Father Xmas

I think we are seeing an influx of gamers from other MMOs between their major releases. MMOs whose forums are survival of the fittest, where helping is a sign of weakness and entrenchment of a position is the norm, regardless of the facts.

Think reintegrating a feral child into civilized society.

Who needs to write a program. Process Explorer lets you see the command line used to launch an application.

The HD 5450 is a very, very weak video card so forget about UM. For $130 at Dell you can upgrade to the HD 5770 which should be able to do UM at their middle settings at 1600x900.

Don't see a problem off had with the rest.

Xoom was pushed out the door ahead of the iPad2 announcement before it was done. The memory card port isn't working yet and neither is a Flash plugin for the browser.

Now if they fix those two things and come out with a wi-fi only version for $100 less then it would be tempting. However I don't want a wireless data contract with tiny data caps for large amounts of money per month.

I get a laugh out of Samsung who publicly stated that they are now ashamed with their gen 2 Galaxy Tab, which isn't out yet but it's hardware specs are, when it's compared to the iPad2.

In Japan that's cocky pretty boy pose. Commonly found in girl's comics when a male character thinks <Dr_Draken_voice>"he's all that"</Dr_Draken_voice>.

Makes sense to a degree since Cyc is a blaster unlike Beast or Logan. Easy to be cocky if all you have to do is literally look at someone funny to attack them at range.

In college it went great with liquid nitrogen.

Actually all the servers are now in Texas, including the EU ones.

Figured that was the one when you said Antec and full size tower.

Any particular reason you want/need a full size tower over a beefy sized mid tower? Like a whole lot of hard drives/optical drives or other options that'll take external bays like fan controller or multi disk hot swap housing?

Anywho, with up to six fans at least you shouldn't worry about keeping everything cool.

That's what the "(B3)" means in the motherboard description. That's the version number of the fixed chipset.

List looks fine. Not sure what you mean by Antec25 for a case, need a link or better description.

(munch, munch, munch) sound of large post being eaten

I was contrasting that MSI microATX mother board to it's P67 big brother the P67A-GD65.

I'll disagree with the others and say it's not a bad motherboard. It's just very limited in what and how you can upgrade and for a DIYer it's not something they would choose.

Sorry about the over abundance of acronyms. I'll try to turn my difficulty setting down to novice.

I ran your parts like through the calculator and only got a minimum of 333 watts.

The CPU is rated at 95 watts, the video card at 170 watts so that's 265 watts of primarily 12 volt power. So lets be generous and double that to 530 watts or about 45 amps at 12 volts. Toss in another 75 watts to cover all the other voltages and we are about 600ish watts.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from your choice of PSU, the Corsair is a fine choice, just that 750 watts is far more than what's needed. Actually if push came to shove a very high quality 450 watt PSU could do the deed, 500 watt easily, 550 watt comfortably. But considering the small delta in price, due to all the sales up at NewEgg, there's nothing wrong with your choice.

Oh, and I hate your choice of memory. CAS 9 DDR3-1333, yuck. CAS 7 DDR3-1333 or CAS 9 DDR3-1600 better but more expensive choice. But if you insist on not paying a lot for memory then get something with heat spreaders like this.

This leaves the case and the Microsoft tax (ie a copy of Win 7 64-bit).

The iPad is a toaster. What I mean is it's a device that the average consumer can treat like a toaster, plug it in and it works.

Get your e-mail, update your social network status, surf the web, watch silly YouTube video, read a book, play a game that has less than 5 minute rounds as a time killer, etc.

It's a media consumption device not a content creation device. And by media I mean paid media. Sure you can rip your own music and transcode video for it but Apple wants you to impulse buy for a couple of bucks a movie rental or song or book or magazine or game. Who needs to go to Borders anymore (answer obviously not enough since they are closing up shop nearly everywhere). Heck B&N now is selling boardgames, like the entire line of Settlers of Catan games, year round but I digress.

Anybody buying an iPad or any tablet and think it's a legitimate replacement for a laptop or desktop is delusional or is quite computer illiterate. It's like saying a Vespa is a suitable replacement for a car.

And just to be clear, with the store down, deleting any character, new or old, will not free up a slot if you still have 12 or more characters on that server.

Doesn't matter that you deleted a character from one of your original 12 or even 8 slots for us old timers made back in 2004. The game doesn't discriminate between added slots and original slots.

Rising Stars as a TV series not called Heroes.

Could be pointed at a wormhole or some other plot device.

If you look at that MB Hyper you will see that the SATA ports that would be blocked by a video card are pointing sideways, not up. Only the two that aren't likely to be blocked are pointing up. Manufacturers may be slow but they do eventually learn. Unless they are doing really low end uATX motherboards you find in store PCs, then all bets are off.

Almost convinced my folks yesterday to buy a new "inexpensive" store system so they can finally turn their Pentium II 450MHz PC into a boat anchor. Sadly they didn't go for it. Still rocking Firefox 2 and Windows 98 SE on that beast.

It's inexpensive because its;

A microATX motherboard so no CrossfireX or SLi, only has 4 card slots;

Based around the H67 chipset so no support for the unlocked Sandy Bridge CPUs or additional memory speeds;

Doesn't have premium ports like IEEE 1394. eSATA or digital audio out;

Only allows two sticks of memory;

Only 4 USB 2.0 ports out the back, needed the space for all the video out options (D-Sub, HDMI, DVI);

Doesn't have any extra SATA III ports.

$100 seems about right.

I used the CoH_Installer.exe that Zombie linked to and in the announcement on multiple machines and the install went smoothly. Mostly. I use ZoneAlarm and the Launcher and Copy_Launcher (it bootstraps itself so it alternates between the two) needed to be given the OK multiple times. However when it was all done everything was AOK.

Also all those machines already have all the various .NET packages installed and patched for quite a while now. I can see lacking that may be a problem for some.

The assumption that a PC will have the same IP address in naive at best. Most DSL (or any ISP that uses PPPoE) and dare I say dial-up (like me) are assigned IP addresses at connection.

I see your Flash Forward and raise you Journeyman.

The 30 day CoH game card is normally $20, creates an account, gives you a month and your characters get a jet pack for that month. At stores like BestBuy (and they may still be available at 7-11s) it is hanging with other MMO points cards that need to be validated at checkout. It's like buying a box version of the game, but without the box, or a DVD, or a manual (edit: or access to Praetoria or Going Rogue enabled content).

The Time Cards are in DVD cases and are good for NCSoft subscription based MMOs. The current case is for Aion, Lineage I+II and CoH.

Edit: You can also go to the NCSoft store and buy an account plus one month for only $9.99. But that won't get you access to Praetoria or any of Going Rogue enabled content. That requires the $29.99 Going Rogue - Complete Collection.

Never underestimate the data bandwidth of a C-5 Galaxy full of BD-R DL disks.

Wondering if this is like what Blizzard does, distribute patches via a custom bittorrent client.

Socket 1155.

Also it's important to get a motherboard with a P class chipset to take advantage of the unlocked multipliers in the i5-2500K. Currently only the P67 allows this, the H61/67 does not.

Also the P67 allows the CPU to use faster memory, unlocking the multipliers for DDR3-1600, -1866 and -2133.