Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Is this the UK’s dumbest pirate?
khenry
Piracy’s a hardy perennial issue that never goes away and it recently flared up again when a developer decided to talk to them. The results of his experimental launch featuring an expanded demo and no DRM remain to be seen.
However, the £3000 fine handed down to the pirate bringing his wares in by fishing boat earlier this year was dwarfed by the penalty that a court slapped on one of four pirates successfully sued by Topware Interactive. This unnamed lady uploaded Dream Pinball 3D, a game which is yet to be released on PC (it’s out at the end of August on the same day as Stalker Clear Skies), which was downloaded 1000 times. The total fine and damages means that for a game that you could pre-order for £8.99 at Play.com, she will pay
£16, 086. The three co-defendants in that single case are yet to be fined, but the court obtained 1,000 other names from ISPs keen to take themselves out of the firing line of legal action.
The “price of games” argument isn’t going to work here because the prize was getting to play a game that was already out in the US, up to seven months before its UK release. Whatever the intellectual debate around piracy, it shows that publishers are no longer willing to put up with it, and that ISPs are tiring of covering the backs of their bandwidth- wasting, filesharing army.
The real surprise is that it’s a small to medium publisher protecting a reputedly so-so pinball game, rather than EA and ActiBlizzard protecting Crysis and Cash on Delivery 4. The latter pair of publishers could certainly afford it.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Freeloading
khenry
Since I’m changing phone contracts, I’m reluctant to have to charge two mobile phones during the crossover period at a time when I want to cut my power bill. So I put aside my concerns that solar gadgets needed another year to really become commonplace and took the plunge.
It’s good that the Supercharger add-on pouch for the Freeloader portable battery (in issue 58’s Custom Kit) is optional. The larger panel might charge the Freeloader much more quickly in summer and is probably a requirement when there is much less light in the sky and the days are shorter.
I looked at the fact that the Freeloader could sit at my feet charging via USB whilst my PC is on. That put paid to my doubts about using the device in winter and I decided that the extra panel could wait, possibly as long as summer 2009. I want to see what the battery alone can do to reduce my bills and its £27-30 cost is comparable to just going out and buying another cheap Nokia handset to use with my SIM-only contract. (Update 7/8/08 - the clincher for the Freeloader is that you can carry on charging it with the USB connector using the standby ATX current from your PSU, retained when you shut down without turning the PC off at the mains).
I may still get the newer phone, but it would be safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t be using much more power from the mains than the PC was wasting anyway. As such, any future phone battery would last a lot longer than the 18 months of the last model. I’d advise turning off those stupid mobile wallpapers and screensavers, especially if you’re with 3, so you can save yourself the same problem I’ve just had.
In the long term though, I have one room which gets all the best sun, where there are no blinds, and a PC Pro reader emailed in to that magazine to say that he adds a new solar panel each year to carry on using a laptop. Eventually, he’d have enough linked panels to have the machine always-on during the summer.
That got me thinking that at least one of those windows might be useful for standing a solar panel on the window sill instead of, or in front of, any blind. This would allow me to do the same for any eventual portable I bought, or to power a solar fan to cool that room or the corridor, depending on the size and ease of connecting the devices to the panel(s).
Putting a single panel in a window is an easier way of finding out the viability of solar power generation than spending £47,000 to stick the panels all over your roof, and waiting 15-20 years to get the money back. All I need now is the gas hob kettle, and I’ll be ready to see whether the Earthwatts power supplies and these other devices bring down my electric bill in October and help the planet as a fringe benefit. The electric bill won’t fall as low as my gas, which was under £22 last quarter. However, anything below £100 would be good, given the recent energy price rises.
Not yet rated
Loading ...I Predict A Rodent
khenry
Who makes up the Gartner Group and why haven’t they all been fired? They just come up with prediction after prediction that means precisely naff-all. These idiots have taken time out from predicting the death (as opposed to the transformation) of PC gaming, and are now telling computer users that the humble mouse will cease to exist very soon.
Never mind the fact that this bold claim flies in the face of Microsoft re-issuing certain models of Intellimice favoured by gamers, nor the fact that even though it’s got that touch of Japanese cool, Nintendo’s Wiimotes are basically wireless mice by another name for use on your telly. Personally, I don’t want a Minority Report-styled touch screen for my computing, not when keyboards are less than a fiver and now wired optical mice hover around a tenner. A replacement Wheel Mouse Optical set me back £11 last month. It’s hardly co-incidence that all these irritating predictions about new technology only happen when the economy of scale has made the existing stuff affordable.
