TargetOne

I should point out, grounding is not only important for signal reception... on any outdoor antenna, it is critical for safety and equipment-protection reasons. Any outdoor antenna needs to have a grounded lightning arrestor of some sort.

Mind you, nothing will protect your equipment from a direct lightning strike, but proper grounding will at least drain away everyday static charges and help protect from near-misses.

Without reading the entire thread, my gut-reaction answer would be option 2, adding the new assets alongside the old ones.

This would give us the benefit of a slick, modern look for those characters we choose to upgrade or build new, while retaining the classic textures for characters whose look actually depends on the texture's blandness.

In particular, I'd like to see fully-textured/shaded/bumpmapped versions of ALL the "Tops with Skin" and "Bottoms with Skin" pieces, both female and male. Give them the treatment that was done for a few pieces a while back, like, say, how the Wedding Pack added "Angelic Plus", "Hearts Plus", and "Excess Plus" parts alongside the originals.

A few caveats are in order, however.

I would like the "modernized" parts added to the "classic" parts for ALL PLAYERS, not as part of a for-pay add-on/booster pack. (While you're at it, make the above three items available for all players. Purchasers of the Wedding Pack would still have other unique items to play with.) An upgrade of costume appearances would be unfair unless everyone had access.

Also, care must be taken that the "modern" pieces aren't SO heavily altered that certain combinations would no longer work. For example, all three "Bikini" bottoms for females should go together with just about any top option. Giving the three "Bikinis" three different texture patterns would be a bad thing! They should be differentiated by their shape alone. (This is especially true if you choose to go with option 1 instead, and eliminate the "classic" pieces.)

Are you running the new monitor at its native resolution? LCDs have a fixed pixel size, so if you run at anything other than native, it's going to be blurry (the monitor and/or videocard have to scale the image to match the native resolution).

I also lose 3D sound in Windows 7 (64-bit), unless I set the program EXE to "Compatibility Mode, Windows XP SP3".

What little performance hit I get in Compatibility Mode is totally worth having 5.1 surround sound!

Still, I wish this would get fixed.

Might I also suggest, newegg.com's affiliated site eggxpert.com. They have forums dealing with all aspects of DIY PC building.

For thermal compound, I'm partial to Arctic Silver products myself. They have several products to choose from, with Arctic Silver 5 being the thinnest (viscosity-wise), Ceramique the thickest, and Alumina in-between. Which one you use depends on the nature and finish of the CPU and heatsink; generally, thinner products work best if the CPU and heatsink are very flat with no gaps (polished and/or lapped) while the thicker ones can help fill gaps if you aren't able or willing to lap your heatsinks. But as long as you use a good brand of compound together with a decent heatsink, the viscosity shouldn't matter much. (We're talking a difference of a couple degrees here.)

As for cleaning off old thermal compound, that Arctic Silver stuff will work, but in most cases you can do the job just as well (and cheaper) with 90% isopropyl alcohol and lint-free cloths.

With regard to the choice of video card, all else being equal, you can expect the superclocked eVGA to be about 10-13% faster than the standard-clocked model. But that's just a rough calculation based on MHz numbers. Whether you will notice a 13% increase is up to you!

Bear in mind that these Geforce GTX 460's are proving to be highly overclockable by end users. I myself have this Gigabyte model, which is also factory overclocked (though not as much as the eVGA one.) But I find I can overclock it easily to 800MHz core/4000MHz memory, and I haven't even really tried to push it to the limit. Nearly 20% faster than the reference models (675MHz), and it does make motion a bit smoother, but that's really subjective.

In the end, any of the GTX 460s will do you just fine. If you can afford a factory-overclocked one, go for it (that Gigabyte is only $10 more than the stock-speed Zotac you linked to); if not, the standard models will still be plenty fast with a good chance you can overclock them. Which one you pick may depend more on non-performance related criteria than anything else (e.g. bundled accessories, extra features, warranty).

I've been getting the full-screen flickering too in Praetoria. It's like the shadow maps suddenly cover the entire world for a split-second. I found that the only way to get rid of the flickers entirely is to set Shadows to "minimal" (e.g. the "old-skool" circular shadows under characters) or "off".

Hope they fix this ASAP!

Happens to me too. When I change zones, the screen with the name of the new zone and progress bar appears right away, but the progress bar only moves maybe 1/5 of the way across... and hangs there for a minute or more. Then, it suddenly starts moving again, zipping the rest of the way across very quickly, sometimes in only a couple of seconds.

