Hyperstrike

1: You may want to look at bumping your RAM to 4GB. What you have is roughly enough for the OS to run okay, but you're start having resource contention issues once you start up the game.

Link to Crucial.com for your specific machine


2: It looks like you're running onboard video at the moment. That's NOT gonna cut it (it's also going to steal system memory).

As much as I'd like to boost for nVidia, their current solutions for gaming are either:

• Unvavailable
• Fare poorly against ATI/AMD (DAAMIT?) in "bang for buck" right now.

Here's the minimum for an ATI Card if you want to enjoy Ultra Mode:

Radeon 5770: $160 (Actual price, no shady rebates)

A step up:

Radeon 5830: $250

Another step up:

Radon 5850: $300

Beyond that you're into the really rarefied fields of top-end video cards and talking $400+

3: Also, note that all of the above cards require at least 1 (I believe both the 5830 and 5850 require 2) 6-pin PCI-E power connectors from your power supply unit.

If you still have the default Acer Power Supply unit in, it's a 250W unit and probably will NOT support any of the cards above. In which case you're likely talking about upgrading your PSU too.

Here's about the lowest cost unit I'd actually trust.

Here's one that's a couple bucks more that I've actually used in systems before.

4: As for the rest, the CPU is a little bit lower-end nowadays, but still perfectly fine for the game. If you WANT to upgrade it, you SHOULD be able to.

Your chip is a Pentium E2160. That's a Socket 775 chip. Your board is compatible with Core2 Duo Chips (which are still available).

Now you'll probably want to e-mail Acer Support.
Here's the link to Acer's Support Page for your computer.
Ask them how high-end of a chip you can put into the system.

Here's a list of currently available Socket 775 Core2Duo chips on Newegg.
All of which are 2x as fast (clockspeed wise) as your current chip.
Starting at $116 and going up.

Note: You'll probably also want to download the latest BIOS update and drivers from Acer as well.

Basically, if you're looking to upgrade ALL of the above (and can), you're looking at probably $470 (with the Radeon 5770), $570 (with the Radeon 5830), or $520 (with the Radeon 5850).


On the flip side, you COULD go with a new system for a bit more.

CyberPowerPC

This system with bumped memory 4GB), PSU, and a Radeon 5770 goes for about $660 sans Operating System.

One small thing.

"rare purples"

Tautology. Purples are, by definition rare.

Sorry to be all grammar police on you.

In short, if you want to be absolutely incredible, be something else.
If you want to be GOD, go Invuln.

Happy Berfday to you!
Happy Berfday to you!
You look like a Rikti!
Now my brain's on fire too!

I'm an nVidiot and even I agree with the advice above. The 5770 will give you better bang for the buck.

BUT YOU WILL HAVE TO HOCK YOUR SOUL!

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You forgot Blue Steel: Incarnate of Chuck Norris.

Okay thus far:

Hyperstrike: (Inv/SS-Tank) Former cop, got caught in a superbrawl in a nuclear power plant (retcon'ed to Terra Volta). Severely wounded, irradiated, and then ported out using another hero's reclaimator, so it wasn't really calibrated for his physiology.

Blastion: (Fire/Fire/Fire-Blaster) Crey experiment trying to use an artificially created metahuman body as a container for a mystically summoned being of elemental fire.

Eclipse Phase: (PB) who, after years of clandestine military superhuman work has retired home to Paragon City and is ROYALLY ticked at how fscked up it is. Essentially "get off my lawn" who explodes into a "crab" if you tick him off.

Inion Iomlain Gealai (I THINK I've got it spelled right...): (WS) Midnighter researcher merged with the nictus progeny of the unseen master from the Romulus ITF cut scene). The ITF is one big predestination paradox for her.

Bubbleshot: (FF/Arch-Defender) Offspring of another Incarnate. And she's just a bit *KABOOM!*...sensitive about it...

Tectonica: (Stone/Fire-Tank) An experimental precursor to the Devouring Earth's Terra.

Cosmic Rae: (Rad/Elec-Blaster) Midnighter Apprentice who went to the North Pole as part of an expedition to stop a Rikti mission to temporarily interfere with the Earth's magnetic field and irradiate the planet. The fight touched off a radiation cascade that killed everything in the area, including her. Mystically merged her consciousness into the radiation storm and resurrected.

Arachnosanguinatus (What can I say, if I don't want to team, I choose tough names...): (SOA/Bane) Assassin, saboteur, terrorist. Oh yeah, and a highly paid Arachnos freelancer.

I support Paragon FC over Rogue Isles United.

As noted above, look at upgrading your video card.

Also, consider throwing another 2GB of RAM into your system. The game can (and will, if you let it) consume over a gig by itself. Going with 4GB, even if you only see 3.0-3.5, allows you to give the game a decent amount of dedicated memory space without choking off the rest of the apps/services/etc running on the system and forcing a swap to hard drive (*SHUDDER*).

Okay, this has come up before. There was a marketing challenge a while back to see how much you could generate within the first hour of creating a toon.

The goal was 1 million inf. During the day, on a weekday, using sub-optimal flipping and vendoring on a toon with only one recipe slot, I was able to generate just under half a million inf.

1 hour to create enough wealth to SO out a toon at L25-30.

Given more time and more patient market use, the wealth generation would be much higher on a per-minute-in-game basis.