rar

To find out how to extract these files please see my "extracting .rar files" post.

Please be patient with your downloads as some can take a lot longer than others, trying at differen types of the day can help and try not to download too many different torrents at once.

There are plenty of guides out there to try to maximise your connection speeds if you wish to learn more about this so there is still a lot more to learn if you have the time.

Download and play Nintendo DS games.

Introduction

The advancement of digital technology has allowed vast amounts of media to be stored on very small memory cards. Considering the size of a DS game (very small), I became interested in finding out if there was a way of storing multiple games on one cartridge.

For a "newbie" like me, it became clear that this was possible but I had no idea how due to the technical jargon being used that baffled me every step of the way.

Over time I managed to work out a way and have also found the cheapest software needed to do so. This page has been designed to share my knowledge with you and to help with any queries.

I am still no where near the technical abilty or knowledge of most but this should help me in being understood as I will speak your language.

The first issue I must deal with is to inform you that although it will be possible to download and play any NDS game, this process should only be used for games where you own the original cartridge. If you download and play a game that you do not own, you will breach copyright law.

Step 1

The first thing you need is the software to play the games. Two things are needed here a compatible NDS Card Reader and a micro SD memory card. There are many NDS card readers on the market which vary in price so which to choose? Well, as I was new at this I went for the cheapest option so I would have little to lose if I wasn't able to do it all properly. A company called Deal Extreme came up with the cheapest card reader ($19.36) called the DSTT and even offered free worldwide delivery. This is the direct link to the card reader page and I will check regularily to see if it continues to be the best deal - http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.10289~r.58207939

The best deal for the micro SD memory card I would go back to dealextreme for their 4gb card at $29.99 with free worldwide deliery at http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.11241~r.58207939

This size card could potentially hold hundreds of games. They obviously have smaller memory cards available for less.

That's it for cost, everything else is all FREE.....forever!!!

Step 2

Once you receive the card reader and memory card you will need to set up the memory card. Your card reader may or may not come with the software needed to do this. What you're basically doing here is putting some info on the memory card so it knows what to do when it put in the card reader and then into the DS.

The following link provides the files to download, a step by step process of setting up the card and also some troubleshooting tipsif things go wrong. http://www.jorosar.com/ndsgear/usingdstt.shtml

If it still isn't working after this, send me a post and I will attempt to help people individually.

Step five of the process on the link tells of adding media to your DS card. This bring us to the next step in our process.

Step 3

We can now add games to the memory card using the above process. This step involves downloading the games. Game files on the internet are more commonly known as ROMS

The best way to download these ROMS is by torrent download. You can simply search for individual ROMS or download them in packs. I prefer using http://thepiratebay.org/ to download the ROM packs, search for joda and you will see the various packs available for download. When the download opens, you will have a list of all the games in the pack allowing you to choose the ones you want to actually download. As all games ever made for the DS will be in these packs so please note that many of the games will have multiple files as there are different language version of the same game. All these ROMS are in number order so if you regularily search for joda, you wll easily see when a new pack has been added for download. (remember you should only download ROMS of games you already own.)

If this section has gone over your head because you don't know about torrents, please see my guide to torrents.

Once these ROMS have downloaded you will have to extract the files using winzip or winrar. Again, for those who are unsure of this process, please see the guide. Once extracted, locate the .NDS file of the game you want (each game will have several files, for cover pictures e.t.c, it's the one with the extension ending in .NDS which is the actual game) and drag this to your game card using te process explained in step 2.

Step 4

That's pretty much it, once the games are on the memory card, it can now go into the cartridge and then into the NDS.

If everything has been done right, when you turn the NDS on you should get a menu of games after a few moments and simply select the game you want to play, the DSTT will immediately create a save file so the game can be saved in the same way as if you were plating the original and after a few seconds the game will start.

Conclusion

This should be a simple process which may have been harder to follow if you haven't used torrents or been involved in extracting files before. Follow the guides to these and please let me know if things aren't working out as you hoped. The guides are specifically written with DS games in mind and follow a step by step guide so putting all the processes together should allow for you to be playing these games in no time.

I invite anyone to leave a post if anything is unclear or confusing and if you leave an email address detailing the problem I will strive to answer everyone individually.

Thanks for reading.

External Guides

For info on Wii Media Downloads please Click Here!

To find out about PSP downloads Click Here!

Xbox 360 red light fix Click Here!

PS3 Direct Downloads Click Here!