Father Xmas

Start with my $750 build.

Swap out the Power Supply for a 650 Watt Corsair 650TX, +$27.

Swap out the Athlon II X2 245 for a 3.0GHz Phenom II X4 945, +$79.

Swap out the HD 5770 for a Gigabyte or Sapphire HD 5850 in the $320 range, +$150.

That's about $260 worth of upgrades. For $20 more you could go to the 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 or $40 more to the 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 965.

As for the memory most CPU/Motherboards perform better if RAM is installed in pairs (i7-9xx CPUs are the exception, they like RAM in threes). Performance will degrade if they aren't in pairs.

Intel's E5400? No not all that great but considering your target price range it's to be expected. At least it's not a Celeron or even an Atom.

A better choice is Intel's E6xxx/E7xxx series, Intel i3 or an AMD Athlon II CPU.

Yes, the game does run under Windows 7.

Shoot for at least 4GB of memory and 64-bit Windows 7.

At that price range you will be stuck with integrated graphics. AMD and nVidia integrated graphics tend to be faster than Intel's.

Stay away from slim-line systems/narrow cases, they limit what video cards can physically fit in there.

And if I remember correctly, WoW's installer/updater is akin to Bittorrent, which along with 10 gazillion players tend to provide a ton of bandwidth for getting the games. NCSoft seems to rely on strict download servers and thus a bit more limited.

One advantage of having the entire game as a trial is if someone decides to subscribe, there is nothing more needed to download.

Also an Atari 800 guy.

C) Tough to say.

It's always an iffy proposition to compare a faster dual core with a slower quad core.

On one hand benchmarks that scale to the number of cores almost always perform better when their are more cores present. You need a very large difference in clock speed to not be faster. On the other if a benchmark is only single or dual core, then the slower quad will lose.

Intel's Turbo Boost mode isn't just hype. On one hand it fixes the problem in the previous paragraph. When only one or two cores are being used, the i7-720QM will be clocked faster than their 1.6GHz default speed. A single core to 2.8GHz, two cores to 2.4GHz and even three and four cores to 1.73GHz if power use and temps are within limits.

So here are some benchmarks.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/lap...-benchmarked/2

Passmark
T9300 - 1664
i7-720QM - 3230

Not as many articles comparing laptop CPUs.

And the badge at Ouroboros is at the top of the gnomon if you are ported there. Just fly, jump or simply run up the cable to the top.

OK, that's a Dx19/Dx10/OpenGL benchmark. Maybe you're GPU bound?

You have an HD 5870 right? You should, for giggles, give their Heaven benchmark a try and look at all the pretty tessellation.

And that's another downside about laptops Vs desktops. With a laptop if something breaks, other than memory or the hard drive, the whole thing needs to go into the shop. On a desktop if something breaks, there is a good chance you can simply swap out the bad part.

The corollary to that is laptops aren't that upgradeable, usually. You could add more memory or swap out the hard drive for one faster and bigger but that's it. So if you buy an inexpensive laptop today, that just means it'll be obsolete faster tomorrow so you should buy as much power as you can afford.

With a desktop, take my $750 build, you can go inexpensive today but upgrade the CPU and video card to something faster and contemporary every year or two and still have a reasonably up to date PC platform.

Well laptops aren't my expertise. I'm basing my recommendations on purely technical details about the laptop GPUs (video) and how they compare to desktop ones.

Looking about I've found a few reviews for the 3 G73JH models built around the mobile version of the HD 5870. The differences are the two more expensive models (that are currently out of stock) come with two 500GB hard drives and swag (backpack, matching mouse) Vs one 500GB hard drive.

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,...9305357,00.htm
http://www.notebookreview.com/defaul...asus+g73+g73jh
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3662/a...sized-gaming/1

And the official NCSoft response.

Every time I see that name, the song Interplanet Janet runs through my head. Why should I be the only one?

Except that's wrong StrifeFox. I17 fixed a number of quirks the game had with ATI cards, and introduced a few new ones. The biggest being a conflict between AA and AO.

Any how Harry is using an nVidia card.

As for Harry's problem there isn't anything obvious. His game settings are set extremely low. His HJT report is clean as a whistle. Memory and page file size seem OK. Yes it's a very low end original Athlon but that shouldn't be a problem unless AVG is bogging down the loading of the zone data so the connection times out.

Well first this is a player help player and not official support.

Second, if you haven't noticed the forum now uses the same password as the game. Sounds like you have but I just wanted to point that out since they could be different in the past.

Third, case matters.

Edit:

Fourth, could you be running a firewall product that needs to be informed that it's OK for cityofheroes.exe to talk to the internet.

I concur with Fleeting. Most likely their skeleton proportions are so different from player ones that most of the other emotes would cause horrible clipping problems if the standard animation was used. But everyone gets a kick out of making minions dance. And maybe protest.

More RAM helps because the OS doesn't have to juggle memory to and from the swap file on the hard drive and compared to RAM, a hard drive is 100+ times slower.

Defrag works because most patches will read in, patch if required and then write every pigg file in the game. Even if they aren't modified. If your hard drive is full or simply doesn't have a lot of contiguous blocks of free space, the pigg files will fragment (some are quite large). Several free third party defrag utilities allow you to defrag a specific directory (Defraggler, Auslogics Disk Defrag) and tend to take less time than defragging the whole drive.

There's a newer CoHHelper now that includes all the new UM settings.