So as far as I’m concerned, the humble mouse is as safe as the paper in your office and your PC games.
Not yet rated
Loading ...Akasa Vortexx Neo - SOLD - (+ benchmarks)
khenry
Having given up on Ebay, why not flog stuff at a place where the item’s received a trusted review and practical testing? If you’re considering the cooler as reviewed in issue 59 and which I blogged about at the start of the month, I’ve got a brand new and sealed spare one courtesy of Overclockers whom I’ll never shop with again.
If you don’t have issue 59 then the review should hit the site within the next 10 days and I’ll link to it here. The card tested with the cooler was the 8800GT and other people’s user experiences at home with Nvidia cards can be seen in these two threads on the forum, here.
So if you’re interested then post a comment or email kenneth_henry AT yahoo dot com.
I also said I’d report some general temps on my Radeon 3850 with the new cooler fitted (all in centigrade unless othewise stated):
Call of Duty 4 was one of the games sending the card up to 90 degrees and crashing the machine out.
I was able to push CoD4 to 1,280 x 1,024 at 100Hz with 4xAA and everything else set to maximum, (my preferred max res on a 17in CRT) and play at 33fps average, 45 maximum (with troughs of 21-25 on the busiest maps). The temp spread was 43 degrees from the startup screen to 51 degrees in the game by the time I stopped playing the general spread of Domination Maps. When I can remember names I’ll edit this and note the peaks and troughs.
Crysis, at the village with 20 soldiers before you have to rescue the hostage in an upstairs room and destroy three tanks, was another game crashing at 90 degrees. After fitting the Vortexx Neo, not only was this busy action scene playable (which included a petrol station explosion if you drove carelessly) but the best balance for this demanding game was 1,024 x 768 with 4 x AA with the game itself selecting medium for all settings. I could then play at an average of 30fps exactly when surrounded by general jungle or landscape, only dropping to a low of 20-22fps when zooming in on the assault scope attachment of any weapon. The temperature range was 46-50 degrees.
I could have played at my desktop res of 1152 x 864, but would have had to stay at 2xAA to achieve more than 20fps on the framerate. The cooler kept the card below 50 degrees, but playable and sustainable anti-aliasing on the runt of the Radeon range was the best I could achieve before the next upgrade is due. At least it’s ready for Warhead, even if Crytek doesn’t render the engine down to prove more system-friendly.
I still wasn’t happy so torture tested the 3850 by setting everything to High, but staying at 10 x 7 and 2xAA. FRAPs reported a 47fps peak, 25fps average but the temperature stayed in the high 40s to 52 degrees. The same torture test at 1152 x 864 finally crashed the card.
Until Valve introduces its proposed engine upgrade to Source for newer dual and quad-core CPUs/GPUs, there’s almost no point in bothering with speed testing; it didn’t fall below 40fps and peaked at 50 in any of the Source games tested including mods, and managed this at 1152 x 864 with 4x AA, everything set to high or high from default selections in the menus. Like CoD 4 though, at the higher resolutions, reading text in MP gaming was almost impossible so you really needed to play with a headset enabled. The temperature was 43-45 degrees and on the day I was testing it was 23 degrees outside, but on cooler days I could play Source games and the temperature was so close to that of the Windows desktop (35-37 degrees) as to be negligible - the 2-3 degree spread would sometimes disappear when I was ALT-TABbing back to Hardware Monitor to pick up the temps.
So this cooler does what it says on the tin, it’s well worth buying and upgrading the default cooler on the current spread of two generations. Since the Radeon 4850 also sports a similar if slightly wider reference cooler, it remains to be seen whether the Neo Vortexx will fit that card as well. On the day that I fitted mine to my 3850, my frustration at the reference cooler subsided and it’s true that I could have merely re-applied some TIM, reseated the reference cooler and started again. However it was another learning experience.
As far as I know that’s the best price you’ll find because I’m including delivery and technically comes with 11 or so months of warranty if I bung in the paperwork, but if you’re buying brand new then stick to Scan like I should have done.
UPDATE 21/7/08 : Thankfully the power of CPC Blogs has struck again! The spare cooler was sold at an unbeatable £18 all in so a bargain for the buyer - basically free delivery compared to the street price on the Elite list and I was just glad to have got shot of my unnecessary spare. So if it’s not against Dennis online policy and you’re sick of trying to sell stuff on Ebay, then give your blog headline space a go.
