TweakGuides - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Author: Koroush Ghazi
Last Modified: July 2007
This Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page tries to answer the most commonly-asked questions I get about TweakGuides.com. Some of it comes from the original text of an interview I did for this article on MSNBC.com. Much of it is in response to common questions I get by email, as well as things readers may generally be curious about. You should also refer to the Contact page on my site for more general details on TweakGuides.com.
Q1. Who are you?
Q2. What are 'tweak guides', and how did TweakGuides.com come about?
Q3. How popular is TweakGuides.com?
Q4. Why don't you write for a big tech site instead?
Q5. Is TweakGuides.com your full time job?
Q6. What process do you go through to create a game tweak guide?
Q7. Why don't your guides just tell me what to turn on/off?
Q8. Why do I need to tweak, and when will all this tweaking crap stop?
Q9. What type of people visit TweakGuides.com?
Q10. What are the most common PC problems you see?
Q11. Do you provide any tech support?
Q12. Which one of your tweak guides is the most popular?
Q13. Can you do a [insert name here] Tweak Guide?
Q14. What are the TweakGuides.com Forums?
Q15. If I write to you, will you write back?
Q16. What items make it to the TweakGuides front page?
Q17. Why are you so strict about other people using your guide material?
My name is Koroush Ghazi, I'm 36 and I live in Canberra, Australia. I am the sole owner of TweakGuides.com, and the author of all the material you see on this site. I was born in Iran, but have spent most of my life in Australia. I have a Bachelor of Economics degree, and I'm keenly interested in all things to do with PCs and technology. You can email me using this email address: PersianImmortal@tweakguides.com
[Back to Top]Q2. What are 'tweak guides', and how did TweakGuides.com come about?
Many years ago I stumbled upon a wonderful thing called a 'tweak guide'. To my surprise this guide gave me information about all sorts of things which weren't in my game's manual. Tips, tricks, configuration details and advice which helped me understand how I could make my game run faster and/or look better, and in the process also taught me alot about my own computer. Every time I bought a new game or used an application I looked for one of these guides to help me out with getting the most out of it.
A few years back I started noticing that good tweak guides were becoming harder and harder to find. Yet from seeing frantic discussions in gaming forums, I knew there were still a lot of gamers who needed these guides. So I decided to do something about it - I started researching and writing my own tweak guides. My first tweak guide was for the popular RPG The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a demanding yet amazing game. This tweak guide was noticed by the owner of TweakTown.com, who eventually helped me release it on his site as my first published tweak guide: The Morrowind Tweak Guide.
After two years of writing a variety of guides for Tweaktown.com, each proving quite popular, I felt I had found my niche, becoming virtually the only author to consistently release game and system tweak guides. I finally made the decision to set up TweakGuides.com in April 2004 because I felt I needed full control over my guide contents and layout, and wanted to steer clear of the overt commercialization which had beset TweakTown. Several years later and TweakGuides.com remains a modest site but I believe it has returned tweak guides to their former position of prominence among computer enthusiasts, hopefully helping people the same way the tweak guides I used to read did.
[Back to Top]Q3. How popular is TweakGuides.com?
To my surprise, TweakGuides is growing in popularity every day. At the moment I get around 700,000 unique visitors and 3 million page views a month on average. During periods when a popular guide is released I can over 50,000 people visiting the site per day. Given the site only provides tweak guides, and doesn't provide hardware reviews, misleading redirects or cheap tactics to increase traffic and page views, I think that's not too shabby.
Part of the reason for TweakGuides' success is that I keep in mind that those 700,000 or so people who come to my site come here to read free and useful information, so that remains my main focus. I know from reader feedback that they like the fact that the site layout is simple, quick to load, and devoid of excessive and annoying advertising. Readers like the way my guides are written in a non-technical style, but still cover both technical and non-technical aspects equally. All of that will remain the same no matter how popular the site becomes.
[Back to Top]Q4. Why don't you write for a big tech site instead?
I've already been offered payment to write guides for big sites like Gamespot and Tom's Hardware. I've rejected all such offers because quite simply I have no incentive to do that at the moment. If my guides appear on Gamespot for example, they might have a larger audience, but I lose control over the precise wording of the content, I have no say as to the copious amounts of advertising these sites display on each page, I don't even get a decent fee for writing guides for such sites. Basically TweakGuides.com is my way of staying completely in control and providing my content the way I want it - free, unbiased and easy to read.
[Back to Top]Q5. Is TweakGuides.com your full time job?
