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So I was playing my favorite Call of Duty 4 on my Playstation 3 and getting pwned, all of a sudden I lost the background sound and I could only hear gun shots. It wasn’t long until it was completely silent, or near silent. I quit the game after the match was over and I couldn’t, it just froze with the black screen, the screen you normally see when you quit the game and back to the main screen. I call this the black screen of death or BSOD for the PlayStation 3.

I’ve encountered freezes before but this time it was different. The console remained in the black screen so the first thing that came to mind was to turn off the console from the back after trying to turn it off from the touch-sensitive power switch at the front. I turned it back on hoping to get back in the game but I wasn’t able to. The game would not load, as in I didn’t see the game icon in the main screen. So then I tried loading one of my Blu-ray movie discs, same thing.

With less than 2 years of game time, my PS3′s disc drive is already busted. That’s pretty disappointing. I’m going to call support tomorrow and hopefully get it fixed. I don’t care if I have to ship my console to them.

Sigh.

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• unable to load call of duty 4 on playstation 3s

Have you ever experienced a scenario where one of your frequently used programs stopped working because one of your hardware’s drivers was out of date? And what are drivers?

Drivers are software that all the PCs need in order to communicate with hardware such as printers, fax machines and scanners. One example of such scenario would be for example, in PC gaming, say you had a video card and assume you never updated your driver except the time during the initial installation when you started using your current PC for the first time. You wanted to play a fairly new game, chances are you would need to update the driver of your video card. Without updating your driver, you would not be able to either start the game or play the game in a stable way.

Now you know that your hardware are constantly in need of the most up to date drivers, you might ask, is this going to be tedious work to check for new drivers for all your hardware? Uniblue’s driver update tool called Uniblue DriverScanner will help you do all the scanning. You can get the free trail version from their site as well which scans your entire computer’s hardware/devices and displays to you which drivers are out of date, up to date and the total number of drivers you have installed. Full version will allow you to download required/recommended drivers by clicking the “Download Driver” button. If you are worried that the new driver will cause problems to your computer, the scanner also gives you the option to backup all your drivers as well as ones you have selected to perform a backup. When something goes wrong, you know have the backup to restore to previous stable state.

With this software, you will not have to worry about which driver for which hardware is out of date. With a touch of a button, it will scan your entire computer and inform you which drivers need to be updated. Instead of letting your frequently used programs to tell you they need driver updates and stop you from using them, let this scanner tell you what you need to update before you use those programs.