Striker879

A lot depends on where you live for where you'd go to upgrade your hardware. I live in Canada and I always prefer to go to an actual store (as opposed to dealing over the internet). I've found that Canada Computers offers fairly reasonable prices, but more importantly that their store staff are very knowledgable. If you do look into upgrading you will need to learn more about the specific motherboard that HP has used, and what CPUs it will support. Often machines built by large companies are built to meet a price point, and so sacrifices are made in which components go into the machine to meet that marketing department driven price point (I call that "design by marketing dweebs") Upgrading your machine yourself can be a "learning experience", so be prepared to learn from your mistakes. It will take years of research and mistakes to begin to get focus on a moving target. I know this because upgrading my own machines is how I got started down the road of building my own desktops. Over the years I've spent a lot of money on components that gave me little return on the dollar as I learned (i.e. buying the latest and best often doesn't equate with the expected amount of better performance if all of the other components aren't equally capable of the same level of performance ... in the real world unless you have unlimited dollars to throw at a machine there will always be a bottleneck to performance). Don't let me discourage you, just be aware this isn't a weekend and then you'll be done project but rather the beginning of a journey. When I first started modding the game I had been building my own machines for a couple of decades but I still found myself in the same boat as anybody starting out modding ... I knew diddly squat and every bit of advice I saw was a gibberish gobbly goop of acronyms. I had absolutely no luck installing anything until I started using a mod manager (and of course like most people ... you excepted ... I wanted to see results now, not after weeks of research). I used Oblivion Mod Manager (OBMM) to get my feet wet. The biggest downside I see to relying on a mod manager for installing mods is this ... after using one for years to install mods you'll still know squat about how to install mods. The best mod manager for Oblivion is Wrye Bash (WB) but a person really needs a good basic understanding of installing mods to use it for mod installation unless the particular mod comes with a BAIN install wizard (BAIN is the acronym for Wrye Bash's mod installer). BAIN wizards walk you through all of the install options for a mod (usually big complicated mods with plenty of options to choose from). A non wizard install would just present you with a bunch of options, often with little or no info about them, and you'd need to know which to select when installing. A basic knowledge of manually installing mods would give you a foundation for interpreting the sometime sparse install instructions. The worst choice for Oblivion is Nexus Mod Manager (NMM) ... which is rather ironic considering that almost all mods have a "Download with Manager" button that will require NMM to work. The reason is that NMM was designed to work with newer games, but when they rolled it out they enabled the "Download with Manager" for all mods without any concern as to whether NMM would actually work on that particular mod or not. Most Oblivion mods haven't been updated in years and predate the earliest version of NMM. Yes NMM will work for many relatively simple Oblivion mods, but generally those mods could be easily installed with a simple extract/copy/paste that takes far longer to describe that to do. Hope you are comfortable with reading ... I do have a "verbose" side at times.

The game prefers a fast CPU ... I run on an old Core2 Duo 3.0GHz. Your CPU speed will limit what the game can handle from mods. From what I can see on nVidia's site it looks like your graphics is a chipset intergrated on the motherboard (I'm guessing you are on a laptop). Those sort of graphics solutions always come with compromises (generally they use your RAM rather than dedicated graphics VRAM, stealing available RAM from the CPU for non-grahics use). You'll also more than likely have an on-board sound solution, further robbing RAM for sound processing. My advice is start without mods to get a good feel for your baseline performance and then add mods slowly (i.e. one at a time) and test thoroughly between mods so you have a good idea on how each affects your performance. If you have an second hard drive then by all means install on that hard drive (e.g. D:\Games). It will help a bit with performance as you won't be asking one hard drive (C drive) to do two or more things at the same time (run the operating system, run your background tasks and run the game). If it isn't a second physical drive (i.e. it is only a partition on the same physical drive as C drive) then there will be little or no dfference between C drive and D drive so C:\Games would be the way to go.

RobertMaleBodyReplacerV52 is the latest version of Roberts Male and the latest refinement is Seamless Equipment - Roberts Male v5.2 Edition (read install iinstructions carefully).

The recommended install location for all Windows versions later than WinXP is C:\Games (or if you have more than one physical disk then similar on that disk ... e.g. D:\Games). What you are looking to do is to keep the game out of any possible protected locations such as C:\Program Files (x86). If you use the Steam version of the game this means installing Steam in C:\Games or similar. - Edit - CPU wise you are at the lower end for the game. It can't use multiple cores like modern games so you'll be limited to a single core and speed is this game's friend. Without things like the 4GB Patch the game won't utilize more than slightly less than 2GB RAM (but with only 4GB total you won't get it to use the full 4GB even with the patch ... Windows and those unavoidable background processes will chew up a good chunk).

The other thing to keep in mind about Wrye Bash and bashed tags is that the overall determining factor when more than one mod does the same thing is load order. So if mods A, B and C all use the same bashed tag and their load order is B, C and then A it will be A's assets that will be used (and if it's C, A, and then B it will be B's). I would guess that WB is only assigning vanilla assets when rebuilding the BP. A while back I did a bit of research for another thread and my guess was that the NPCs who have "default" for eye colour, hair etc. were the ones that WB was assigning to, but that research didn't yield any conclusive results. It would be interesting to find out the answer.

Whenever I rebuild my bashed patch I see it reported that WB is assigning random hair and eyes to NPCs who are missing them (you need to watch the reported progress as the BP is being rebuilt), but beyond seeing that reported I don't have further info. Could be there is more info on it in the Wrye Bash readmes (found in the Oblivion\Mopy\Docs folder).

Never use quicksave ... it's a known corrupter of save games. See Forli's post in this thread. Another possibility is the A-Bomb stuck animation bug, easily repaired using Wrye Bash (Saves tab right click menu -> Repair A-Bomb).