TweakGuides.com started out as a hobby in my spare time, and continued as such for the first 2 years. However increasingly it started consuming more and more of my spare time to the point where undertaking my full-time (non-tech related) day job and running this site resulted in 16 hour days which became quite stressful. When push came to shove, given I didn't like my day job, as of 1 May 2006 I decided to quit my day job and go full-time on the site.
This is as much an experiment as anything else to see if I can make a living running the site, since it is something I enjoy. Now I can focus on the site, and still have free time and hence more of a balance between time at my computer and time away from it. It's extremely difficult to gain sponsorship or income from the site, since everyone expects the site contents to remain free, and at the same time I don't write biased articles or promote particular products explicitly or implicitly like most other sites. It will be interesting to see what happens, but in the long run if I don't gather many sponsors or other methods of paying my bills, I will have to go back to a full time job and scale back my work on the site greatly, perhaps even closing it.
[Back to Top]Q6. What process do you go through to create a game tweak guide?
I start out by purchasing the game (or downloading the demo) and quickly play it for the first couple of days. I try to 'break' the game, paying attention to any unusual or problematic aspects which arise. At the same time I check the game's directory structure and files, looking for configuration files which can be edited.
Next I launch into the research phase in earnest, searching the web for any existing information on the game's engine, any user problems with the game, and any tips or tweaks which have been discovered, even if they may be dubious. Basically I try to find any leads which give me a clearer picture of how the game works on an intuitive level. Many times the game engine is new or virtually undocumented and I find very few leads.
I then experiment with the game. I test all the regular in-game settings to see what impact they have on framerate and image quality. I try a range of commands in the configuration files, I use various values for the existing commands, I try to access the game's built-in debugging console and try various commands, and I even look into game executable files. It takes some educated guessing and tedious experimentation, but most of the major commands can eventually be discovered and decyphered. Game Developers use logical syntax and leave plenty of clues, so it's just a matter of thinking as they would.
Finally, I document all my major findings - from the in-game settings through to very advanced tweaks - so that anyone who reads the guide has an 'official unofficial' manual to their game, answering the most basic of questions all the way through to the very complex. In the past when pushed I've done the whole process in a matter of days, but usually it takes a couple of weeks, sometimes longer. It all depends on the complexity of the subject matter and how busy I am with other things.
[Back to Top]Q7. Why don't your guides just tell me what to turn on/off?
A lot of people ask me why my guides have so much descriptive text. They say "I don't want to read through all that, why don't your guides just tell me which settings I should turn on, which settings I should turn off, and what lines I should insert or edit in my config files?". The answer is that it's not that simple, but trust me when I say that if I could provide such guides I would - it would be great for you the reader, and it would be great for me too!
Almost every game released today requires that you use your own personal preference for performance vs. image quality when deciding what the settings should be. You may prefer to do your gaming at higher resolutions and hence you might not mind turning down some of the other settings to get a smooth framerate at that resolution on your machine. You might think that 30FPS or more is fine for gaming, while others believe that they need 100FPS+ to be happy. You might want all the eye candy in a game enabled, and then lower other settings (such as EAX Sound or Enemy AI) to make this playable. As you can see, determining the "best" settings for a game on your machine requires you to make that choice, not me. Of course if a particular setting should be turned on or off for most machines, I will provide explicit recommendations to that effect in my guide.
Furthermore, the same setting may reduce or increase performance depending entirely on your particular hardware. There are literally thousands of potential hardware combinations possible, and to try to categorize these into 'slow', 'medium' or 'fast' categories is a nonsense. Most PCs fall between categories, having a mix of slow and fast components of varying brands, speeds and tolerances. Putting aside the fact that many choices are based on personal preference, even if I were to try to provide 'basic configurations' for various types of computers, some people would see a performance drop or experience visual glitches if they used such preset configurations. Think about games which already try to 'auto detect' your hardware and provide the best possible software configuration - how successful are they in actually doing that? The whole reason why games developers allow user customization in games is precisely because it's as much about personal preference as it is about getting the highest FPS.
The bottom line is that I only provide the information you need to conduct tweaking. I can't actually do it for you. I will keep trying as hard as possible to make things easier, but you will never see me write a guide which simply provides a step-by-step list of which settings to turn on/off and a bunch of lines to copy and paste into your .cfg/.ini files. Any guide which does so is not doing you a favor, believe me. The minute you run into an inevitable problem, you will have no idea what caused it if you try that approach.
[Back to Top]Q8. Why do I need to tweak, and when will all this tweaking crap stop?
