DarkWarrior45

I'm in a similar boat, I'm currently reinstalling Skyrim with a new mod list. However, I am not at the moment using Special Edition simply because of mod support. To expect the same level of mod support for SE as what we have for Skyrim is unrealistic at best; it took the modding community five years to get Skyrim's modding scenario into its current state. Simply put, I will not be touching SE for at least a year, unless I'm wanting a vanilla playthrough.

Did you follow this guide: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50244/? Also, install ENB (even if you're not using an ENB preset) and enable the ENB's memory patch as detailed here: http://enbdev.com/ctdfix.html The stability guide that I've linked also details some additional things in ENB to configure as well. Follow both guides and you should be set. Also, grab this to fix the bouncy cart at the opening scene: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/65538/

Thanks, man. Never heard of the magnetic drive, but I'll look into it. Does it replace the HDD? I recently ordered a 1 TB Hitachi 3.5 HDD which was recommended to go with the build. Magnetic drive is the same thing as a HDD, just different terminology.

What I did with my fiance's computer was I paired the SSD with a 1 TB magnetic drive. All the data goes onto the 1 TB drive and the OS and the applications, such as your games, go onto your SSD. This frees the SSD of some data load. A 500 GB SSD will be more future proof than anything else, but it's still very pricey. Me personally, I would use a 256 GB SSD with a 1 TB magnetic drive.

My biggest suggestion for you is that before you start heavily recruiting people, sit down and put together a "Game Design Document." A quick search on Google should come up with some templates for this. Then set your strategic goals, and then your day-to-day goals for the project. Then set a schedule for the project (gannt charts help immensenly with this). Then recruit.

He's right, you need a laptop in the $1500 - $2000 range. But, for development, you don't need a gaming laptop. You need a type of laptop called a mobile workstation, which are typically used for 3d development and autocad. Lenovo has a "Thinkpad W530" that has a i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a Quadro graphics card with 2 GB of VRAM that starts at about $1200. Link here: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/w-series/w530/.

I actually built a system for a friend of mine a couple of months ago for about $1000. Currently, she is playing Skyrim on "Ultra-High" settings. It had an 3rd gen i5 processor, 16 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 660, a 128 GB solid state drive with Windows 8 loaded on it, and a 1 TB drive for all of her crap. Oh, her boot times is in the range of thirty seconds. Now, that is with a custom built. You're not getting that good of a system pre-assembled from manufacturers such as Dell, HP, or Lenovo, who are known to overprice their systems. My recommendation is to build your own system, as your dollar will go the furthest with a custom built system.

I have a request, and I would be very grateful for this. I'm looking for any kind of city overhaul mods, both that are either currently released, or are still in pre-release development. This is not neccesarily for my own enjoyment, but it's for research into a possible project. Thank you.

Erik005 is right, you can save some money by switching to a different power supply. You might want to look at a 620 watt or maybe a 750 watt to save anywhere between $30 tp $70 depending on what you pick.Take a look at Corsair's lineup. Honestly, I'm an ATI guy right now. However, the Geforce lineup is currently benchmarking higher than the Radeons, so your money is better invested with nVidia. Now, with that being said, take a look at the Radeon HD 7950. It's fifty dollars cheaper on Newegg than the 7870 and it has 3 GB of video memory (versus 2 GB on the 7870 and the 670). Plus, it inches past the 7870 on the Passmark benchmark. It can't quite compete with the 670 in regards to raw power and speed, but its got more video memory.

Personally, I recommend Linux as a second OS just in case, the ext4 filesystem can't be read by Windows (even with required software, ext4 is read-only) so it can't be screwed up unless you wreck it's partition with crappy partitioning tools. Even better with reiserfs or reiser4, they can't be read by Windows at all. Also good for backing up/restoring your files if Windows fails to boot of if NTFS goes to hell (happens to any OS), my data is worth to me more than 10GB free space and 3 seconds faster boot. Linux/Windows dual-boot won't slow down your system other than the 3 second GRUB2 countdown during boot time, won't affect gaming performance at all. I don't recommend Ubuntu though, ever since Unity got out it turned into a huge pile of unstable horse dung. Mint 13 is decent, based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and easy to use for a Windows user. No fancy Compiz effects on Cinnamon but it's a decent, stable DE. Also, you're wrong, Linux can run native games as good as Windows. Some even better, read up on Valve's results while porting L4D2 to Linux. The lack of games for Linux is a different thing entirely, though that might change if Valve indeed releases a Linux-based Steam Box (good for me). Wait, Windows has a RAM limit on a 64-bit OS? What's the point of that? :blink: I'm sorry, but I disagree on having Linux as a secondary OS. Maybe for someone who knows what they're doing, then yes, I can see the benefit. But for a gamer who doesn't know the difference between Linux and Windows, let alone how to use Linux, it's a waste of time and effort imo. Just load Windows and be done with it. Linux or no Linux, my phone's gonna ring. Although I will admit that my favorite distro at the moment is Fedora 18. And yes, Windows has a RAM limit. Windows 7 Home Premium limits you to 16 GB. And either Home Starter or Home Basic (forget which one) limits you to 4/8 GB. Professional does too, but that limit is in the neighborhood of about 192 GB. Basically if you need more than 192 GB of RAM then Microsoft is going to be asking you why you are not using a Server edition of Windows ($600+ depending on edition). There are also other limits that people are not aware of, such as that no more than 10 computers can connect to a shared folder on Windows 7/8 at a time. Again, Microsoft wants you to use a Server edition for that purpose. The long and the short of this is that it's a big marketing scheme that's enforced by the OS. And please do not jump to conclusions that I'm wrong on something. The gist behind my comment "Linux cannot run games (outside of Bastion)," basically meant that there is a very poor library of games available for Linux, except worded in such a way that someone who does not know much about Linux will come to the conclusion that they're most likely are not running their Windows games on it.