I don't have any experience with Streamline/Streamsave. What little I know about it I've mostly got from various discussions in the Oblivion Reloaded - OBGE v4 mod comments a long way back. I could be remembering wrong but I think that Streamsave was the one thing from Streamline that was recommended. - Edit - See Forli's comment below ... I was remembering wrong. If you want to search through the OR mod comments I'll give you a tip. At the top of the comments page there is a link to the forum version of the mod's comments, where you can use the forum search tools to search through the comments for things like Streamline or Streamsave.

A good place for a question like this is Oblivion Mod Detectives.

You are not supposed to use both Tamrielic_Ingredients.esp and Tamrielic_Ingredients_OOO.esp at the same time ... read the Tamriel Ingredients esp Files section of the TI mod description. That's where I'd start troubeshooting.

All I can suggest is something you probably don't want to hear. Long ago I read something on Wrye Musings when researching my own problems with saving (I was a quick save junkie back then ... not a good thing to do to your game). It said that you should always exit to the desktop and restart the game before loading a save (yes, a bit of a pain in the butt if you are dying a lot). Other advice I gleaned from the Wrye Musings article was to never overwrite saves (i.e. always save in a new slot from the Esc menu Save menu). That old character's saves were so bad I normally crashed when crossing cell boundaries and interior/exterior, so that I was forever reloading and saving. By following the advice in Wrye Musings I was able to slowly get that character's saves more stable. The other trick I used was to use the "coc center and wait 72 hours" trick, which gives the game an opportunity to purge out cell states that are all tangled up. I have followed that advice (exit to desktop, don't quick save and never overwrite) with all of my more recent characters and haven't run into those probems since.

Not sure if CSE works the same way, but in the regular CS you need to open a cell before you'll see the NPCs displayed using anything other than vanilla assets for faces. I've never even tried getting other body parts to display, but I do use the vanilla CS to tweak and adjust Blockheadized NPC faces.

Any of Emma's mods are non-OBSE dependent.

I had an old Vista laptop that used Realtek and once ran into a problem (but not a problem playing games ... that laptop wouldn't play any games). It happened right after I allowed Microsoft Update to install some "recommended" driver updates, one of those being the Realtek drivers. To resolve the problem I had to uninstall the driver from MS and install the latest one from the Realtek site. I always have all automatic updates turned off, so I knew exactly where to look when troubleshooting, but most people have automatic updates turned on and just take whatever MS decides to push at them. Could your problem be as a result of a Microsoft update?

I have a fuzzy recollection of a similar problem reported a long time ago, but don't recall if the issue was ever resolved. If you are not running a dedicated sound card I'd try disabling the sound hardware acceleration (something like bDHWSoundAcceleration or similar in Oblivion.ini if memory serves).

I'd like to second what Drake says about Steam changing things and breaking what had been working for their users ... I've seen it a number of times myself. Unfortunately we don't have very many Steam users who are also active in helping with support requiests here. Contra's contributions are always welcome, and if your own research leads you to learning some of what works and what doesn't I encourage you to join our small team of troubleshooters. When you really would like to help but don't have the first hand knowledge needed (like in this Steam issue here) I myself don't like to see a request just left without any attempt to help. I'll ususally wait a day or two to see if anyone has something to offer, and if not I'll try to help as best I can. If you found the tone of my reply condescending I do appologize ... that wasn't my intention. Back when I worked a large part of my job was troubleshooting, which is probably why I'm still "working" the help desk here. My advice was just what I consider basic troubleshooting. That's how I work through any of the problems I run into myself ... gather what data I can and come up with some different ways of testing that will show a result that can be used to draw conclusions. If the test results in ambiguous results you still won't know more than you started out with.

Which one ... this one or this one?

The advice I have seen given in TweakGuides is that the game doesn't get along well with "codec paks" (i.e. K-Lite codec pak). Have you treied uninstalling any you have installed?

When I'm exploring what works and what doesn't work I try things. If I try "A" and it doesn't work then I try "B". In this particular case, being the consevative type that I am, I would try with Steam Overlay on (or Steam Community, or whatever the term of the day for the Steam crowd is). If it works then great ... maybe if I was feeling adventurous I'd do a part 2 test with Steam Overlay off, just to see what happens. If it didn't work with Steam Overlay on then my next test would of course be without. What is the issue that created your need to know about Overlay off/on?

The colours are all explained in the two readmes included with Wrye Bash ... Wrye Bash General Readme.html and Wrye Bash Advanced Readme.html (both found in the Oblivion\Mopy\Docs folder).

According to Alenet (the authot of Oblivion Reloaded) it isn't required. I'm also a non-Steamer so I have no way to confirm this.

Open the console using the tilde (~) key found just below the Esc key on standard keyboards. With the console open click on the item and you'll see the refID displayed at the top of the screen along with it's name. Type "disable" (without the quote marks) and hit Enter.

Google Oblivion A-Bomb (stuck animation with long gametime saves) ... easily fixed using Wrye Bash.

RefScope is another option. Hey Contra, you'll next hear from me from the north!!

No I'm Canadian. Not much time this morning as I have to drive 4 hours to get to my ferry reservation. I spend most of the summer on my sailboat, which I keep on the North Channel of Lake Huron. I haven't been keeping up on what is available these days at all (I'm retired = no money). I used to use Toms Hardware and Anandtech sites as my primary sources for info, but there were a host of others I'd use as well. Learning to build my own machines wasn't just a project for a few days ... I spent years learning (and only truly learn by making mistakes). Here in Canada my primary source for hardware is Canada Computers (I don't do the internet thing for much at all anymore ... even for my case fans I phone and place my order with FrozenCPU). If you have a teacher who is knowledgeable about computers that would be one place to start, but I always try to get more than one opinion before forming my own.