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...Akasa Vortexx Neo vs Radeon HD 3850
khenry
The Akasa Neo Vortexx 1000 (See issue 59, p59) may have won an award and in my opinion, lives up to it. However, when replacing a single-slot reference ATi HSF on an entry-level card, you’ll notice a major issue (which you can see on the online version of the review, now up here) – the front of the Neo, which raises the fan away from the top of the card, doesn’t cover the quartet of chips at the top of the card (hereafter known as the VRMs even though I’ve no idea what they do). These heatsinks are sold as separate items. That certainly wins an award from me as stupid idea of the year, as opposed to just charging more money for a more complete upgrade set.
This is a quick guide to how to add this cooler to the 256Mb version of the 3850 which many gamers on a budget are still running (unless it’s just me).
Firstly you should know how to Apply TIM (or see print issue 46, p98). My GPU’s overheating problems were caused by a leakage of the shipped thermal paste causing the copper base to almost touch the die. This is what led to my 41-50 degree temps when idle in Windows, my 70-degree temps in Source games, the low to mid 80s for Crysis (even when tweaked) and the crashout temperatures of more than 90 degrees in Call of Duty 4. Follow all instructions to Remove Your GPU Cooler (or see issue 56 p90). This will rid you of the stock HSF. Unlike the X1900 series card in the guide, the 3850 GPU looks like an AMD Socket A CPU with a central silver die surrounded by green ceramic packaging. So you can apply your TIM to just the silver area of the chip after you’ve cleaned off the old paste with TIM cleaner. Also apply a smooth but thin layer to the surface of the four “VRMs” at the top – but use the replacement thermal pads as directed in Akasa’s kit on the eight RAM chips that make up the 256Mb.
Once all thermal pads are in place and the GPU and VRMs have had TIM applied, jump back to the Make Your Own Thermal Epoxy guide (Issue 53, p102). The only thing you need to change in these instructions is your preferred brand of TIM – I used the old fashioned 80s variety of Araldite as well, bought from B & Q but either type will do. Also, you can either construct or just buy RAM chip heatsinks as directed in issue 59’s Hands On which is yet to reach the site (See the update for the link to buy them, below). If you are stuck without new ones or old flat motherboard heatsinks to recycle, and you were fed up and wanted a quick fix, then do what I did (Pretty sure CPC won’t vouch for this, but it worked for me)…
Take a pair of recently minted (2004 onwards) 2pence pieces – whose circumference covers two of the VRMs and which are literally 1mm thinner than the Reference HSF’s own layer of copper. Clean them up with any solution famous for cleaning copper coins (that’s Coca Cola, Cillit Bang or just TIM Cleaner). Once dry, use your thermal epoxy to bond them to the VRMs, which have already had that single layer of TIM applied. They need a single dollop each as they have to cover two chips – use the centre of the plumage on the “tails” side as a guide – they need to cover a total length of 5.1cm or exactly 2inches). Then place the two coins on the VRMs and gently press them down (if like me, you’d already fitted the cooler by then then you can clamp the edges of the coins with a pair of scissors to place and press the coins to the VRMs). Then carry out the final fixing of the Akasa cooler with the enclosed washers and screw-on caps on the underside and leave the entire upgrade to “dry”. After a decent 45mins to an hour, slot the card back into its case.
If your case is the Cooler Master RC330 Elite V2 from the Issue 55 Build Your Own PC or Mr Geiseric’s BBB or BBBB PCs on the forums, the rear of the Vortexx Neo won’t stretch to the back of the case like a flush double-slot cooler as shipped with the early Radeon 3870 or GeForce 8800GTS/GTX. Naturally, you should still snap out the blanking plate below the first PCI-E slot to allow some hot air to escape. You have the option of fitting a second 80mm cooling fan to the air vent parallel to the top-most PCI-E slots if you don’t feel that the Neo Vortexx is successfully expelling the maximum amount of heat. Despite the lack of a metal backplane, My tests have shown no increase in the surrounding case temperature of 30 degrees. When you first put the cooler through its paces and leave your PC running for a few hours, that will finalise the natural bonding process of the new layers of TIM. I’ll report my results in the next post but thanks to this Cooler, for my preferred resolutions, the card now lives up to issue 53 and 54’s results, rather than issue 58’s.
