The Lazy Gamer's Guide to Gran Turismo 4

Before I begin the tips for playing GT4, I'd like to pass along three items of general advice:

1. GT4 saves your screen aspect ratio to your memory card but not your screen resolution. So if you want to play at 480p or 1080i, you'll need to set that every time you start the game.
2. Play GT4 in 480i or 1080i. 480p looks awful.
3. Get a Logitech Driving Force Pro wheel. You won't be sorry.

If you think that the fun part of driving and racing games is driving fast and exotic cars in races against other fast and exotic cars, if you think that cone challenges and hot laps and pace laps are just the chores you have to get through to get to the good stuff, then this article is for you.

Here's how to play GT4 so you maximize the amount of time you spend racing fast cars and minimize the amount of time you spend earning the money you need to buy them:

First, get your B and A licenses. Yeah, I know, it's a chore, but it's less of one than getting to the same place by trying to race without licenses and earning money in dribs and drabs. Plus, you'll need those licenses later in order to race more interesting courses against more challenging opponents. For that matter, you'll need the IB, IA and S licenses in order to run all the races in the game, so resign yourself to working through them. Don't worry about golding the licenses; bronze will get you what you need.

Now, go to Used Car Showroom I and buy a Honda Civic SiR-II (EG) '92. The '91 will probably serve just as well; it's the same price and has the same specifications. Give your Civic an oil change to boost its HP, then add the following modifications:

• Racing Chip
• Exhaust and Air Filter: Semi Racing

This should be enough for the next step.

Using your modified Civic or the car you got for your A license, go to the Beginner arena and win the Sunday Cup a couple of times. The second time run it in B-Spec mode, unless you enjoy these races. To win races in B-Spec mode, start the race at speed 5, passing mode and maximum time acceleration. As soon as your car is in front, turn off passing mode and drop back to speed 3. Keep the first car you win (an Autobianchi A112 Abarth '79) for your collection, and sell the second one for the roughly 8,000 CR it's worth. Take this money and add the following modifications to your Civic:

• Flywheel: Racing
• Turbine: Stage 2
• Weight Reduction: Stage 1

This will improve the performance to the point that the car can now win at least the first race in the next step.

Go to Honda under Japan, and enter the Civic championship under One-Make Races. With each race you win or almost win, use the money to improve your Civic's performance so it can win the next race. Again, use B-Spec mode to cut down on the boredom of running the same race over and over. Here are the modifications to apply, in the order they should be applied:

• Clutch: Sports
• Brakes: Racing
• Sports Tires: Soft
• Weight Reduction: Stage 2
• Clutch: Triple Plate

Winning this championship will get you a MUGEN MOTUL CIVIC Si Race Car '87, which unmodified is good enough to do the next step.

Get in your new Civic race car, and go to the Special Conditions arena. There, enter the second series. This is the Capri Rally at Costa di Amalfi. You can easily win this race with this car. Keep the Toyota RSC Rally Raid Car '02 you get for winning this series, and use it to win a second time. Sell the second Rally Raid Car for 265,624 CR. Rinse and repeat until you have at least 441,250 CR.

Go to Mercedes-Benz under Germany and buy an SL65 AMG (R230) '04. Give it an oil change, then take it to the tuning shop and add these modifications:

• Exhaust & Air Filter: Racing
• Racing Brakes
• Brake Controller
• Port Polish
• Engine Balancing
• Racing Chip
• Nitrous
• Transmission: Full Customize
• Clutch: Triple-plate
• Flywheel: Racing
• Limited Slip: Full Customize
• Carbon Driveshaft
• Turbine Kit: Stage 4
• Intercooler: Racing
• Suspension: Full Customize
• Racing Tires: Hard
• Weight Reduction: Stage 1
• Weight Reduction: Stage 2
• Weight Reduction: Stage 3
• Increase Rigidity
• Rigidity Refresher Plan

Enter it in the one-make series Legends of the Silver Arrow. For winning you'll get a Mercedes-Benz CLK Touring Car '00.

