Father Xmas

Post a HiJack this report, we should be able to spot the offending software from that.

Well looking at the CoHHelper file the OP has a ASRock P4VM800 motherboard. The long and short of it is that it's a Socket 478, AGP motherboard using up to DDR-400 memory.

The OP has 2 GB so that's fine. The problem is limited to no upgradable parts for CPU and video.

For the video there is the HD 3650 AGP for around $60-70 and the HD 3850 AGP for around $90-120. The 3850 is over twice as fast as the 3650 but uses considerably more power and would likely require an upgrade to the PSU. Compared to what you have the HD3650 would be 2-3 times faster than the video card you currently have.

CPU is this most difficult piece to upgrade simply because they stopped making CPUs for this socket a very long time ago. You can find OEM (no heatsink included) from a number of online sources at Pricewatch. It should use a 800MHz FSB, 512MB of cache, obviously clocked faster than your current CPU and look for one with HT (hyperthreading). Note that the 512MB of cache will denote the cooler running, lower power Northwood verison of the P4 instead of the much hotter Prescott. If you are careful when you remove the old CPU's heatsink and clean it of the old thermal compound, all you will need to buy is a $6 tube of Arctic Silver 5 to reuse it on the new CPU. Sorry, this CPU socket was before the era of the Pentium D so the closest you can get to dual cores is a P4 with hyperthreading.

So we are looking at $150-200 to get maybe 50-100% better performance.

The alternative is replacing the motherboard/CPU/video/ram and maybe the power supply and hard drive and/or optical drive (because of the single IDE interface found on today's motherboards). Take my $600 from the link in my sig. The CPU/MB/Ram and SATA Optical drive would be around $250. You can get a reasonable modern 400-450 watt PSU for around $60-70 which would handle any of the sub $150 video cards on the market. The GTS 250 from my $600 build for example is roughly 10-15 times faster than what you currently have. From a CPU perspective (using the Pentium E6300), you would now have two CPUs, each over twice as fast as the P4 you have now. That's what about $450 would buy you, keeping the case and your hard drives.

Yep. I'm still on dial-up.

Until we see a CoHHelper and a HiJack This report we are simply guessing.

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It makes it so if you look inside a PSU you'll see a whole mess of yellow wires (12 volt wires are yellow) soldered into the PSU circuit board. The one pictured is a Corsair HX850 (single 70 amp rail) and fortunately uses a module cable design otherwise there would have been even more yellow wires in that bundle.



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Sorry, I get a 403 Forbidden with that link.

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Meh, I was worried about hot linking the image, can never be sure with some sites.

Here, halfway down the page, picture with the bundle of wires along the right side of the picture.

Start of article if it turns out I can't link to a page within the review, picture is on page 4.

Point being that in their 'worse' test (i7-920 with a GTX295) they recorded 503 watts with both the CPU and GPU at full burn. 468 watts of that was at 12 volts.

On their low end 'gaming system' (E8600 with a HD 4850) they recorded 189 watts with 160 watts at 12 volts.

There point, made so very clear with their data, is it's all about the 12 volts baby. When shopping for a power supply, the total amount of power available from the 12 volt part of the supply is the key stat you should be looking at. It doesn't mater that a PSU is rated at 450 watts if it can only put out 200 watts at 12 volts, there are modern 300 watt PSUs that can do that.

Today's modern motherboard/CPU/video card uses less than 50 watts at 3.3 and 5 volts. A number of cases that come with a generic 400+ watt power supply were designed back in the day when video cards rarely needed external power directly from the CPU and if so tapped it off the 5 volt supply. It doesn't really matter if the 3.3 and 5 volt side of the PSU can deliver 200-300 watts of power because today's equipment doesn't need that much at those voltages.

The XBit Labs article is simply a more up to date article that reconfirms the conclusions and data from this older article from SilentPCReview.

Anandtech also had an article about PSU size realities. Now they were looking at the total AC watts the PSU was pulling from the wall, showing overall that today's PC rigs, even quad core, dual GPU set ups don't really require kilowatt PSUs. However in their recommendations for PSUs, all of them can provide 80+% or more of their rated power at 12 volts.

Since I'm already yacking about PSUs lets touch on the single/multiple 12 rail debate. Unless the PSU is outrageously expensive, all PC PSUs only have a single 12 volt supply. Now the manufacturer can choose, and are encouraged in the PSU design specifications, to divide this single 12 volt supply into separate 'circuits' or rails. Each of these are capped to all at most, X amps, normally less than 20. Think of this as the circuit breakers in your house or a fuse in an appliance. The idea behind the limit is if that 12 volt rail is shorted out, the wires carrying the 12 volts won't melt, evaporate and catch on fire, not necessarily in that order.