UPDATE: If you don’t like the idea of gluing money to your VRMs/other types of capacitor, then you can also obtain the Zalman Coolers pictured in Issue 59’s guide (page 98), separately and direct from good old Scan or quick code LN9907 - they cost £5 for a pack of eight heatsinks in total, four standard “high sprung” memory coolers and another four of the flat, “fanned out” variety (the flatter type are the ones in the bottom right-hand/final photograph). They’re so small when bought with the Vortexx, as to add next to nothing to the delivery charge. I’d be the first to admit they probably look more techy than a couple of coins. Whether they’d match the required length to cover the VRMs/non-memory chips/capacitors on every single graphics card remains to be seen. However, at five pounds, it won’t break the bank to find out.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Master Cooler
khenry
So here I was thinking my build was over and done with, once my preferred PSU had been installed. I opened the case and gave the cabling a second round of general management and reconnected my CPU exhaust fan’s power lead which had become dislodged.
However, I never thought I would see myself typing the following words; following tweaking, I played through and completed Crysis with no further crashes to the Radeon 3850 GPU. Its temperatures no longer breached 65 degrees when playing Cryis compared to the GPU’s crash temperature wall of 90 degrees. Before I could celebrate with a replay on hard difficulty, rather than Crysis proving hard to tackle, it was Call of Duty 4 which proved the more difficult game to configure.
CoD 4 is the one game where a lack of AA could really make the game ugly (even compared to Crysis), but one setting, Specular Map, could stop the game looking as washed out as before, without the use of AA. It didn’t prove reliable, sadly, as the game continued to crash out even if I can get 3-4 hours from it before this happens, whatever the ambient temperature. A jump of 60 degrees from the GPU alone was weird, because the twin 120mm and side 80mm fans, not to mention the 90mm cooler on the Artic 64 Pro, all keep my CPU and general case temp to the 30 degree mark and at the time of the crash, still failed to exceed 35-40 degrees now that the Antec PSU has been installed, which maintains a third 120mm fan to take out the last vestiges of hot air. By elimination, that points to the ATi single-slot reference cooler which is supposed to work, and according to all CPC tests (particularly issue 54’s), was supposed to play at my preferred res even with no AA to jack up the output of heat. I’m not saying it’s rubbish, especially when any Source engine game (including those making use of the new Source SDK circa the Orange Box) continues to work flawlessly.
Unless I have a sample card running hotter than the usual norm, (which I doubt, considering its 290-292W power consumption in its two separate labs tests, and no failures when different writers benchmarked CoD 4), I think I was accustomed to my 6800GT with a Zalman third party cooler which cooled not only itself but also the case space around it. Thankfully, within the last two issues there have been two alternative GPU coolers but this time I’ll plump for the Akasa Vortexx Neo reviewed in issue 59. Its £10 price advantage will equate to free delivery compared to the modern Zalman, and it’s much more likely that a wider range of stores will stock Akasa hardware and I can throw a replacement mouse into the box whilst I’m there.
If the reviewer had no more Crysis crashes using the 3rd party cooler but I was able to tweak that game to work on the reference GPU HSF, here’s hoping it will do the same for CoD 4, when the air is getting vented out of the back of my case again. I’m also happy that it will keep my chosen blue lighting theme going with its UV looks and sport a larger overall cooling fan*. If all else fails I can finally reconnect my second side panel fan which sits at the level of the GPU.
However, despite my new build giving me another interesting twist that won’t cost me too much money to fix, I’ll never trust the lower of two cards in an emerging ATi range ever again. Any graphics card I purchase from now on will have a dual slot cooler from the start, as having to do upgrades to my upgrades to finally attain a stable rig is limiting my gaming options until it’s sorted out.
*Akasa reported no specs in any review or news coverage regarding the Vortexx GPU HSF cooling fan but I am going to use Akasa’s separated 80mm blue LED fans as a rough guide, being the same physical size. It’s rated at 2,500RPM and shifting 32.37 CFM with a noise level of 23db(A). If you went to PC World and bought that fan separately for the side of your case, they cost me £4 but may prove more expensive outside sale times.
Not yet rated
Loading ...More power to the new build
khenry
Not only did I receive issue 59 last weekend but also the two other PSU labs issues courtesy of Faceplant on the forums. That makes my last purchase the most researched for three years as opposed to the general guesswork or emergency panic buying of the last two builds.
