Dante

*Ducks and covers*

I'll admit, my advice was based on your common or garden, average cuppa tea that your average Brit would probably make if you asked for one. When it comes to the more refined tastes, I'm pretty much a knuckle-dragging barbarian. So if you're into trying out green teas and herbal teas and all the other exotic types out there, I'd listen to the experts rather than me.

I certainly have the problem of warm water rather than boiling at my workplace too. And they won't let us have a kettle either! Grrrr...!

And on a side note, Turkish coffee is... an experience. I don't think I've ever had that much caffeine shot through my system in one go before.

Ah tea...!

Okay, I guess the thing about tea is that it's like a milder form of coffee. Us Brits tend to find coffee quite abrasive and has a tad too much ZING! to it when you want a relaxing drink. Quite often, I want a warm drink that gives me a bit of pep but not so much that it sends me bouncing off of the walls as coffee is want to do. Tea fills that gap quite nicely.

It's also not a drink that is easy to appreciate on the move so it lends itself to sitting down and drinking it, hence why tea breaks are opportunities to take the weight off of your feet and not move for a few minutes. And then there's the dunking...

Some biscuits are made for dunking, some are not. And the quest to find the ultimate dunking biscuit is a long and hard fought quest. For me, it's Custard Creams.

As for making tea, I won't go for the three hour Tea Ritual that's apparently still practiced around the other side of the globe. But here's how I prepare mine:

1) Boil kettle with sufficient water.
2) Place tea bag into empty mug.
3) Fill with boiling water (it MUST be boiling, just hot water makes rubbish tea)
4) Leave for 3 minutes, no less, no more.
5) Remove tea bag and discard.
6) Stir in cold milk.
7) Add sugar to taste.

Some heathens pour the milk in when the tea bag is still in the cup but this ruins the flavour of the tea as the material of the tea bag absorbs the fat from the milk.

Sheesh, that was a longer post than I anticipated. Still, enjoy, it's an acquired taste.


Oh, one last point, I have no idea what brands are available in the States, so I can't advise on them really. I drink Yorkshire brand tea but I don't know if it's available over there. Sometimes the water in your area can affect the flavour so you might need to get one that's formulated for hard water.

Thanks guys, this has helped a lot. I'm looking at the GTX460 at the moment and trying to work out whether it will fit onto my motherboard. The 8400 is 20mm deep and just about fits above one of my PCI slots whereas the GTX460 is 37mm deep so will probably overshadow it. I guess it means giving up one of my PCI slots really. Are all new cards this deep and is my 8400 behind the times in being a bit slimmer? Some sites list the card as being "dual width" which I guess means they just doubled the size of them in order to get a bigger cooling unit on top.

As for the other requirements, my PCU is 500W which seems to suggest I'll need to upgrade that too. I also play on a 19" flatscreen monitor but typically have CoX windowed for easier Alt+Tabbing. I think my resolution's not that high but I can push it higher on my monitor if needed. IIRC, it's about 1024x768.

One other thing: the site I'm probably going to buy the card from states this:

REQUIREMENTS
- PCI Express or PCI Express 2.0- compliant motherboard with one dualwidth x16 graphics slot
- Two 6-pin PCI Express supplementary power connectors
- Minimum 550W or greater system power supply (with a minimum 12V current rating of 38A)*

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/p...OV-GTX461.html

What's with the second item? The two 6-pin PCI Express supplementary power connectors? Is this a secondary power supply I need to hook up?

Thanks again. Imaginary +rep all round.

Partner placated? Check!

Childcare arranged? Check!

Time booked off work? Check!

Count me in!

I will have to lay claim to one of those PCs as well. I could bring my laptop but it tends to start gasping and wheezing if I try to get it to play CoX for more than ten minutes at a time.


Oh and in case I forget to say it, thanks very much for organising this Kallandra.

Ok, so it’s finally time to take the plunge. I have upgraded my computer on a number of occasions and have no trouble with plugging components in and out etc. However, the one part I am useless with: video cards. There’s too much jargon that I can’t get my head round and I’m struggling to locate a card that can handle Ultra Mode in all its glory. And so I come to you, gurus of graphics card to ask for your recommendations.

