HavocX10

"I uninstalled Norton and some of the HP stuff. Is there something you recommend for removing this stuff? "

I have heard good things about this software for finding and giving you a list of programs to remove.

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/home

I use this service and have had a Vent server for 3 years without issues. Easy to follow set up steps and excellent tech support if needed.

http://www.light-speed.com/

Well, I am not a COH Helper analyst but can say I have an evga 9800GTX+ for bout a year now and runs CoX with plenty of eye candy no problem. My rig is fairly similar to yours as well OS wise and hardware wise. May just be coincidence you have 2 computers crashing and both have a 9800 card. May want to post a HJT log as well for the gurus to see if maybe some other issue is the culprit.

You need to see if PNY offers their own control panel for their cards and if so it will likely have acces to the fan controller. I use evga products and their control panel is excellent for overclocking the card and setting the fan speed. Nvidia also has a System Tools download that is essentially an enhanced control panel with additional settings to tweak over and above the standard control panel you get with the driver. I'm not sure but the RivaTuner software may also offer these capabilities.

Before you start shopping a new case, definately look into one of these softwares and check the fan speed setting. It is very likely set low from the factory. Mine came preset at around 30%, I manually crank it to about 85% when I get ready to play any game. Others I know of just set it at 100% full time but I personally would rather not go that route.

I'm afraid you may have an issue with the vid cards being discussed. Do you know if your motherboard and current 7800's are AGP or PCIe? My concern is that at 5 years old and with those cards, i am thinking your rig is an AGP configuration. If so, you will be greatly limited on your choice of vid cards to upgrade to and in fact, a pair of 7800's may be as good as it gets. You can of course still get a slight bump in performance with the added ram mainly for zone loads and like another mentioned, your mb may be able to take a faster cpu as well. That plus the hack to get the benefit of sli may all combine to give you a decent boost in performance. Other than all of that, if AGP is an issue, then it will be time for a ground up rebuild. If so, post your budget when you get ready and you will get plenty of input.

If you do in-fact have a PCIe rig, thats great but I am still concerned that a Fermi 4xx series card is way over kill for the rest of your hardware. Your cpu will be a definate bottleneck and likely the ram as well. You did not mention what speed the ram is but with the age of the rig, it may be the older 184 pin DDR instead of the 240 pin DDR2 and if so, will also be a bottleneck for a high end vid card. A 250GTX may be all your present hardware could accomodate and even then may be a bit overpowered. Just thinking out loud but figured better to bring it up before you get a card that will be hopelessly held back by the other components.

Hey everybody. I am looking for recommendations for a free anti-spyware program that also has real time protection. I was using IObit 360 but read some reviews that were less than impressive regarding it's capabilities. I used to use Ad-Aware but am currently just back to using Windows Defender. I also run scans weekly with Malwarebytes and ASquared and use Spyware Blaster to compliment them but neither are real time on the free versions. Thanks.

Thanks for the responses, some good advice and links for further info to ponder and study. I will start playing around with Mids to put together a game plan for my toons. As far as which toon am I trying to convert to IO's, well, lol, all of em, on 4 servers. So I guess the research per AT and power set per AT will need to be continued for individual builds posted in those forums. In the mean time I think I will continue to build wealth and keep my below 40 toons current with SO's and then start putting big bucks towards conversion to IO's and/or sets at that stage. That may be contrary to those in the know but frankly, after I get my toons into their 30's and have the money to keep SO slotting current, I can run +2 missions, or +3 on my tanks, scrappers and brutes without too much difficulty, depending on the opponent of course.

I do have 1 more question, that I think was addressed indirectly by Fulmens:
"4) It's hard to find good IO's at any level below 50 (people are stupid and various fixes to the market have allowed people to exercise this stupidity.)"

I was doing some research last night at WW seeing what I could expect to pay on that particular toon to purchase Lvl 25 IO's. I am not dense but damn if I could get any IO's to show up no matter how I filtered the search. I found a ton of recipes and salvage and common everyday DO's and SO's but no pre-made IO enhancements. Can somebocy offer some input on what I am doing wrong, or is it as Fulmens indicated, nobody is crafting low level IO's to sale, you just have to buy the recipes and salvage and craft them your self?

