Gaia

At that resolution you could probably reduce your budget significantly especially if you don't need to buy a new monitor.

A tip with SSDs though - do not put your cache files on it - they can be slower to write to than hard drives and will rapidly degrade. TRIM support reduces this degradation a *LOT* but doesn't entirely eliminate it. Do not buy an SSD without TRIM support or you will be reformating it every couple of months to restore performance.
You can get a 40Gb SSD in the UK for around the £60-£80 mark and with typical computer pricing £=$ - two of those in a striped RAID array should give you excellent performance


Oh and Crossfire has never required identical cards. I'm not sure that SLi still does either, However I'd suggest that a single higher spec card is a better option than two lower performance cards in SLi - You will always have the performance even on apps that don't support SLi/Crossfire and still will have the option to add another card(s) later.

As I said Herzfold is the other Loyalist starting contact for that level range - Herzford, Bobcat, Neuron so if you haven't done those you won't be breaking away from straight loyalist.

Oh and Herzford's arc is full of failed experiments!

The two Resistance paths can both be done by Loyalists under cover - no need to switch sides.

Have you done both of the Resistance contacts and Herzfold up to Neuron as well?
If you don't go undercover you can run out of arcs.
I had to switch sides before Herzfold would talk to my Resistance toon - there may be a similar issue with the Resistance contacts for Loyalists, others have been able to do Herzfold but not AM. I suspect that has more to do with AM and Neuron's relationship.

I'm with most of the others on this - the only thing I'd consider would be an extra 1Gb of RAM everything else is just throwing good money after bad.
Buying a new PC would be as cheap as upgrading to bring it up to a performance level where you could run UM.

Either that or look around on the second hand market or end of line/surplus/bankrupcy sales.

They ask for that information for a very good reason.
They need to know what you are doing at the time of the problem so they can try to reproduce it. If a problem cannot be reproduced then it will be a nightmare to identify far less to resolve.
If there is a problem on the users PC that can be identified that needs to be fixed first so that it does not hide any other problem which lies elsewhere.

If a problem is affecting one user then its probably that user's PC or their connection to their ISP.
If it affects everyone in the same way then its probably either the game code or the servers.
If it affects everyone on ONE server and no-one else then its probably to do with that server.
If it affects ALL servers at one location then its probably related to the server management or their network connection.
If it affects many people on all servers at one site then its probably a routing problem on the internet which is outside their or your control - how many that will affect will depend on where the problem link is. If its close to the servers them the majority of users will be affected, if its close to the users then only those in that locality will be affected. In both cases other users not routed via the affected link will not be affected. This will also mean that the dev/support teams will see everthing as working normally as they are connecting over an internal network.
It could also be a Denial of Service attack on any link in your connection to their servers or even be a side effect of an attack elsewhere.
Or even a perfectly legitimate peak in internet traffic caused by something totally unrelated - maybe a new game was released for the PS3 and everyone is trying it out online, saturating a server at some point which is also used to route traffic between you and the game servers.

In short there are 3 type of problem
- ones at your end which the support team can help you to fix but ultimately are your responsibility.
- ones at their end which are their responsibility to fix and
- ones on the network between you which could be any of a multitude of others responsibility but very difficult to identify who or what.

I did try using a joystick back in 2005 and whilst possible CoH like most PC games is designed to be played using mouse and keyboard and this doesn't tend to translate well to using a joystick but by all means try it.

The buttons will map to either JOY**** or the same as the mouse buttons in general but you are probably largely on your own trying to work out which binds to which control.
Binding a chat message (team chat would be good just please don't spam broadcast) would help identify them.

The problem came up last night on both UK servers at the same time. Rubberbanding like crazy and LCMS - I was seeing it on Union and Defiant Events had several compaining about it at the same time.

The usual cause of this is one link in France through which all UK traffic is routed to the servers in Germany but if the US servers were seeing this at the same time its probably something else.
Were both US server farms affected simultaneously and did this coincide with the problems in the UK (and I presume on Zukunft and Vigilance also)?

If so its unlikely to be the game code - a bug in the server management software otoh is a possibility.
A hardware problem simultaneously affecting multiple servers is also extremely unlikely.

Is this on the laptop's screen or on an external monitor?

