Want better indication in Modern Warfare 2 on what your ping may actually be? Then you can simply edit the configuration file.

- Navigate to the folder:  xxxxx\steam\steamapps\common\call of duty modern warfare 2\players and open the file config_mp.cfg

- Find the line seta cg_ScoresPing_Interval and change the value to “20″
- Find the line seta cg_ScoresPing_MaxBars and change the value to “10″

You will now have 10 bars, each representing 20ms. If you have the full green 10 bars you have between 0-20ms ping. The host pretty much always has this and is now a bit more easier to know who the host is. If you have one tiny red bar, consider that to have 200+ms ping. Five bars is roughly 100ms ping and so on.

I had some major sound troubles with source games when I installed Windows 7. I refused to believe that my X-Fi Titanium Pro was at fault as it worked flawlessly in everything else apart form Source games. My Left 4 Dead intro movie had no sound and I could not use my microphone or could not change speaker setup in game. I installed all the drivers and selected / unselected / muted everything I needed to do in Windows 7. Everything I usually do in Vista. Why the fuck did it not want to work. I even tried everything Valve suggest for microphones not working.

I realised I had not installed Creative Alchemy, but thought it shouldn’t make a difference to the microphone not working! Plus it should of only been for older Source games, Half-Life 2 for example. I gave it ago anyway, installed Alchemy and copied over my backed up Alchemy config file for Source games. Rebooted and… everything worked as it should. Interesting.

*Update*
Last week I uninstalled everything Creative and installed the package by Daniel_K (as noted by Tom in comments). You can find the link here. After I installed the complete package, I installed the latest driver (just the driver) over the top of of the existing driver (latest driver not included in Daniel_K package). After doing this my Source games worked correctly too.