[ILUG] <Highly OT> Windoze gaming problem

[Declan Moriarty]

Apologies for tapping the knowledge base for such a problem. If someone knows 
where I should send this, please tell me. I never looked for support in 
windoze.

One of my teenage kids has a windoze game called 'starcraft'. He logs on to 
battle.net, meets his friends by arrangements, and has a game with his 
schoolmates. This is one of life's complex pleasures for him. It's all 
windoze based, BTW.

Now my isp (ntlworld) cuts you off after 10 minutes of a dead line, or 2 
hours of surfing. SNIP - you're gone. Problem is, they're cutting him after 
45 minutes or 1 hour, when he can get well built up in a complex game but 
can't finish off his opponents. It's infuriating, and goes down in the 
statistics as a loss; This only happens on windoze, and in this game - it 
never happens in linux, where I surf. I presume it is the 10 minute thing. 

Can I get around it, e.g. Write a batch file to ping  a nameserver every 5 
minutes or some such? I thought of a mail check, (I even have a redundant 
mailbox to check) but that would mean Netscape, (~10 MB overhead) and 
starcraft under windoze stretches this beast (k6/3-500Mhz, 64Mb ram, and via 
chipset with slow disk access, S3 video card) enough as it is. CPU and memory 
overhead is as much of an issue here as anything else. The game takes over 
(15 "quit? - are you sure you're sure?" screens to click through, Alt-Tab 
disabled, etc) 


-- 
	Regards,


	Declan Moriarty




Applied Researches - Ireland's Foremost Electronic Hardware Genius

	A Slightly Serious(TM) Company

Experience is like a comb, 
that Life gives you - AFTER all your hair has fallen out!