If its the latter the first thing to check is that the monitor lead is properly seated (both at the laptop and also at the monitor). If its loose some of the pins may not be making proper contact - if that is the ones carrying the red signal you will get a cyan cast.
The same could be an issue with the built in screen but thats not as easy to fix.

How limited?

Uriel,

Are you running the game in XP mode? Win7 Pro effectively runs a copy of XP if you are - I would expect that to be at SP3 though. (Lower versions of Win7 only emulate XP).
I assume that your version of Win7 is a retail or OEM version, the beta versions are possibly earlier if they are still activated.
In any event the game runs fine in Native Win7 so no need to run in XP Mode.

My first thought is your PSU may be overloaded on one of its power rails.

The MB power lead includes a voltage sensing control line and if that is out of spec it will shut the system down in the manner you describe.

What make and power rating is the PSU?
Bear in mind a quality 600W PSU will probably outperform a budget 1000W one. With a budget one the power rating is often quoted as the sum of the power ratings of each rail even if it is not capable of driving them all to that level simultaneously.

Are your graphics card and MB connectors drawing power from the same power lead even if not they may still be drawing from the same power rail but if they are you may be able try swapping connectors if its a modular PSU or try the second GPU conector if there is one.
Check your PSU fan is clean and spinning freely (do the same for the CPU and GPU fans whilst you're at it).
What else is being powered? - obviously at least one hard drive and probably also an optical drive and your case fans. Anything else - try disconnecting - if that solves it you will need to upgrade the PSU.
If you have access to a desk fan try setting that to cool the PSU as well - again if that makes a difference this would once again point to needing to upgrade but you may have a usable option in the meantime.

Also another free possibility - try reseating the MB and GPU power leads - a poor connection could cause this - unlikely but as I said it costs nothing.

It sounds as if your son's PC may have had one of the seriously bugged NVidia drivers that came out about a year ago.

They wouldn't allow the GPU fan to go above about 30% and on at least one version they actually reduced fan speed as temperatures rose! There were several cases of people who burned out their graphics cards because of this and it was reported on the forums of several games at the time.

GR increased the graphics requirements if you want to use ultra mode although this isn't particularly noticible outside Praetoria as those other zones still use the same maps as previously (a few tweaks but nothing major)
Praetoria however is designed with UM in mind and so graphics are a lot more GPU intensive.

As others have said the Celeron processor is probably proving to be a bottleneck, your graphics are now more than adequate for UM. The memory upgrade probably didn't make as much of a difference as you would hope - Win XP SP3 is the 32 bit version (64 bit is at SP2)
this means an addressable range of 4Gb - knock off 1Gb for your graphics memory and a bit more for the various other bits of hardware requiring space in the memory map leaves probably only about 2.5-2.75Gb available to be used for system memory any installed over this will not be used (You could configure it as a RAM disk which depending on the controller may allow you to use it for storage)

You should check your memory is configured in pairs of the same size and speed (ideally they should be fully matched but generally size and speed will suffice).
Also I tend to find the big lag spikes in CoX correspond to disk paging which is part of why more memory is benificial (provided your OS will allow you to use it).
As you don't have the option to increase it you should take steps to ensure it is used as efficiently as possible - so clear your internet cache, delete temp files, close any unnecessary applications and defrag your disk.
If you have access to a faster drive install CoH to that.

Also is your net connection via ethernet or are you using wireless, the latter can increase lag perceived.

I'd tend to agree with your initial assessment - that does sond like overheating problems with the graphics card.

Are you overclocking the card - if so edge it back a bit.
You could also try reducing the temperature thresholds for each fan speed setting so that it is better cooled - or in the extreme case just set the fan to 100% at all settings but that will be a lot more noisy.

Also check the card fan isn't clogged with dust and that it is being fed with cold air - if you are blowing air past the CPU cooler or disk drives towards it it will have a lot more work to do to cool the card properly.

Oh and make sure the pc suppliers removed the clear plastic protective film from the card before sending it out!

This does sound like a PSU problem - is the fan working correctly and clear of dust on the PSU.
If it is turning but clogged up a can of compressed air may solve the problem. - If it does bear in mind that you will be close to the current PSU's limit so any further expansion will probably need you to replace it in any event.

Had something similar happen once - the PSU fan failed which caused the system to shut down automatically as soon as the load caused the voltages to go out of spec.
Pointing a spare fan directly at the air intake to the psu allowed me to use it until I could fit a new one.