As usual, there was a PSU for everyone in the test despite the no-shows and I ignored the award winners and went for the Antec Earthwatts EA 650. Why?
1) I can hide the captive cabling because the case isn’t windowed anyway – having got over my fixation with lights, I can fit another LED/cathode in the case floor to make up for the Antec’s deliberately generic looks, which will take away the red light from the current unit. As admitted somewhere in one of the three labs, captive cabling is slightly more efficient even if it’s cumbersome (though the percentage must depend on how many cables the user plugs into a modular unit).
2) The next step up in efficiency terms, from 83% to 85%, would have cost a minimum of £30 extra for one of the Corsairs. In the real world, the credit crunch (and maybe exploitation of the added sales CPC might generate) has added another tenner to the price all in from eBuyer. The listed stockist sold out BUT was yet another company where you didn’t know if VAT would be added to the **£13** delivery charge on top of the attractive price. Ebuyer had the stock and my April build came from there, so it made sense to stick with them if their couriers were happy to pick up RMAs.
3) The EA 650 matched the price of the predecessor in this machine. Hiper’s 480w Type-R family, which was updated every quarter, achieved 74% efficiency back in issue 26. It’s doubtful that my version would have performed better than the test unit aside from not proving as explosive as later models. Attaining 80% efficiency in my main PC and gaining the ROHS standard, a third 12V rail, a more powerful non-LED fan and native PCI-E connectors for £4 more – ie a higher delivery charge than previous supplier CCL - represents the perfect bargain. Most importantly, I can now cover the overheads of a future GPU like the Radeon 4870.
4) There’s the possibility implied by an American reviewer that like the 430w model, Seasonic may be the true manufacturer for Antec’s Earthwatts range. If this is true, then it’s good to know that they have a more competitively priced model in this Labs, albeit rebadged, which can output the same 83% efficiency even if the cabling isn’t modular and it peaks at lower wattage by at least 50w.
5) It carries its environmental branding over to the packaging, all of which is no-frills recyclable paper and card and if your council won’t take away a slightly shiny box, your supermarket certainly will. By contrast Hiper’s plastic lunchbox, freebie LED fan and other frills may have been a nice way of showing where your money went, but irrelevant for the fairly standard twin 12v rail PSUs it was selling. The money’s in the unit with the Earthwatts range.
6) It’s only a small thing but I don’t care how good that Be Quiet 850Watt model is, if the 650Watt model could feature a standard kettle lead, this one should have done the same. Proprietary cabling is a bad 1990s throwback, as you’re locked in to trying to find a converter or you’re tied to buying spares from just that firm. Hopefully this was a shipping issue for the labs and future Be Quiet 850s will sport a standard kettle lead plug socket like the other 28 units tested, in future quarters, and I wouldn’t personally choose the one on test knowing none of the power leads I have lying around, work with it.
Fitting this PSU will at least represent a 99% completely new build, with only the soundcard recycled from another machine. Since the financial benefits to my power bill will be greatly appreciated, I just hope it arrives in a working condition to make it a straightforward PSU swapout.
It just goes to show that even if you’ve been waiting a long time for a new labs test of something you want to buy, it might throw up more questions than answers. Thankfully the answer in this case was to buy more of the same if I was happy with the first one, and it’ll be a long time before I see myself looking at the 90 Plus PSU badge - that’s as long as these two units will last.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...The Wooden Freeview Box
khenry
Whilst it’s great to have a brand brand new piece of technology in the house such as a LCD or Plasma television, it’s even better to get more than your money’s worth from a technical purchase before you opt for replacement. In modern times this is not fashionable and if you spend below a certain amount, not practical as the item will have been cheaply made.
However antiques restorer Richard Griffiths has taken his father’s 1957 television and spent another few hundred pounds this century on making it Freeview compatible. It’s even more heartwarming that Bush was once a major force in the AV hardware business, aiming for quality and not simply value.
Treating the maintenance like a good PC project, Griffiths had the foresight to update the internals once before, making it capable of receiving the then-modern 625-line PAL transmissions of the 1980s, otherwise the jump to DVB wouldn’t have worked. Another £200 made the original internals peacefully co-exist with modern Freeview electronics but without causing the tube to go bang.
It’s telling that aside from its place in Griffiths’ family history, the fact that it serves as a piece of furniture and not just a television, is the reason it stuck around for half a century. Of course, £113 in 1957 must represent more than a thousand pounds if we’re talking pre-decimalised currency.