Now it's the PSU designer that is suppose to choose which devices are going to be connected to which rail so in normal operation, if everything is plugged into that rail is drawing their normal maximum current, it won't end up blowing the 'fuse' on that rail. Some designers may choose poorly. Others simply tie each type of power connector back into the PSU on their own cable. The PCIe power connectors are on their own cable, the 4/8 pin CPU power connector is on it's own cable, the 12 volts from the motherboard main power connector is on it's own cable, etc. It makes it so if you look inside a PSU you'll see a whole mess of yellow wires (12 volt wires are yellow) soldered into the PSU circuit board. The one pictured is a Corsair HX850 (single 70 amp rail) and fortunately uses a module cable design otherwise there would have been even more yellow wires in that bundle.

And since I'm already up to my neck ranting about PSUs, lets conclude with PSUs and video card recommendations. Video card manufactures recommend a minimum size PSU, usually with a 12 volt amp rating as well, with their higher end video cards. They originally only provided a PSU size because back in the days of older PSUs, more watts overall meant more watts at 12 volts. Because of this, initial PSU size recommendation were huge and now persist in the PC gamer's 'race' memory. Now as newer PSUs designed around providing a lot of power at 12 volts and they document this amount on their websites and the sticker on the side of the PSU, video card manufactures can now list more realistically sized PSUs as long as they can provide X amps at 12 volts. This amp rating is for the whole system. As it stands today, a single PCIe video card with one 6 pin and one 8 pin PCIe power connector can use at most 250 watts of power, a bit under 21 amps at 12 volts assuming all that power was at 12 volts.

So when you see the GTX295 listing a 680 watt, 46 amps at 12 volt, that's for the whole system, not just the card. Also, two 8-pin PCIe power connectors can reside on the same 17 amp or higher rail with out causing any problems. You don't need to find a PSU with a 46 amp rail.

I would like to take this moment to mention that isn't the total rated wattage of the PSU but the watts available at 12 volts that can limit a stock power supply.

PC Power Consumption: How Many Watts Do We Need?

I would like to take this time to thank the devs for their implementation of /em teabag.

I posted in the thread about the Science Booster on the General forum that I was a bit annoyed that a feature that has been asked for as long as I can remember, height, body type for nearly as long, ends up in a paid booster.

I don't have problems with costume parts in payed expansions because sometimes I simply not interested enough to spend $10 for them. However a QoL costume editing feature that people have asked for almost as long as we had alternate costume slots as part of a paid expansion is pushing the boundaries from what I consider to be a 'microtransaction' feature.

I've read Castle's (or was it BaB) who brought it up at the brainstorming session for what would be in this booster and he's willing to take the blame for this but someone should have realized that some people would be annoyed by this turn.

First assuming you still know how to access your account, all you need to do to reactivate is add more time. You can grab a copy of the updater, which will either patch the game if you still have it installed or redownload the whole thing, which depending on your connection and what's between you and NCSoft can be quick or painfully long.

Reupping with AE will give you a month of time plus one of the booster packs. A box version of the game will give you an issue 13 image which would require considerably smaller download to bring it up to issue 14.

In 4 years CoH has added a number of new 'story based' zones, revamped the Hollows and Faultline. The new Faultline mission chain from 15-25 is very good. Everything else new in CoH is also found in CoV (bank missions for temp power, Ouroboros, RWZ, Midnight Squad).

Well a long time ago in CoH the order was

Start in either Atlas or Galaxy
Go to Kings Row
at level 10-20 you are sent to Steel and Skyway
at 20-30 you are sent to Talos and IP
at 30-40 you are sent to Bricks and FF
at 40-50 you are sent to PI

1-30 content revolve around a series of "drug" distribution wars starting with Hellions, Skulls and Trolls with the Family getting involved. You start running into merc groups like Sky Raiders and more series gangs like the Tsoo, Warriors and Freakshow. The CoT is a constant annoyance and in the 20s you meet another mystic foe the Banished Pantheon. There are also a few 'independent' groups with their own agendas like the Vahz and Clockwork.

In the 30s and higher you start dealing with the left overs from the original Rikti alien invasion, the 'evil" Crey corporation, merc outfits like Malta and KoA. You also start bumping into the Prussian mastermind an near immortal Nemesis who is behind more than what anyone suspects. Toss in the Carnival with their love of chaos. You are now a big time hero and routinely get sent to parallel worlds to help unravel threats found there including the mirror universe version of our world where out heros are the bad guys.

Then the devs started to add what I call story zones which you can use as an alternate leveling path. First is the Hollows for 5-15. Then Striga from 20-30. New Faultline from 15-25. Croatoa from 25-35. And the Rikti War Zone from 35-50. Contacts in those zones give missions within the zone so little or no zone to zone travel is required other than getting the best prices on selling standard enhancements.

