Tyrrano

Update. Took some lunch time and removed hard drive and the memory SODIMMs, used compressed air to clean out the heat sink area and around the processor. Still nothing. I also tried booting it with an external monitor attached. No dice there, either.

Looks like this month's subscription to CoX is going to be a waste. :P

Yeah, yeah, I know, this isn't a PC support forum. But over the years I've learned to respect the opinions and hardware savvy expressed on this forum.

Anyway, I've had this laptop for a couple of years now. Everex Stepnote XT5300T, running Vista. Home Premium, I think. Does everything I need, including AutoCAD, Revit, and of course CoX. It's been a great laptop, until today. So I headed to the support forum for Everex, only to find they've folded their tent for good.

Usually on startup the lights flash, the fan spins up to high speed for a few seconds, then it slows down as the computer continues to boot up. Went to turn it on this weekend and nothing. Power lights come on, fan spins up, and it hangs there. The fan runs on high speed the whole time, and the drive activity light flashes about once a second, very regular.

I tried downloading a Vista recovery CD, burned that and tried starting from it, but the machine never gets far enough to access the CD drive. I will admit that the drive has always been a touch flaky, though.

Once upon a time I was good at diagnosing this sort of thing and figuring out solutions. But with Vista, I don't have a clue where to start. Can someone throw me a bone? I think this machine is set to try and boot from a flash drive - is it possible to simply copy the contents of the boot CD I made to a flash drive, or is there a special procedure to make it bootable?

It didn't try to re-download (Thank Heavens!) but after messing with it awhile longer I just let it run and went to bed. I guess I can give up a night of CoH once in awhile. Worked fine last night, so I guess it was a one time thing, still don't know why all the sub-directories tho. :shrug:

OK, so I go to fire up CoX tonite. It does the 'Where do you want to put the new CoH files' message. Wow, haven't seen that in a long time. Cancel. Restart and the updater starts 'fixing files' with the usual hours remaining.

Fvadt.

I log on the forum and start looking for threads about how to get around this. I recall seeing them before, but my instance of CoH has been practically trouble-free for years now, so it's been awhile. I note one thread that mentions something about the updater installing itself in a subdirectory of the CoH directory. So I open up the files to look...

C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\City of Heroes\City of Heroes\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe

Wow. Four? FOUR? Really?

Not sure why it's done this, or if it's even a problem. But it's obvious I ain't playing tonight. :P

There is a phase temp power? Gotta admit I've completely missed this one...

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Finally, we have Ice and Earth. These two powersets are very similar. These two, for my money, are the best pure control sets - they have a lot of excellent control powers that are easy to use, and a lot of the gems are available very early on. That's a strong advantage over late-maturing sets like Fire, Gravity, and to some extent Mind. It's very hard to mess up as an Ice or Earth controller. They don't do as much damage compared to their brethren, but I don't think damage-dealing is a high priority for a controller on a team like yours - you have enough firepower elsewhere. You might want to take a long hard look at Ice and Earth.

[/ QUOTE ]Let me second this, especially Ice/*. The AoE immobilize has very good range. The single target hold is in my experience one of the most effective. Ice Slick is a wonderful power at the lower levels for damage mitigation, and stays effective against anything that doesn't have exceptional KB resist.

As for secondaries, one word. Debuffs.

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Server: All
Zone: All
Character name: Several
Time: since I13
Location: Anywhere
Mission: -
Mission Contact: -
Bug Description: The Ghost slaying axe is only animating attacks when used with a shield. If a shield using character has their shield put away or you use a character that doesn't have a shield, the attack does not animate, the attack still happens and damage is done but no attack animation is played. Very rarely the attack wont animate if you do use a shield but very rare. Bugged in game.

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I bugged this last night as well, however, I was able to get the GSA to animate *sometimes*. If another power is queued up, the GSA draw animation would play, but then the attack animation would not. If a weapon-based power had been used and the weapon was still drawn, the same thing would happen. Also, if a weapon was drawn and the GSA was clicked without a target, then the GSA would draw but the weapon would remain as well (which resulted in an odd sword-axe combo thing). The only time I could get the GSA attack animation was when I opened my attack chain with it - then it worked as it always has.

Meanwhile, an ocean away...

A lone figure sits in a newly-built hall, upon an ornate chair raised one step above the room. Beneath the chair sits a large, worn stone. His eyes, framed by the fine lines of care, years, and worry, flick quickly over reports as the pages turn. Most of the content is innocuous enough.

A messenger enters and crosses the room, stopping at a respectful distance. After a few moments the throne's occupant speaks without raising his eyes from the report in his hands.

"Aye, Malcolm?"

"Your Majesty. I have an urgent message for you. It's from ... Ajax."

Steel-grey eyes fix the messenger, and the room's temperature drops a few degrees for just a moment. Then a sigh, fraught with knowledge of the trials that must follow short on the heels of this missive.

"Of course, let me see it."

*parchment crackling*

"Malcolm, please send my condolences to Her Majesty in Buckingham, as I'll no' be able to attend the summit. Make sure Parliament knows they may have t' do without me for some time as well. Alert the Blackwatch. Then reply to this for me. Tell them Royal Sovereign is at their disposal."

"Very good, my liege."