Most people misunderstand the point of tweaking. They believe it's some sort of thing geeks love to do, but in reality it only provides very little if any noticeable differences. This is completely untrue: tweaking is not about fiddling or 'hacking', it's about customization. Software developers realise that given the variety of hardware on which their games/applications will run, their software needs to be adaptable, hence all recent software comes with the ability to customize it to suit your needs and operating environment. My tweak guides emphasize both internal and external customization of software - that is the guides provide full details of how to use the built-in customization options in a game or application, as well as the less accessible/hidden customization options. These are used to make sure the software runs as fast as it possibly can with maximum stability.
To put it another way, basic software tweaking is like getting into a car and adjusting the seats and mirrors to suit you, while advanced tweaking is like getting under the hood of that car and making sure the engine is purring along smoothly and all the fluids are topped up. It needs to be done regularly, and there is no way around it. You need to understand what you're doing, and not just rely on a preset list of things to turn off/on, as that just doesn't work with PCs.
As for when you can stop tweaking and get back to just enjoying your PC - well in my opinion things are not going to get much easier for PC Gamers in the foreseeable future. Having some understanding of how a PC works, and the ways in which a computer needs to be maintained and optimized are an ongoing necessity for PC users. While operating systems such as Windows Vista have improved system stability and integrity for Windows gaming platforms, given the sheer diversity of computer hardware as well as evolutionary and revolutionary hardware developments (64-bit computing, multi-core CPUs, PPUs), games developers will never be able to make their games 100% compatible or optimal on all gaming systems. Hence some form of tweaking will still be required to keep PC users from experiencing the usual problems.
Believe me, in many ways I wish it wasn't so. We're losing a lot of PC gamers to consoles for that very reason - the ability to simply switch on their console and start gaming straight away without worrying about the need to tweak or optimize anything. Of course to balance that negative, you have to realize that there are some absolutely amazing PC games which are well worth the effort. Most importantly of all, PCs aren't going to go away given their variety of uses, and in the short term at least they will remain complex and non-standard, and hence require tweaking (customization) to use them properly.
[Back to Top]Q9. What type of people visit TweakGuides.com?
I get a wide range of people who visit my site. I would say the majority of them are younger casual gamers who just want to play their games without problems. I don't think many of them even know they're setting out to find a tweak guide; they usually start off by searching Google for a general answer to their mysterious game problems, or to find better descriptions of cryptic in-game setting names. They inevitably stumble upon my site and (based on feedback I receive) are extremely happy to find at least some guidance on the types of things they can do to resolve their problems or improve their game performance.
Most hard-core gamers would already be aware of my site, and no doubt go through my guides for relevant games as a matter of course, but I think they're searching for the more obscure tweaks or tips. Sometimes they just need confirmation that a particular setting does what they thought it would do, or they want to know the various values they can try for certain variables. They rely on me to do the legwork for them, and in many respects I'm happy to do that and document it in one central resource for everyone to use.
More recently with the release of my general system guides, such as the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion, the ATI and Nvidia Tweak Guides and the Firefox Tweak Guide, I get an even broader range of people visiting, from those completely new to PCs to the highly experienced. Once again, my aim is to try and create a guide which encapsulates all the information anyone would need on a particular subject; from the basic to the advanced. That way I cover my bases and all types of readers find something useful in them.
[Back to Top]Q10. What are the most common PC problems you see?
The most common problem I see is a general lack of understanding by computer users (particularly gamers) of their system. Stuttering in games, crashes to desktop, blue screens, graphics slowdowns and laggy online gameplay are quite often the result of people not being aware of the relationship between particular settings and their impacts on games and general system stability, and/or not being aware of the capabilities of their own hardware and where bottlenecks are occuring. To add to that overclocking is a real problem since it is now so easy to do that inexperienced PC users overclock all of their components without any real understanding of the problems which can come with overclocking.
Another common problem gamers face today are incomplete/buggy games being released. It seems the gaming industry now more than ever works to a particular release schedule, and most games are rushed to meet these release dates without being properly tested or finished off. It is extremely frustrating for gamers to have to wait for that inevitable first patch (or second or third) before they can truly enjoy their game. Sometimes these patches are released months after the game has been purchased, and gamers are justifiably upset by this alarming trend for games manufacturers to take the money first and deliver the goods further down the track.
For the most part though, the majority of problems relate to people not setting up their systems correctly, and not software bugs. I don't believe in "blaming" the user; rather I want to highlight to people that your PC is a delicately balanced machine which needs to be highly maintained and understood if you want it to run with speed and stability. There's no way around it unfortunately, that's just the nature of the beast.
[Back to Top]Q11. Do you provide any tech support?