I left the game 3 years in after playing from release. The Issue that brought WW, crafting, salvage etc. had just been introduced. I was already tired and burned out, SG disbanding, didn't care to have to learn all the stuff in that respect and left the game shortly thereafter. Returned recently about 6 months ago and loving the game again. But, I am no longer a seasoned well informed vet and while I would like to settle for just playing old school and outfitting my toons with SO's and being satisfied with that, I now realize I can't be satisfied with that .

I have searched the Player Guides and forums and have learned a lot about the market. I could just take what I have learned and always have plenty of bucks with current non-IO enhancements on all toons but again, I really need to take the plunge and get some of the good stuff. At this point I do not see my goal being to the point I have invested the amount of time to get toons all "purped" out. But, what I am having trouble with is deciding on which IO's to get for which toon, which sets are recommended for which toons etc. I see the builds people post in the forums using Mids but the abbreviations are confusing. I have found some guides that list the Bronze, Silver and Gold choices and the A,B,C & D choices but damned if I can fully understand what it all means. The choices are somewhat overwhelming.

Perhaps what I would like to find is too simplistic or maybe I just have not found it yet. What I am hoping to find is a guide for say a scrapper, troller, defender etc. that lists the suggested IO's and IO sets so I can then go the market and start setting up and planning on what to look for and how much money I will need to make the purchases over the course of the toon's develoment. I just cannot tell what I am looking at from the optimum builds people post listing the slots and ehnancemnts using Mids.

I am also confused on IO's in general. I know if you buy one, it stays current for the life of the toon meaning it never turns red or has to be replaced. So is that to say if I have the bucks and fully outfit my Lvl 10 toon with Lvl 10 IO's for all powers I have at that point, those Lvl 10 IO's will be just as effective at Lvl 50 as an identical Lvl 30 IO?

Please resist the urge to flame and point out that all of this info is somewhere on the forums . I have spent considerable time searching, reviewing, reading, clicking links that no longer work and so on. I have like I said, found a ton of info, just not what I am indicating above. Thanks in advance for any assistance!

I expect I know the answer but just in case, I am wondering if the Lenovo T400 Thinkpad laptop with Mobile Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family would have any hope of running the game at low settings. The processor is adequate (dual core P8600 2.4) and it has 3 gigs of ram running on XP Pro. It is a work computer but since I travel alot I was hoping I might be able to play CoX on it.

Was able to find time to uninstall with Driver Sweeper, reinstall, reset control panel and run a 3D'06 bench as well as a controlled in-game fps test on all drivers up to the current 196.21. The 195.62 was in-fact unstable for my system and locked up on more than one occasion. Didn't matter though, the 196.21 gave a noticeable boost of 5-10 fps in game and a slightly higher 3D'06 score.

Kind of a lame question, showing my laziness perhaps. But, just wondering if anybody can say they saw a significant or even moderate increase in performance from the 186.18 driver. That is how far behind I am on driver updates. I always try the new drivers and run benchmarks to determine if they are better for my set up or not. But, now that I am about 4 drivers behind, that represents a bit of a time issue to uninstall, reset the control panel, run the bench marks, repeat etc.

For comparison to your rig, I have an older C2D 6600, 4 gig G.Skill 1066, evga 9800 GTX+, Vista Home 64 bit, running at 1680x1050. Thanks.

Other factors to consider when choosing a card other than just the price is warranty and support. I lean towards evga for a couple of reasons. They offer a limited lifetime warranty on most of their gaming level cards, but you do have to register the card at their site within 30 days of purchase. They also have a free upgrade program to a higher level card within 90 days of purchase.

Another concern about using a vacuum is that small static electric charges can form at the tip of the nozzle as air is sucked in and consequently jump to your motherboard and well, that can be bad . Also be sure to hold your case fans stationary as you blast them with the compressed air bursts, otherwise may cause bearing damage. Sounds like if your case has accumulated that much dust, may just be better to spend a little more time to remove the components and clean them individually. Gratz on the temp fix on the vid card until you can make the new build.

