Hmm, I've been stabbed quite a few times today and my SteamPipe Beta TF2 didn't crash. Are you running any special configs or have custom files installed?

Sadly, DDR2 has been quite costly since it is outdated, and the DDR3 producers cut production late last year causing DDR3 kits to become on average 40% more expensive. If the OP has a technology retailer in their country that sells "refurbished" goods (e.g. Geeks.com in the USA) they can probably get a reasonable 2x2GB 800MHz kit for a decent price.

8509 frames 89.021 seconds 95.58 fps (10.46 ms/f) 8.416 fps variability

8509 frames 67.324 seconds 126.39 fps ( 7.91 ms/f) 7.479 fps variability
(same specs as post #68)

You definitely need a new platform, or at least a better CPU (higher clocked Core 2 Quad). The GTS 450 is alright for TF2, but the CPU is holding you back significantly (and you can't overclock it because it's a 1333MHz FSB processor and you have a G31 chipset motherboard, if it even has overclocking options). Your CPU is rated for about 15 GFLOPs when newer quad cores bench about 60-120 (depending on AVX being supported).

Probably your best bet for under $100 would be a Core 2 Quad Q6700 or QX6700 from eBay. You also really need more than 2GB of RAM, but you have a 32bit OS and a 1GB video card that eats away at one of your 4GB of addressable RAM. It's a tough call between more RAM and a better CPU because both are probably killing your performance right now.

2639 frames 22.900 seconds 115.24 fps ( 8.68 ms/f) 4.659 fps variability

CPU and overclock: i7-3770K @ 4.3 GHz, 4x4GB DDR3-2133 CL11
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7970 @ 1150/1650

Driver version: Catalyst 13.5 Beta2
dxlevel (default is 90): 90
Resolution: 1920x1080
Full-screen or windowed: Full
FPS configs enabled: None
Shadows enabled/disabled: Enabled

Additional notes: SteamPipe Beta (not that this really matters, I have an SSD anyway).

New engine_srv.so released, update your servers again and they work properly now.

From what I heard, servers do not serve VPKs. Custom maps likely stay loose as they have been all along.

Also, Metamod: Source is broken on Linux servers. This means mods like MGEMod on those servers are not working at the moment, so please try not to harass your server OPs about it as there's nothing we can do until a new MM:S build is compiled.

Metamod: Source is currently non-functional on Linux servers, but works fine on Windows. I am awaiting an update from AlliedModders concerning the issue. This means that most MGEMod servers and other mods that are running on Linux servers are non-functional at this time. Also, the build number turned into a 7 digit number for some reason.

Laptop antennas run up the sides of the notebook lid and typically terminate on metal pads in the upper third of the screen. When your notebook lid is closed, you're likely orienting the antenna pads perpendicular to the router's antennas instead of parallel, and that likely dramatically reduces the effective surface area of the antennas. I'm not an antenna engineer by any means, but this seems to be the most logical reasoning for your issue.

Leave the laptop open and the back of the lid oriented towards your router, and use the display toggle key combination (usually the function key + one of the F keys that has two boxes or CRT/LCD printed on it) until your external display is enabled but your notebook display is disabled.

I'd love to upgrade to one, but honestly my ASUS VG236H 120Hz has been great, and the CCFL backlight seems fairly natural. If I were a first time buyer, I'd probably purchase this one given my good experiences with the older model.

Honestly, that was what I was expecting for a mid-high end gaming laptop. Most of the mobile quad core CPUs are still in the low-mid 2GHz range, which is honestly a lot better than 2010 when the first generation mobile i7 chips were 1.6-1.73GHz. I'd be happy with what you're getting out of the laptop now, as my 2010 notebook with an AMD Phenom II X920 quad core @ 2.2GHz and a mobile HD 5650 drops to 25-30 FPS during large fights, and stays around 50-60 in low load situations on the lowest settings. Your minimum frame rate is fairly comparable to a desktop Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4GHz) from around the time TF2 was released.

The only real thing I can suggest is making sure multicore rendering is enabled. I don't believe you can do much else to increase your minimum framerate as the GTX 560M (same chip as a desktop GTX 550 Ti with lower clocks) is more than sufficient for TF2's graphical demands.

It sounds like your CPU might be a bottleneck, as TF2 is more CPU intensive than GPU. What CPU do you have, and is it overclocked? Even with my overclocked HD 7970, Core i7-3770K @ 4.3GHz and 4x4GB DDR3-2133 CL11 RAM, my FPS drops down to around 80-100 from 120FPS VSYNC on 24+ player servers that have lots of action going on, despite neither my GPU or CPU being remotely close to being maxed out.

I also experience similar FPS drops in TESV: Skyrim (game engine only supports 2 cores) and Minecraft (poor multithreading). TF2 must do some expensive calculations that cause an increase in frame latency, as Chris's configs literally do nothing for my system.

EDIT: From the sounds of it, you probably have a mobile i7 clocked in the low 2GHz range.

Nice price, got mine new in March 2011 for $62 and it still works perfectly.

This isn't true. An Ethernet hub is an OSI layer 1 device that broadcasts all signals received on a port to every other port excluding the port where the incoming signal originated. Since they operate at the physical layer, hubs cannot discern what a frame is. The entire hub is a single collision domain and every device must take turns transmitting or receiving signals.

An Ethernet switch is an OSI layer 2 device that is capable of analyzing frames because it operates in the data link layer. Therefore, it is able to analyze frames and forward them to the appropriate port. This is why switches don't have collision problems, because each individual port becomes its own collision domain.

A router is a layer 3 device with makes it superior to hubs and switches, but having more than a single router on your network is utterly pointless because it will manage every device on its LAN anyway.

"A switch is a telecommunication device that receives a message from any device connected to it and then transmits the message only to the device for which the message was meant. This makes the switch a more intelligent device than a hub (which receives a message and then transmits it to all the other devices on its network)."

I'll look into this. I have a hunch that the changes I made to the Badlands displacements (the terrain) last year may have changed the general height of the terrain by a few units, causing the original spawn points to become invalid. The number of triangles had to be reduced in the terrain because Valve designed Badlands with "Power 4" displacements that aren't supported properly in Hammer/Source SDK, causing unusually large map file sizes and preventing terrain physics calculations from being computed. I had to reduce the displacements to "Power 3" which reduced their "resolution" due to the reduced triangle count.

I'm a bit surprised nobody noticed/mentioned this sooner.