No, I can't provide any tech support whatsoever. The reason is simple: I write guides so that I can provide the most detailed instructions I know to as large a number of people as possible. I just don't have the time to then retype variations of this information for particular individuals over and over again, nor can I provide personalized tweaking info to suit different peoples' machines. All of that is beyond the scope of what I do, and what this site is designed to do. The main reason is time - the more time I spend providing free and detailed tech support, the less time I can spend writing guides. So instead of helping a handful of people by email, I want to help a large number of people more efficiently and in much more detail through my guides.
The second reason is that this site is based on the concept of trying to teach people to read, research and help themselves. TweakGuides was created as a central resource for tweaking and optimization information, and my guides are larger than most other guides because they try to explain the rationale behind making certain changes - to encourage you to understand and make educated decisions, not just to blindly follow whatever I tell you to do. My suite of guides are specifically designed to cater to all audiences, from newbie to advanced, so if you put in the time to read through them you will be rewarded.
I usually get emails telling me the writer is desperate and that he's tried everything but he still has such and such a problem. Believe me, I'm completely sympathetic. I know how frustrating it is to have a computer problem you can't solve - that's what got me into tweaking in the first place. I would love to help, however it is simply not practical nor appropriate for me to do so. My guides come from a combination of my intuitive understanding of PCs, my experience and time-consuming research. That means that even if I try to help you personally, while I may have some idea of what the problem is, it would take a lot of time and emailing back and forth as various solutions are tried. If I was sitting in front of your machine, I could probably quickly work out the problem; since I'm not, I would have to email you back and ask you try a range of things to narrow down the range of possible problems. This is very time consuming and again, something I'm simply not going to do under any circumstances.
So the bottom line is please don't email me with tech questions, or PC troubleshooting questions, or questions on what hardware to buy, or to seek my personal advice on a particular setting or tweak. I'm truly sorry, but I won't provide any answers to such questions. I write tweak guides, and I include almost everything I know in those, and that's the only way I provide tech support. It is up to you to take the initiative and read these guides if you really wish to solve your particular problem. The aim of the site is to help you to help yourself by giving you appropriate resources in the form of guides, not to provide you with a free tech support channel. That's just not practical or appropriate unfortunately.
[Back to Top]Q12. Which one of your tweak guides is the most popular?
In terms of sheer numbers of readers, I believe my Oblivion Tweak Guide has proven to be the most popular. And it is still drawing in a lot of traffic given the game's ongoing popularity. The reason I believe is that Oblivion is an amazingly beautiful and complex game, and it inspires users to try to get the most out of it. If not properly tweaked, Oblivion can stutter and give low framerates, but when optimized and using appropriate modifications, the game is truly stunning and runs quite well.
[Back to Top]Q13. Can you do a [insert name here] Tweak Guide?
I wish I could fulfil all requests for guides, but I just can't. The main reasons I can't meet a particular guide request include:
As you can see there are a variety of reasons why I will never write certain guides. It may annoy you, but I'm only one person and I've already done over 35 guides in the past 4 years, something like 800+ pages of guide material, much of it which I have to update constantly. I'm not a guide-writing machine, and although everyone wants a guide on their particular favorite game, application or piece of hardware, I ration my time to write for the widest possible audience on popular topics which I am personally interested in.
[Back to Top]Q14. Why the TweakGuides Forums so strict?
In late 2005 I started the TweakGuides Forums as a means of providing readers of the site with a place where they can interact with each other in a friendly, non-abusive environment. It's a place to discuss the latest developments in the tech world in a mature and thoughtful manner. It is not designed to be a free tech support forum, and the reason for this is explained in detail in the Forum Philosophy
I don't want to emulate the many spam-filled childish and abusive forums there are around the Internet. For this reason, while the contents of the forums are freely available for anyone to read, to have full posting privileges you need to become an 'Invited Member' through the Invitation System. The system has been implemented because over the years, it became quite clear that most people simply wanted to use the TweakGuides Forums to beg for help and post questions they could easily answer themselves with a bit of effort. I want the forums to actually complement the guides on the main site rather than being a substitute for them. The forums are now firmly focused on providing a protected environment for people to discuss things maturely and productively, free of abuse, spam and lazy people. If you feel you have something to contribute then I encourage you to post an Introduction, but the decision is ultimately up to the community. If the Forum Philosophy does not suit you, I strongly encourage you to seek out and join another forum, as there are many others to choose from.
[Back to Top]Q15. If I write to you, will you write back?
