Father Xmas

It's a licensing thing.

OEM disks don't come with Microsoft support, the PC provider is suppose to do it which for DIYers means you.

They are meant to be tied to the hardware in question. In a retail version, the license says you can transfer that copy of the OS to another piece of hardware as long as it's removed from the PC it was originally on. An OEM license binds the two together. Sell/donate the PC, the OS license goes with it, no save.

With a retail copy, I believe you can upgrade to the 64-bit OS for a slight charge (shipping of the DVD). With the OEM version, you choose up front 32-bit or 64-bit.

That's all I can think of off hand. I'm sure some nice player who is a certified Microsoft tech will come by to add anything I missed or correct me if I misrepresented something.

Since we didn't know how much memory you had, it was a possibility. 2GB should be enough assuming you don't have a ton of other memory hogging apps active while playing the game.

I played GTA III as if I was a deep undercover agent trying to get to the guy behind the whole thing. That is one of the problems with a true sandbox game. A fairly high percentage of gamers need some sort of guidance to progress in a game. In a sandbox they simply follow how they see others play or get bored because they missed the contact that gets them started. Picking up prostitutes, having them "heal" you and then kill them and take their money must be the way the game was intended to play, I see everyone talking about it.

Same is true here. How every team now needs to be 8 members. Leveling up as fast as you can is the primary goal. Everyone has to do sewer teams at low level. CoT are a pain, do Freakshow. Wait, arcane salvage is worth big bucks, everyone do CoT and forget about Freakshow. Wait, we can get arcane salvage with tickets, everyone do loads of ticket rich MA missions. The "adventure" of walking the streets, fighting crime, helping the weak, you know the theme behind CoH, has been reduced down to the flavorless basics of any MMO. Level and loot.

Level 50 shouldn't be the goal, it's the reward for accomplishing all the other goals, story arcs and missions in the game.

Trial accounts can't use MA. They can be invited to a team playing a MA mission but they can't start one or create one themselves.

Yea that's the quote I remembered.

Sorry I can't find the quote but I do remember sometime very recently that there was mention that some of the new hires are working on something new. Sorry I can't remember exactly what. It doesn't look as if the quote was on these forums, it must be in one of the online interviews. I believe Posi made some mention of it.

Yea, it's vague upon vague and it wasn't even specific what they were working on. I would hope it's a revamp of the renderer or even a revamp of the underlining structures dealing with powers and effects (the whole power customization issue). But it may have simply been a reference to Going Rogue.

[minor rant]
First report 9:13 AM EDT

Red Name reports it is being looked at nearly 10 hours later.

10 minutes after Red Name reports it is being looked at the problem is resolved.

Why did it take 10 hours before action was taken? It's Virtue. It's not like there isn't a crowd on it 24/7. I know that MA has made the market less useful with ticket purchasing of salvage and all but I can't believe that NCSoft didn't get flooded with /bug and /petitions about this problem besides this thread and it took 10 hours before someone there logged in themselves to confirm it and then kicked the server?

Too many mission arcs to play I guess.
[/minor rant]

No just that we already have a 'heads up' post telling us any weekday from 9-11 Eastern, the servers may be taken down during that time. Why tell us again?

They do warn us if they believe it is going to take longer than the two hours or if one of the ancillary server/services are going to be down like the in-game store for slots, transfers, respecs and renames.

So while they could give us a warning the day before for a normal patch release, I'm not all that upset when they don't. And to frame this properly, I'm on dial-up. When a patch comes out it may take me a day before I can play due to the duration of the download. This latest one wasn't bad but the 37MB one took over two hours to download which pretty much shot that evening to hell. With advance warning I could at least have other activities planned as the download is going on than playing Peggle and watching the time remaining tick down.

No, the game saves it's hardware settings in the Windows Registry, TweakCoH simply modifies them. You could modify them directly as well but it's to easy for someone who thinks they know enough to mess up their system. A version of this program has been around since the open beta of City of Heroes in 2004.

[ QUOTE ]
Okay, I played around on the Dell website for a bit and this is what I have come up with...what do you think?

Inspiron 530.........$569
Intel® Pentium® dual-core processor E5200 (2MB L2, 2.5GHz, 800FSB)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1
Microsoft Works 9.0
1Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis
3GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 DIMMs
320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
No Monitor
ATI RADEON HD 4670 512MB
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell Optical USB Mouse
No Floppy Drive Included
No Modem Option
Dell 1505 Wireless-N PCIe Card


Inspiron 530.........$669
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E7400 (3MB L2 Cache,2.80GHz,1066 FSB)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition SP1, 64-Bit
Microsoft Works 9.0
1Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz- 4DIMMs
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
Dell S1709W 17" Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor
ATI Radeon HD3650 256MB
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell Optical USB Mouse
No Floppy Drive Included


Studio Desktop.............$759
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E7400 (3MB L2, 2.8GHz, 1066FSB)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition SP1, 64-Bit
Microsoft Works 9.0
1Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis
Dell S1909WX 19 inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz- 2DIMMs
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
nVidia GeForce 9800GT
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Dell Consumer Multimedia Keyboard and Laser Mouse
Integrated 16-in-1 Media Card Reader
Dell 1505 Wireless-N PCIe Card

[/ QUOTE ]
No on the $669 one, HD3650 is not a great card relatively speaking.