Give your new CLK Touring Car an oil change and add these mods:

• Exhaust & Air Filter: Racing
• Brake Controller
• NA Tuning: Stage 3
• Nitrous
• Transmission: Full Customize
• Limited Slip: Full Customize
• Turbine Kit: Stage 4
• Suspension: Full Customize
• Racing Tires: Medium
• Increase Rigidity
• Rigidity Refresher Plan

Go to the European Events arena and enter the car in the Deutsche Touring Car Meisterschaft series. The first time you win, keep the AMG Mercedes CLK-GTR Race Car for your collection. After that you can sell succeeding prizes from this series for 743,749 CR. That should be enough cash flow to buy even the most expensive cars in the game.

Remember to play the Deutsche Touring Car Meisterschaft series in B-Spec mode, to speed up your cash flow. Also, you can skip the first race in the series and still win, speeding up your cash flow even more. Yes, you'll lose the money you'd have won from that first race, but that's more than made up for by how much faster you pull in the prize cars.

And that's it! When it comes to in-game money, you're now on Easy Street. Go race.

Norton Ghost Exorcised

There was a time when Peter Norton's programs were the best system tools available for the PC. However, in recent years, mostly since the acquisition by Symantec, the quality appears to have been slipping.

• Norton Antivirus has a significant negative impact on system performance.
• Norton SpeedDisk made my system unusably slow for the entire week I left it running, with no indication that it would ever finish 'optimizing' my hard drive.
• Norton Protected Recycle Bin didn't really add any significant functionality to the Windows Recycle Bin, and like the other apps was a resource hog.
• Norton GoBack is another resource hog, adds little to Windows System Restore, and by many accounts makes systems unstable or even renders them unbootable. Hardly acceptable behavior for a program that's supposed to protect you from buggy software that screws up your system.

Norton Ghost has now joined the growing list of Symantec products I would never voluntarily install.

I was getting ready to upgrade to a larger hard drive, and wanted to simply move my entire filesystem to the new disk, along with all my installed games and game saves. A drive imaging program would do the trick. I happened to have a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 I'd gotten with a hard drive, and I'd heard good things about it, so I decided to try that.

I installed Ghost, ran it, and found that it wanted to boot in its own "virtual partition" so it could copy files that are locked while Windows is running. Fine. So I let it do its thing and rebooted the PC. On reboot Ghost told me something was wrong and offered to let me reboot the machine in its previous state (i.e. before Ghost twiddled the partitions). So I chose that, rebooted, and it...

Displayed the same error message.

After several hours and an rapidly increasing percentage of gray hairs, I was able to find a combination of commands issued from the Windows XP Home install disk and from a Linux boot disk (Knoppix 4.01) that allowed me to fix the partitions and drive letters back and delete Ghost's virtual partition. To my great relief, on the next reboot I was back in my familiar Windows XP environment.

After uninstalling Ghost and removing from my system any trace of it I could find, I did some research. I dug into the nooks and crannies of the Web, and it appears that Ghost has problems with SATA boot drives, which is the kind I have. But that's really beside the point.

What we have here is a backup tool: a program to assist you in securing your data against mishap. But it modifies the source before copying it, and does so in a way that renders the machine unusable if anything goes wrong. Sure, I was able to restore the machine to its previous state. But I'm also a computer professional with over twenty years of experience. Joe Normal who doesn't know the tricks I do would be sunk; he'd either have to find someone like me to help him or reformat his drive and lose everything.

So I now renounce all software Symantec. There would have to be some indication that their software development methods have had a major change for the better before I considered purchasing or using any of their products.

Epilogue: I found a combination of Linux tools that would let me do the image copy, and which was considerably faster than solutions based on reading the filesystem file by file. And I can now use it to make regular backups of my system drive.