Send me an Email and I will always read the contents. However, given the volume of email I receive daily, you must understand that I won't answer emails which don't follow these simple rules:
If you keep the above in mind, I would love to hear from you. Let me know what you think about my site or my guides, point out any mistakes in the guides (e.g. dead links), or problems you've had when using a particular guide. Provide me with any genuine tech tips or tweaks you've seen or come up with yourself. Give me details of performance experiences you have with a particular game. Give me suggestions for future guides, or for the layout and content of my site. Even just an email to say hi is absolutely fine! I will try to reply to most of these types of emails. However don't take it as a personal insult if you don't receive a reply, and above all keep in mind that I'm not a personal tech support channel.
[Back to Top]Q16. What items make it to the TweakGuides front page?
A lot of people wonder what exactly makes it to the front page of TweakGuides.com - what's the criteria? Well I spend a lot of time each day browsing the Net, often until 3:00am Australian time, to make sure I personally get across new developments and to post news updates as they happen. The general aim is to bring you the most important news of the day for the broadest group of readers. This includes:
In theory if I posted all the tech developments in a day there would be 20 or more items each day, and that's just not feasible or desirable. In the end it's a choice I have to make and I tend to go with my gut instinct as to what few items would be the most interesting and useful news for the majority of my readers. This often means that items which only affect a small group of people and/or which are not significant enough in nature will not be posted. If there's no real news I may throw in a Site Update or something quirky. Importantly, I steer clear of hardware reviews, gossip, rumors, and blogspam as these would overwhelm the front page and devalue its brevity and focus. I want people to glance at the front page and quickly see the most important tech news items of the day, most of which should be relevant to them in some way.
If you're after more general tech news here try checking our Forums regularly, and feel free to Email Me if you think something genuinely important is missing from the front page.
[Back to Top]Q17. Why are you so strict about other people using your guide material?
People often wonder why I'm so strict with giving permission to others to use my guide material. I get a lot of emails from people who want to host my guides (or parts of them) on their own sites, and of course a few people also go ahead and mistakenly think they can reproduce my material without even asking me in the first place. Unfortunately I don't find this acceptable - the home of my guides is right here on TweakGuides.com, where they are provided completely free, in a non-obtrusive layout, and are always easily available to everyone. In general I do not give permission for anyone to host my guides anywhere else for any reason. There are several reasons for this.
To start with, I firmly believe that all content creators have the moral right to determine the fate of their content, whether it be an Internet article, a book, a movie, or music for example. If someone puts the time and effort into creating something, they are morally and legally entitled to control how that creation is used to a reasonable extent. This is why Copyright exists, and I encourage you to read this simple Copyright Myths article to understand why most people go about breaching Copyright based on falsehoods they believe to be true. Copyright is not just about the big bad record companies trying to prevent you from downloading MP3s, it exists for a reason, and that is to encourage people to create new things, safe in the knowledge that their hard work won't be ripped off by someone else who's put in no effort at all.
I invest a huge amount of my time and effort into writing guides and keeping them up to date. TweakGuides.com takes up at least 8 hours of my day, 7 days a week, if not much more during busy periods. Because of this huge commitment in time and effort, I run the site as my full-time occupation. Thus the income I need to eat, clothe myself and pay my bills comes from the advertising on this site and in small part from donations. Now I'm not forcing you to pay me for writing guides, nor do I write my guides out of "greed" - right now I'm earning roughly 1/5th of what I was earning in my old day job. I write guides mainly out of my desire to help people and because I enjoy it. However I'm not a saint, I need income to survive, and every time someone hosts my material elsewhere it reduces the number of people who visit this site directly, and in turn reduces my advertising and potential sponsor income and also prevents people from seeing the other guides on offer here.
Let's be honest, most people who reproduce my material are simply doing so to draw traffic to their own websites and hence easily benefit from something they didn't put the work into in the first place. If you really want to help people, all you need to do is give them the link to my guides, there is absolutely no need to reproduce the contents elsewhere. My guides are easily accessible and completely free right here on TweakGuides.com. The bottom line is that the more people rip off my guide contents and spread them around the Internet, the less I will receive in return for all the time and effort I put into the guides. This means that eventually I will simply stop producing them.
The following things are both legal and appropriate, and do not require my permission:
The following things are both illegal and inappropriate, and require my written permission (though usually I don't permit these regardless):
People who disregard the above will be pursued to the best of my abilities, including contacting their Host/ISP for breach of Terms of Service, contacting their Domain Name Registrar as required, using the Google DMCA provisions to delist them from Google, and of course if severe enough, action through a Court of Law. Please respect my rights and support my work by linking to TweakGuides.com, not by copying my guides elsewhere. Just because something is free, doesn't mean it's worthless or up for grabs by anyone.
[Back to Top]For the moment that covers all the basic questions in this FAQ. Let me know if you feel anything should be added to, or clarified in this FAQ.
Cheers,
Koroush Ghazi
Owner/Author