I notice NO (zero) hard disk activity during the frozen progress bar. It's not even touching the hard drive during the freeze.

I have noticed that, when the progress bar starts moving again, I suddenly hear the new zone's 'ambient noise' and/or music start up, but there's often an audio glitch where some sound effect or other plays in a tight loop VERY loudly fro a fraction of a second.

I would make a note of what brand and model of hard disk it is, then find the manufacturer's website and look for any diagnostic or utility programs associated with it. These programs can run detailed tests to determine how close the hard disk is to failure.

Nice enough. What's the pricing on that?

I'll be getting a new system of my own soon enough, the i7 and 5850 ought to do nicely for CoH.

Pretty nicely, I would think? Maybe not with EVERYthing on max...

But if I were you, and looking to spend around the same amount of money (or even a little less), I would get a Radeon 5770 instead of the GTX 260. The performance is comparable, but the 5770 supports DirectX 11 and costs a bit less. Or, for a little bit more, you could get a Radeon 5830 and even better performance. It all depends on how much you want to spend.

Are there any other games besides CoH you'd like to be playing on this system?

I'd been looking at a Phenom II X4 955 myself, coupled with a Radeon 5850, but consider a Radon 5770 to be a good second choice for video to save a bit of money. Either should be able to play CoX with most if not all of the Ultra Mode bells and whistles on high settings. Personally, I'm holding out for the 5850 to give my new system a bit more headroom for other games. Even with Ultra Mode, CoX's graphics are hardly cutting-edge.

What sort of hardware is on your OLD system? My current PC is an ancient Athlon XP 2600+ with a GeForce 7600GT videocard, so my planned replacement ought to be a serious kick in the pants, performance-wise.

As for a motherboard, any with the 890 chipset would do you good, but personally, to save a little money, I'm going with this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128438

It actually uses the 790 northbridge, not the 890, the difference being the number of full-speed PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots supported (one vs. two). But I'm unlikely to ever run two cards in Crossfire, so a single x16 is enough for me. More importantly, that m/b has the 850 southbridge, which gives more SATA 6Gb/s ports than the older 750 (more future-proof). And it's $40 cheaper than a full 890/850-based board.

If you're really concerned about temperatures, you might want to invest in an add-on set of thermal probes and a display panel. One of the probes can be placed against the CPU. right against the heatspreader, or (carefully) between the CPU and the heatsink. If you do the latter, you may need to use extra thermal paste, and don't leave any kind of gap! (Gaps between CPU and heatsink = bad juju!)

If you're ambitious/skillful, you might carve out a channel in the heatsink for the probe to nestle into, so it lies flush with the bottom of the heatsink. I've even seen examples where someone drilled a hole/tunnel into the side of the heatsink, very close to and parallel with the bottom, and deep enough so that the probe can be positioned directly over the center of the CPU .Then the probe is inserted along with enough thermal paste to fill the hole. (But this is probably beyond the capabilities of most users.)

In any case, add-on thermal probes can be a useful second source of CPU temperature reporting. On the downside, they won't be accurate unless you can get the probe in direct contact with the center of the CPU heatspreader (the metal panel on top of the chip), using thermal paste to fill any gaps. And they don't report to the BIOS either, so no automatic shutdown if the temp goes too high.

Just my 2 cents' worth.

Those of you having this problem: you might want to go into Windows' Control Panel and check the settings in "Accessibility Options". (In Windows XP, it's "in Start/Settings/Control Panel", I'm not sure about Vista or Windows 7.)

Then, make sure "StickeyKeys" is UNchecked!

StickeyKeys will cause any of the "Shift"-type keys (Shift, Ctrl, Alt, maybe Windows and Context ones too) to toggle into an "on" state if you press and hold them down long enough. I can't remember whether StickeyKeys defaults to enabled or not... IIRC, in a pristine XP install, XP will offer to turn it on for you the first time you try holding any such key down for more than about ten seconds. But whether you've been prompted or not, it might have gotten set to enabled/checked anyway.

As far as CoH goes, it could be that something in the game code fools Windows into thinking the SHIFT or ALT keys were being held down, triggering the StickeyKeys functionality. If this is indeed the case, disabling StickyKeys entirely ought to fix the problem.

On the other hand, it could certainly be due to some other cause, like a keyboard or driver bug, or a bug in the game itself.

I'll be curious to see if the above advice works for you guys. Post your results!

Oh, one more thing: it would be nice if the Log Cleaner would display the filename of the currently-open file somewhere, perhaps in the app's titlebar.