At the moment, I can manage to play CoX on its most minimal settings and all shadows turned off. I don’t need the top end of the range but I would like to make a significant jump and get the game to somewhere in the middle – top of what Ultra Mode can provide. My budget is somewhere around £100 - £200 (that’s $150 - $315 in US money) depending on what I can get hold of although I might go a bit higher if I feel it’s worth it. I also don’t have the biggest case in the world so something that’s not a monstrous bulk of a card would definitely be a bonus.

In terms of other games, I did manage to handle Age of Conan a while back but it struggled big time. I’m also interested in checking out Knights of the Old Republic when it comes out.

This is my current computer set up:

Processor: Intel Core2 Duo 3.00 Ghz
Motherboard: Gigabyte G31M-S2L
RAM: 4 GB DIMM DDR2
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS
O/S: XP Home

This is the card I was looking at, based on the post Positron made a few months back although it appears to be discontinued.

http://www.dabs.com/products/gigabyt...ce%20GTX%20260


Anything that you experts can recommend would be appreciated as this is one area where my technical knowledge really does hugely suck. I’ve tried to follow other threads on card recommendations but I tend to get lost very quickly.

Many thanks!

Welcome back.

Glad you've decided to re-enter the fray.

Belated congratulations Lady. Hope it was a great day.

Good idea!

I'm a sucker for meeting up with other CoX players (and usually embarrassing myself in front of them) so count me in.

I can get to most places in the UK, so I'd suggest somewhere nice and central really so it's not too far for anyone to get to. If I might suggest, in the past the EU Community Reps have been willing to spring for some prizes. So if you wanted to run any contests etc so it might be worth seeing if our overseas lords and masters would do similar.

Hi there.

My Sonic/En, The Amber Banshee, is one of my favourite 50s to run around on so I'll offer up what advice I can give. I see you've softcapped your range and have some tasty accuracy and recharge but I feel you may be sacrificing some of your core tools in order to do so. If this is a final build you intend to play at 50, you should do ok but if you're going to try levelling with this, you may face some problems.

1) Power Thrust is an excellent tool from 1-50 for any foe that gets within melee range. It's far more effective than Shockwave and is great at early levels for juggling foes so they can't fight back.

2) No Siren's Song. The best tool available for the solo Blaster, being able to sleep your foes then pick them off one by one is excellent. Also good for ghosting.

3) No Screech. Screech is your anti-mezz tactic. Stun the mezzing mob at range and then take out his friends before he can recover. Very good on teams too, unlike Shockwave which'll probably get you shouted at.

4) Interesting slotting on Dreadful Wail. However, if you're going to sacrifice your endurance bar, at least get some damage out of it. If you insist on getting the full set of Stupefy, I'd suggest dumping Dreadful Wail and take Screech instead. Otherwise, leaping into a mob and attempting to stun them all at the cost of all of your endurance, leaving you unable to take advantage of the stun is a bit wasteful in my opinion.

Other than that, no real criticisms. I can't see the point of the fighting pool on a Blaster but I figure you're taking it to hit the soft cap. You've got no knockback protection either but that might not bother you if you're Hovering all of the time. Personally, four slotting Power Thrust or Shockwave with Kinetic Crash is a cheap way of getting 3 points which will do you most of the time for PvE.

I hope that helps some.

EDIT: Oh and Power Boost has no effect on the -Res your attacks do. It will improve your stuns and your flight speed but not much else on a build like this. Consider it if you want to go crazy on your stun attacks.

Many congratulations Carni. I'm sure you're doing a great job.

That state of low grade terror is something I think every good parent feels from time to time. I know I certainly do with my daughter.

The two servers often change places in terms of population. The last time I checked, Union was supposedly ahead.

Both servers are very similar although Union is the EU's unofficial roleplay server however you really wouldn't notice it unless you went looking for it. Both are good and have their own channels for organising teams, TFs etc.

Congratulations! I hope everything goes smoothly and you have a wonderful day you can treasure for the rest of your lives together.

At first I thought this was the '1,000 Supatrolls in Skyway' bug back again but it turns out to be far more enjoyable news.

Congratulations to you both. Once the little girl arrives all thoughts of future boyfriends will disappear with one wink of those baby blues. I'm still working on my little one. At 20 months, she can sit on my lap and clap each time I toast something in game. Hopefully within a year, she'll be playing better than me.

Heh, and I even remember where it's from...

Of course it was slightly diminished by the daft rave afterwards.


But hell yes, we are still here and still kicking ***.

Well done Sapphic.

It was nice knowing you.



*Watches the horizon for divine retribution...*