The first thing you need to know is what is a lan party. A lan party is when like minded people orginise to take thier computers and meet in pre-arranged location, this can be anywhere from someone's house to a hotel conference suite (this is what we do).

Why? well there is quite a few answers to this question, the first is it's more fun to play multi-player games when everyone you are playing with are in the same room. The second reason is a lan (local area network) is by far faster than the internet, why is this important? well when you play a game online you can be playing against people from all over the world. This sounds great but the vast distances that seperate each player can cause problems.
When you connect to an online game you are connecting to a server, this server is what tells your computer where you are and what is happening you in the game. The time taken for your computer to send and receive information from the server is called a 'ping'. The higher your ping is means it is taking your computer longer to communicate with the server.
There are many reasons for this but the main one is your connection to the internet, most of us still connect to the internet with a 56k modem which is ok if you are just surfing web pages like this, but if you play games online generally you will have a high ping. Which means you are not playing the game in real time. You might just be half a second out of synch with everybody else in the game but it leaves you a sitting duck, especially with an opponent who has a low ping. Enter the local area network, every body's in the same room connected to a network that runs at 100mb a second!! now you can play in real time and scream at ZeroG (he likes to camp) all at the same time!!!

So what do you need? first you will need your computer, then you will have to get a network card preferably a 10/100mb nic (network interface card) you can pick them up from about £15 . If you are happy enough to install the card that's great off you go (please look in the networking section to set things up) , if not please get in touch and we can do that on the day, it's not a big job and we can have you up and running in 15-20 minutes. The third and most important thing is you need all the games we will be playing. Please go here for a list of the games we play. Most of these games are quite old and can be picked up quite cheaply. You will need patches for these games but they can be down loaded from my web server on the day. The fourth thing you need to take especially if we are installing the network card for you is your windows CD (with the certificate number) and any device drivers that you will need. This is just incase you have major problems. (we did have one guy who burnt out his graphics card!!).

ok any further questions please mail me here or post them on the forum and we will answer them as quickly as posible.