Star Strider Forces Registry
Name: Royal Sovereign
Global Contact: @Tyrrano
Level of Classification: Controller 43
Origin: Mutant
Super Rank & Super Group:
Patriot, "The American Legion" - Foreign Legion division

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... Then the twit wanted to team with me, after noticing my level. I told him no way,..

[/ QUOTE ]Sure, I'll team with you, let's go ToT in Warburg... *slag* *brush off tights and walk away*

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That's too bad about the Spirit issue. Is it ironic that the first hero I used for this event obtained that badge first?

[/ QUOTE ]You know, I hit the event very early this year (just happened to log on as it went live) and jumped out on a full team right off. We spent an hour ToTing in Steel, and I bet we killed 30-50 spirits. They were spawning at fairly decent rates. Since that first hour-ish window, I haven't seen a single spirit. Damned peculiar.

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Frankly, with the cost of fuel today having an unlimited supply of jetpack fuel for $5/mo is a steal.

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OK, waitaminit, hold on, time out, travelling, illegal use of hands.

Devs ain't allowed to have a sense of humor. And you owe me for my dry cleaning bill.

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It is there for everyone to use, much more than vent etc. so it will be used a lot. For those who do not want to use it? Tag along in a team and not hear what is going on. RP blown out the window. ... Turn it on? Roleplay blown out the window anyway. Lousy choice....

[/ QUOTE ]Opinion seconded. I usually play late at night when the rest of the house is asleep - it's the only free time I have. I turn all the sound off, so voice chat of any sort is really not an option for me. And it's really a drag when I hook up with a team and suddenly they're off doing something and I'm typing away, "Wait, where'd everyone go?" and trying to figure out what they're doing. About 5 minutes later someone'll send back, "Oh, sorry, we're all on vent."

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When fighting Rikti in an invasion cycle, the bound key ... targets an area, displays the target name say, 'rikti monkey', but the crittter isn't there. At least not yet. It seems to anticipate where the Rikti will be, and ignores Rikti that are already on the ground.

The normal Tab targeting thing works as it always has.

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Actually, my TAB key does the same thing your target key does. It's probably lag-related.

Actually, it's kind of nice to have the mobs suffer getting pounded while zoning in for a change.

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ZOMFG!!!ZOMFG!!!ZOMFG!!!... (impossibly long string deleted)

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I love that folks are enthusiastic, but for the luvva Pete, please throw a space into this kinda squee'ing! When you have what is essentially one long 250 character word, it makes my browser page a mile wide.

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I'd really have liked a bit more notice also.

4 am to 8 am central is my playtime. I enjoy getting my missions in before work. In fact, it is a rare occurrance that I can do anything meaningful w/r to CoH outside this time.

I'm very unhappy about this.

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I'm afraid this will sound flippant or callous, but no matter when they perform maintenance, someone is going to be inconvenienced. I think you can handle being without CoX for a couple of hours. Gosh, not too many years ago those of us who played online often had games go down unexpectedly for days, even weeks at a time. Of course, we weren't *paying* for the privilege in most cases.

But then what do I know? My total play time here is probably in the range of 6-8 hours per week. Obviously I'm not structuring my life around server uptime.

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I thought it worked out perfectly to have the contest end almost right on the 3-year anniversary mark for the game. We should petition to have the CoX team do one of these every year, on the anniversary of the original launch. Seems fitting, no?

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I could certainly get behind that idea, even if they didn't have the prizes and stuff. It'd be kind of expensive to do that giveaway every year. Maybe next time I'll get more than two pages done.

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Another thing I'd like to mention, the lag in Pocket D. It's almost like a slideshow at times. If you're gonna continue to use Pocket D for events and such, then something's gotta be done about the lag. At least with the winter event we could leave the dance area and the lag behind by going to the chateau area. But the VDay event kept us in the dance area where the lag made it hard to move around and stuff. The strobe lights, the torches in the Tiki Room, whatever it is that's causing it, get rid of it!

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Dear God, yes. It's the strobes. I could stand in place, facing away from the dance floor, then turn around and watch my frame rate go from 23-ish to about 3-4fps instantly.

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One last thought, I would love to see the Winter chalet again. Even if only for the treat of being able to ski.

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/signed. Why not have the chalet open during the winter months, and maybe have a seaside resort/bungalow for summer month hijinks. You could ditch the Valentine's Day event (which is really too close to the winter event) and replace it with a Labor Day or Memorial Day or Flag Day /4th of July event at the 'island paradise'.

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Why don't the mobs in the Snaptooth mission scale up to Team size? This really disapointed me.

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Or down to team size either. I usually play solo, since my computer is slow and lags badly on zoning. I think I might've been able to take Snappy alone, but as amusing as it is to see a little redcap sitting on my shoulders wailing away with his little dagger, it makes it next to impossible to kill an elite boss three times in rapid succession.

I love the teaming aspect, though as others pointed out the disparity between blues and reds makes it hard. I'd have played my reds all thru the event if CoV didn't just lock up my poor tired ol' computer.

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Believed it when someone said that 640K would be WAY more memory than anyone could ever need

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And of course the corollary that the average computer user didn't need static storage, and that a power user could spend $1200 for a 5MB hard disk drive that he'd *never* be able to fill up.

Gee, feeling nostalgic for my old 128K Mac and 'Strategic Conquest' - now that game rocked. Nearly cost me a year of college.