As far as I’m concerned, if my Mum’s TV is on the blink, I’ll encourage her to call in the repair man. Her TV’s ten and a half years pales by comparison, but there’s no harm in the continued use of a set which has never had a problem up to now – especially not when a reasonable replacement might cost £500.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Buy Buy Ebay
khenry
Ebay’s Feedback changes have bitten hard and the site’s message boards are awash with sellers falling victim to the random suspension policy of a neutral and negative rating within a month, or Detailed Seller Ratings (the stars) falling below 4.6 out of five stars.
Personally I’m glad that my final buyer of all my old PC Gear, paid up and I sent off my other Radeon 9800 Pro to help towards the cost of the new build.
So now that the final sale is finished, I think that Ebay’s self-inflicted destruction of the feedback system as a whole, plus the wanton removal of sellers without power seller status, makes it the ideal time to quit selling and move with the times.
If Ebay will only treat buyers fairly and you can’t beat them, then it’s time to rejoin them and not bother contributing any further fees to the firm as an unwanted small seller. Ebid is growing even if buyers haven’t moved across there but if you specialised in Buy It Now auctions, then Amazon Marketplace or Play2trade at Play.com are two close equivalents, even if Amazon has fixed brackets for postage costs.
I nearly forgot to mention the much more personal message board sales environments of forums such as PC Gamer, Preys-World and Overclockers, where listings are free, Paypal isn’t forced on people and it’s much easier to split it and offer a discount for using any other payment method and trust is gained from the length of time that you hang around and post.
It’s also great that when I go to the post office now, it’s much more likely to be for sending fun stuff. It’s all too easy for offloading the items to the buyer to become a drudge, especially if you have to find and buy specialist packing eg card-backed envelopes for magazines.
What I won’t miss is the gloom and the paranoia; I previously had a completely open buying policy. Within two weeks of these changes, over 50 buyers were added to my Blocked Bidders list from all the tales of buyers, who, knowing they could not receive a neutral or negative rating, left gratuitous or anti-competitive non-positive feedback to perceived rivals in an attempt to get them closed down. This included one Warhammer model painter trying to shut down another seller of the unpainted pieces!
It’s no surprise that Ebay has increased the list size to include up to 5,000 accounts, more than double the previous length. So when bureaucracy of checking the boards and blocking the nutters wastes too much time and it’s just no longer fun, even if it’s a handy money maker for bills (as opposed to getting rich), it’s time to wind down and see if it’s all over by Christmas.
The last five years were great though, and everything I’ve learned should make my message board, Play2trade or Amazon sales keep going with the same rate of success. Ebay should find out that getting rid of the small timers, won’t necessarily mean that the biggest companies will flood in to take their place. Plenty of those favoured power sellers started out small and kept on going.
However, Ebay is yet another business run like the current British Government which pretends to listen when it doesn’t give a toss and imposes whatever policies it likes. Luckily, you can vote with your feet right now instead of waiting another two years.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...N-Gaged
khenry
Next in my accidental series of big companies screwing up; Nokia. Their N-Gage platform flopped and died five years ago so you’d have thought that they would pull out all the stops to make the follow-up, a success. However, an N-Gage fan site reported that whatever the circumstances (except for repairs), Nokia refuses to let you move your games to another phone when you change handsets.
There’s not much to say after that (except on the relevant forum )- it’s commercial suicide for the platform, for the second time, on a level rivalling Creative’s self-made troubles of the past two months. Some people might try to pirate these games, but it’s unlikely - by looking at the mobile market, people change handsets for looks, camera quality, or just because an operator needs to seal a deal. Expecting people to just buy their games again and give Nokia lots of free profit, or put the cost of replacing N-Gage games into any insurance policy if their “home” handset is lost or stolen, isn’t going to be a popular suggestion.
Copying Steam and keeping an individual account list of games would be a much better idea. Then the software could have been uninstalled on one handset, and downloaded all over again on the replacement model. That’s commonsense though, so Nokia will never do that…
UPDATE: The power of the internet strikes again. Yesterday, Nokia announced that they were working on a solution to the situation which would balance the needs of games publishers and customers. Thankfully the company realised that annoyed customers could just buy a mobile handset from LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or Sagem. That would cause bigger losses for Nokia than Creative, which has outsourced its sound chips to other board makers even if you didn’t choose to buy specific Soundblaster cards.