Yeh, the ultra-mode was the absolute only reason I was thinking about it. The game runs flawlessly at high settings currently. I was reading about the new graphics engine in GR and seems like I heard that the game was going to support SLI was the only reason I even went there getting back to the most bang for the buck. I prefer single gpu rigs but a 275GTX or 285GTX or ATI 5800 series are in the $350 range and not a viable alternative. I'll definately hold off at this point until beta and more info is released. Thanks for the input.

I have an evga 9800GTX+ and in preparation for GR I have been considering an upgrade. However, money is tight so I am leaning towards going SLI, which i have never done, over buying a higher end single gpu. Per the charts at Toms Hardware, for the 1680x1050 res comparisons,

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts...1050,1699.html

it seems that it would be best economically since the next jump up, nvidia or ati, are cards that are about triple the cost of a 9800 gt. My question is, not being a sli user, does the second card need to be as close as possible to the main card manufacture and performance wise? Newegg atm does not even have a 9800GTX+ choice and the 9800GT's are clocked lower than my factory oc'd card. Will the overall performance be pulled down to the lower card I presume? I'm sure I can find a 9800GTX+ somewhere, just trying to gather info on the way sli works so I get it right the first time around. Or, is there some reason my game plan is flawed to go sli. Thanks.

Sounds like maybe a firewall issue. First time I tried to log in on my new rig, which is not so new anymore, I seem to recall I received the same message. Try to window back to desktop, you may have a firewall pop-up that you cannot see, allow the connection and that may solve it. Otherwise, very nice machine, way overkill for this game and most everyday applications but gotta be a hoot getting instant access to all programs etc. I also agree with CMA on the raid config, may want to re think that one day soon.

Found them, thanks much for the assistance!

I have been away a long time and have a question regarding Vet powers. I have created several new toons but none of them have the Vet powers I recall such as the Sprint choice, Sands of Mu, Nemesis Staff, costume deals and free respecs. I have all of the reward badges but cannot locate the other goodies. Are they no longer being made available?

Thanks much. Working perfectly now!

Thnx Houtex. That certainly sounded simple enough but perhaps I am just not savvy enough to understand. Did you mean to copy the Target path from the Updater Properties screen and then paste it into the new folder on her desktop? If so that would not work, when I got back to the folder on her desktop and tried to paste the path, I had no Paste option, it was greyed out. So, I e-mailed the path to myself and could copy it from the the e-mail and had a Paste option when I got to the new folder on her desktop but..... nothing pasted. I expect I am not doing at all what you suggested. Could you or somebody give my dense skull a step-by-step on how I might get what I thought was going to be a simple deal to work? Thanks in advance.

I am having an issue with setting up a 2nd User account on my Vista 64 bit Home Premium computer. I added my daughter as a Standard User and authorized CoH to be run from her account. UAC in Vista is off btw. But, when I try to launch the game from her desktop, the updater errors out saying I can only run one application of the updater at a time. Thing is there is not another user running the game or the updater. Any suggestions to get the dang updater to be able to launch from her desktop?

Well I guess I'll ask the stupid question, but, since it has not been brought up on this post far as I can tell, here goes.

I already belong to an SG, so, we can creat a base for our heros simply by talking to the SG contact, correct?

But, I fully intend to play a villian when CoV goes live so I assume that means we would need to start a whole new SG for the villian toons and have their own separate base accordingly, correct?

If so, it almost looks like we are going to have to make a choice whether to play in SG mode as a villian or hero or split time between both. Since I forsee the majority of players playing new villian toons at least for a while when CoV goes live , hero SG bases will not see much advancement. So, if you intend to play as a hero but have a desire to create a base and all that entails, you will have to buy CoV just to unlock the base aspect. But any time spent playing a villian will mean no prestige to use for your hero base.

Flame if you feel like it, I'm just a bit confused still on how all this will work between playing a hero or a villian, SGs, bases etc.