Then they mirrored the newspaper/broker mission structure from CoV into CoH as a Police Scanner/Detective missions. These are random, relatively short missions that'll end with a prevent robbery at the bank. Success grant some form of temp power.

Lastly they added 'hub' zones like Ouroboros and the Midnight Squad zone which screw around with time.

Bye Bye LM! Please come back soon.

With the exception of a few, now rarer, simultaneous disarm bombs missions and a few really pesky AV/EBs, pretty much all the way to 50.

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Was your MM an equal opportunity employer? If so, she should have also had a henchman named Major Wang.

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I think I was saving him for the top most merc. Probably would have been Sargent Major Wang.

Didn't play her to that level. Also had a cowboy looking brute with spiked gloves name The Tenderizer.

It takes virtually no time anymore to get to level 5, go to KR, do the radio/bank missions. By then you are close to level 10. A mission or two and you are off to Steel where you do the Midnight Squad missions and the radio/bank missions there. Do the University tutorial as well and you are very close to level 15. A mission or two after that you go to Faultline and do those arcs. Again you may need to pad slightly to get to 20 but then you have Striga and the Talos bank missions. Before you know it you are level 22+, ready for SOs and at level 25 you can get to Ouroboros to back fill your badge missions. And this is soloing.

Winter Lords. Back during the first Holiday event, the Winter Lord giant monster, like all GMs back then, had a level and it's HPs were based on the level so it was much easier to kill WL in Atlas and Galaxy than Skyway and Steel for instance. Damage dealt by them and to them weren't scaled tothe player's level like today. They also gave HUGE XP relative to lower level characters.

So a party of very low level characters team up with one or two high level characters and it was a PL fest for low level characters. I was in one group, as the high level, and a lowbie leveled two more times on the way from near the PP gate where we were fighting to the trainer (no range limitation to XP from a team back then as well) and once more on the way back.

Back during the CoV Beta I had a female merc Mastermind named Major Domonatrix. Cap/mask/uniform top half/fishnet bottom half. All she was missing was a riding crop. Think Annie Lennox from the 'Sweet Dreams' music video in a uniform and fishnets.

All her "minions" were named rank + nickname for male genitalia. Names like Private Peters, Sargent Willie, Corporal Johnson, etc.

What can I say, I was in an odd mood when I rolled her up. Also I knew she would be deleted after the Beta.

It's been a while since we had one of these copyright violation/generic bat/narc threads. We need to do this more often since there seemed to be a lot of pent up drama being unleashed here.

So shiny and after he/she typed in all that bio information too.

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...in fact I can safely say that none of my characters are gender-curious...

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Thin, short male character -> maxed out huge character. No gender bending required.

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Because the half a dozen times I've done this it is nearly impossible to get everyone to click simultaneously. We've tried syncing to the countdown timer as well as "3, 2, 1, NOW!" in team chat. Always seems to take 3 or 4 tries before the group is successful.

Plus if anyone gets bored and quits the Trial before the click phase, it ends up being a waste of time.

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Use the Mission Timer.

At 25:54 the team leader says "click at 25:20". When you see 25:20 on your mission timer (synchronized by the Server), you click along with everyone else. Simple.

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Bold and colored yellow for emphasis.

I'm very peeved that the tailor changes that some of us wanted since day 1 (changing body type and height) end up in a paid booster.

What's next? A jet pack costume item for the Natural Booster? Fox tails or animated tails in the Mutant Booster?

grumble grumble grumble

And yes I read Castle's post about it.

That's because it's easier to add a "move critter back on to map" function that runs periodically on the server side of things than come up with a fix that doesn't adversely affect performance to prevent critters from being pushed through the microscopic cracks in the geometry (actually floating point math quirks) in the first place.

Because the half a dozen times I've done this it is nearly impossible to get everyone to click simultaneously. We've tried syncing to the countdown timer as well as "3, 2, 1, NOW!" in team chat. Always seems to take 3 or 4 tries before the group is successful.

Plus if anyone gets bored and quits the Trial before the click phase, it ends up being a waste of time.

See this is the short attention scan mentality that simply can't believe anyone would play any game for 5 years. These same Red Bull fueled twitch monkeys can't believe anyone would turn off XP and that the MA was added solely for PLing.

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I understand that all these games are ridiculously large - which is why they tend to be distributed on dvd's and when there are downloads, they are usually bit-torrented or run from several mirror sites.

My issue is that the download speed seems to capped at a low enough level that people like me who want to do the 14 day trial are facing 6 hours minimum of downloading to do so.

I've opened the right ports in my firewall and I don't experience slow download speeds like this in general so after checking all the tech advice here it seems my problem comes down to capped download rates.

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Oops, sorry. I thought your 140KB/s was your normal rate.