Of the two remaining the $759 Studio Desktop is the more powerful of the two, CPU and GPU wise. Adding memory is easy so the fact it only has 2GB isn't really a problem and it's a relatively cheap upgrade. Plus it comes with a monitor as oppose to the $569 model.

Let me take a different tack here, what to avoid in store bought PCs.

"Slim line" cases as they don't take standard size video cards.
Less than 2GB of memory.
Vista Basic.
Integrated Graphics from Intel, nVidia, or ATI.
Intel CPUs that start with E2xxx or E4xxx.
AMD Phenom processors (not Phenom II) that end in 00 like a 9100.

Narrow down the systems you are considering and come back and ask our opinion on what's left.

I'm guessing because mscorsvw is running, assuming it was also running when you started up the game. Nothing looks out of the ordinary in the HiJack This and you have plenty of ram.

You could try defragging the HD partition that has the game on it but I'm grasping at straws here.

The game uses OpenGL for it's graphics.

atioglxx.dll is the OpenGL portion of ATI's graphics drivers.

I would say the fix, and got be more specific due to the lack of any useful bits of information, is to reinstall the graphics driver.

Assuming US PC Client.

Download it to your desktop and run it from there. After it downloads everything else, delete the files from there and use the shortcut the install places there instead.

Yes but the USB interface itself is a limiting factor (slower than HD) plus the higher CPU overhead.

Well you have a Mac so you would have better luck asking players in the Mac area of the forum than the players here in the tech board. Mac support is relatively new and most of us are PC people.

That's assuming you are running naively on your Mac and not using Bootcamp to run XP or Vista.

I would recommend turning on the advance graphics options and try turning off Depth of Field, Bloom and maybe turn down the Water Effects a notch and see how much they affect your framerate. (/showfps 1 if you didn't know).

Also reduce the World Detail to 100%. World Detail determines how "far" you can see fixed objects and while 200% is pretty and all, it does load down the CPU with the setup work for the video card.

DDR2 memory is going to start to creep up in price as fabs are ramping up DDR3 production as more Phenom II and Core i7s are sold not to mention Core 2 MBs that use DDR3.

CPU and video card prices tend to jump downward in spurts as they release newer, faster product at the top end, everything else gets bumped down a price point. This means either the CPU or video card you are looking at is cheaper or that you could buy more for the same price.

As for the Rosewill PSU, I'm having second thoughts based on it's review over at JonnyGURU. JonnyGURU was one of the first sites on the web that actually did extensive load testing on PSUs and not just stuck it in a box and looked at what the BIOS said the voltages were. They also tear down the PSU and look at the quality of parts inside.

That sounds more like that you don't have enough system memory. How much do you have and how many things are you also running in the background?

Not a fan of Rosewill PSUs.

The Q8200 is an OK quad core but for the same price you can get an E8400 that is roughly 40% faster. Of course with top end graphically intensive games, it's the video card that is the limiting factor.

If you are seriously considering the 9800GTX+ then you shouldn't overlook the GTS250 which is the same card, different name which may be going for less. If you were considering an SLi setup with two of those cards then I would suggest a single GTX260/216 or a GTX275 for about the same price as two 9800GTX+/GTS250.

I concur with the 1GB WD Black Caviar drive.

As for the memory situation. A 32-bit OS like XP Home can at most see 4GB and with all the memory mapped devices and a video card with lots of memory, likely only see around 3GB of it. It's OK to go with 4 but forget about 8 unless you are planning to install Vista 64-bit or wait for Windows 7 64-bit. In all honesty, I can't recommend a RC of an OS unless you realize up front that when it actually comes out you will need to buy it for real and the safest route would be a full reinstall.

Just my 2 cents.

The GT120 is a rebranded 9500GT with DDR2 video memory. Performance wise it is around the 8600GT which is light years ahead of an integrated 6150.

The 8800GS was nVidia's attempt at something to fill the gap between the 8600GTS and the 8800GT. By going with an odd 192-bit memory bus and a 96SP version of a G92 they essentially choked the performance out of the card with only 60% of the bandwidth of a G80 based 320MB 8800GTS.

The HD 4770 has twice the texture fill rate and four times the raw FLOP performance of the 320MB 8800GTS. However its potential performance gain is muted by a relatively small bandwidth to memory.

Still it is an amazing $99-109 video card.

ig4dev32.dll is the OpenGL portion of the Intel graphics driver. So I would say that it is either corrupted or old. Check with DxDiag to see if the graphic drivers are the same.

That's similar to what my parents have.

Problem is finding a faster Socket 478 Pentium 4, preferably a Northwood core which is a lot less power hungry than a Prescott core. The Northwood core has only 512KB of cache. The technical specs on the Dell Dimension 2600 says it will recognize up to the 3.0GHz/800MHz FSB or the 3.06GHz/533MHz FSB version of the Pentium 4. There are no dual core Pentium D's for that socket.

That video card you found is reasonable, should be 3 times faster than what you currently have installed. It does use a 4-pin hard drive power connector but it shouldn't be so much power to brown out the 250 watt PSU the Dell uses.

Use TweakCoh. Otherwise there's some "trick" involved since it isn't intuitively obvious what to do to get a resolution change to stick.