Father Xmas

Same here. Originally to get away from the power spamming and constant large crowds under Atlas.

I think some are still confused from the time the paragonwiki url pointed to the old wikia version.

As one of the few people who seems to be still on dial-up (live to far away from "civilization" for DSL and Cable and hill in way of Satellite) I've learned to liberally use adblock to screen out the excessively large (for me over 300KB) avatars, animated or otherwise (I've blocked a few over 300KB png and jpg files, is it so hard to learn how to crop and scale?).

The most egregious one since the forum move was over 12MB in size.

And yes, I currently run with img tags shut off. I come here to read, not to look at billboards.

The 2nd phase was July 16, 2008.

And honestly NCSoft, a year would be nice on the articles in the news archive.

Since I didn't see anyone link to it; http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Respec.

Mr. Incredible: No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved! You know, for a little bit? I feel like the maid; I just cleaned up this mess! Can we keep it clean for... for ten minutes!

I've also had relatively good response times in game. The only thing that annoys me a bit are the fixed responses when talking to a GM, as if they can only communicate in preapproved phrases. It would seem friendlier if it didn't feel like I was talking to an AI.

Also...

Players tend to be either in instanced missions or hanging out at the market or AE. This means that except for zone wide events like Rikti or Zombie Invasions or a giant monster roaming around, you won't see many players on the streets.

Due to e-mail spam (2-3 a day per character) from RMT groups who harvest character names off the /search results, many players have chosen to hide themselves from search which can make that method unreliable in determining how many people are currently logged in to your server.

Saw a proper 30 day time card today a Best Buy besides the $20 Game Card with the rented jet pack.

Mostly. Sort of like Xenomorphs and night.

Noticed one proper 30 day time card at one of the nearby (20 miles away) Best Buy, along with one AE box. Of course they also had Game Cards if you don't also mind buying 30 day jet packs.

Just so we are on the same page while discussing this ...

Laptop Specifications - Laptop Support Page

Processor Specifications Note this CPU does NOT support 64-bit in case someone comes along with that suggestion.

You can only max out memory to 2 GB. Here are the selections at NewEgg. Good news it's fairly inexpensive.

As for a hard drive upgrade. It's nice to see that your laptap is designed to make this easy. As for improved performance in this game switching to a 5400RPM drive, can't really say. Note you can't use SATA laptop drives. Only review I could find may not be all that fair (the 4200RPM drive has a much smaller cache and who knows what platter size, which with rotational speed pretty much determines how fast the drive can be). Some of the benchmarks do show significant improvement in loading times and performance in some software.

Only problem of swapping the hard drive is reinstalling the OS, I'm assuming Vista looking and the drivers they have at the support site. Even if you have an OS install disk from Gateway I see lots of potential hours needed plus whatever headaches you could have with the laptop specific drivers.

There may be a few optimizations we could do to your game settings and look over the software you have loaded with a CoHHelper and HiJackThis report.

Article about the gogamer sale from Massively.

For a laptop, memory is the way to go. Swapping to the hard drive is bad enough but laptop hard drives are notoriously slow (well the vast majority of them). It won't speed up your framerate but as TargetOne says it will smooth out game play and reduce zoning times by eliminating one bottleneck in your system.

My guess they alternate color in groups of five. First five bright, next five dim.

I would imagine when Aion hits next month that we'll see new NCSoft time cards hitting the stores as well.

recharge reduction is calculated as 1 / ( 1 + sum of all recharge bonuses ).

So if a power has an even recharge SO in it (33.33%) then it recharges in 1 / 1.3333 or 75% of the time.

Log on as one of your Level 50 heroes first and then try to make one.

In theory the Socket 1156 P55 based motherboards should be cheaper than the current crop of Socket 1366 X58 based motherboards. Still I wouldn't be surprised that more than a few variants will still be in the plus $200 range, full of copper heatsinks, heat pipes and multiple gigabit ethernet ports.

Since only two video cards can be supported with the integrated PCIe controller on the CPU (two as x8 connections), the really hard core, deep pocket DIYers probably won't embrace these boards.

On a plus note most MB manufactures have licensed the "secret code" that nVidia use to only have in their motherboard chips so both X58 and P55 mobos will support both SLi and Crossfire. I'm still disappointed that the only thing that prevented other mobos from supporting nVidia SLi was essentially a decryption key that the driver looks for embedded in nVidia motherboard chipsets and not some hardware deep voodoo.

Yea, the 2.80/3.46GHz i7-860 looks to be priced the same as the current 2.66/2.93GHz i7-920. The i7-860 is also more power efficient, only 95 watts rather than the 130 watts of the i7-920. The benchmark articles when the NDA lift comparing the CPUs from the two socket families should be an interesting read, not only CPU performance but single and multiple video card performance as well.

Edit: By the way, for those who don't read the Comic and Hero/Villain Culture forum or other MMO/gamer web sites, catch Do You Wanna Date My Avatar on Youtube.

That 2x weekend was also the only one they didn't reactivate old accounts. That probably also had something to with those servers not being overloaded this time.

Intel marketing crashes into physical socket. The Core i7, Core i5 and Core i3 designations are meant to convey high performance, mainstream and value respectively. However what they don't convey is the type of socket it needs.

As of right now the Socket 1156 chips have either the Core i7 or Core i5 designation. Current Core i7 and i5 CPUs all have 8MB of L3 cache and 4 cores.

The Socket 1156 CPUs only have a dual channel DDR3 memory controller internally instead of the triple channel found in the Socket 1366 Core i7s. The third channel really didn't buy a whole lot in performance but added to the complexity of the motherboard.

The Socket 1156 CPUs also have it's own integrated 16 channel PCIe controller to talk directly to the video card(s). This should speed up video performance. Now that both memory and GPU communication have dedicated interfaces on the CPU, communications to the rest of the hardware can be handled by a simple old fashion DMI interface, similar to what's found between current North and Southbridge chipsets. Currently the P55 chipset from Intel is the only one available for use with Socket 1156.

Lastly the Turbo Boost mode, which automatically overclocks one core if the others aren't busy is increased. Currently the Socket 1366 i7-9xx will kick the clock multiplier up by +2 or an extra 266MHz. The new i7-8xx series will kick the clock speed up by an additional 667MHz (+5 on the multiplier) while the new i5-7xx series will kick the clock speed up by an additional 533MHz (+4 on the multipler).

The other difference between the i7-9xx/i7-8xx series and the i5-7xx series is support of hyperthreading, the i5-7xx doesn't have it, it is just 4 cores and 4 threads.

You've all heard that they are implementing login queues in Issue 16 players on busy servers don't need to repeatedly login hoping that a space has opened up during special events.

This should give you an idea of how the missions and contacts are structured on the CoH side of the game.

After your origin contact for level 1-5 in either Atlas or Galaxy, you will be directed to other contacts in Atlas, Galaxy and Kings Row for level 5-10 missions. While doing that contact's missions they will give you other contacts from other the origins, eventually giving you one contact from each origin for that level range.

Now while there are multiple contacts for each origin in each level range, you will only get one contact for that origin/level range. Don't fret, they all offer the same set of missions.

Then there are zone specific contacts and missions that are origin independent. You will find these in what I call "Story Zones", The Hollows, Faultline, Striga Isle, Croatoa, RWZ, Ouroboras and Cimerora.