I personally think that Nintendo's current marketing strategy with the Wii U is the byproduct of a... I won't finish that sentence. My point being is that I think the Wii U's strategy to attract back proper games is simply a knee jerk reaction to the fact that Nintendo knows there's a shotgun pointed at their head. What I wish they had done was a full feature console similiar to the PS4 instead of an update of the Wii, with the marketing focus on hard core gaming. Bring in a digital game store (like Steam) with good support for indies, and also bring your NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube games available for download. One thing they could had done to make it more attractive for developers was to add native support for majors game engines such as Unreal Engine.

First things first, reinstall your audio drivers. Then try listening to music with headphones plugged into the computer's headphone jack. If the problem persists over headphones, and after reinstalling drivers, then you're looking at a soundcard problem, just as others have suggested. If, however, it sounds perfectly fine over headphones, then there is nothing wrong with your soundcard. The next thing to check is your speakers themselves. A loose speaker plug will do it everytime. Also check the speaker cables for places where the cable may have been pinched or damaged. If you're using an optical SPIDF cable, check for tight bends in the cable (optical cables are not suppose to be tightly bent, as this breaks the glass inside). In fact, try it with a replacement SPIDF cable to see what it does. And if all else fails, just get new speakers.

A lot of people have already mentioned that Windows 7 would be the better platform for a gaming machine, and I would be inclined to agree. I personally use Windows 7 on my own desktop rig that is used for light to medium gaming. Me personally, Windows 8 is not horrible. Sure, Microsoft made some mistakes in the UI design, but that is something that I've learned to work around. The Windows 8.1 update is suppose to address some of the UI concerns. I use it on my Lenovo ultrabook, and it does everything I want it too. Of course, I'm not gaming on my ultrabook either. When Windows Vista was Microsoft's newest thing on the block, I was really big into Linux and was pushing everyone I knew to go to Ubuntu Linux. And Ubuntu, for the most part, is a pretty good operating system. Especially if your main line of work is programming. However, in this day and age, I personally think that Linux has no business being on a gaming rig. Linux cannot run games (outside of Bastion), and installing it, even as a secondary OS, just simply adds complexity that I think is unneccesary. I prefer a gaming rig to have one OS (Windows 7) loaded on a fast drive (either a 10k rpm drive or a SSD). It's simple and it works.

That is exactly correct. When I took my digital logic design course here at the engineering school we were required to design and build a an actual, working microprocessor using TTL components. Now, these were little squirt guns; they were the size of a dinner plate and they ran anywhere between 2 Hz to 12 Hz and they had a 4 bit front sided bus with about 8 bytes of memory. The running joke in the class was they might be able to run Windows. The fastest clock in the class was the 12 Hz unit. The fastest and smoothest running processor in the class however, was a 8 Hz unit where the student was smart enough to use fast switching NAND gates from Texas Instruments that could switch on/off twice as fast as anything else that we had in the lab. Point being is that we found at that CPU speed is not about clock nor the number of cores, but the true determining factors in performance was architecture and the speed of the gates used. In fact we had an engineering teacher state "How fast can you get a computer to go? Well how fast can you get a NAND gate to flip?" Right now Intel has the better digital gates and the better architecture, so guess which chip is benching higher?

There is also CDW. They are catered more towards the business side of computing, but they should take an order from a private individual without a problem. Frozencpu.com is also another reliable site that caters towards modders and overclockers. They should have the fan you're looking for. This is the site that I personally prefer to buy liquid cooling parts from.

You shouldn't have a problem running any kind of game that is currently out right now.

You're stressing your Corsair power supply way too much. If a power supply is a 500 W at 34 amp on the twelve volt rail, then it means that the unit has been rated to continuously and reliably run with a 500W @ 34 A load for as long as the warranty lasts. It can support a higher load than that, but the components inside the power supply will be running hotter and with more electricity than what they are designed to handle; when you go past the max load, you risk the components burning out. A diode rated for 34 amps will destroy itself when presented with a higher amperage. Resisters will literally burn up (you'll smell a staunch burning smell in this case) when presented with a higher amperage. Basically what I am trying to say is: yes it may be running fine for now. But your power supply will not be able to support that load for a long period of time. You will need to plan for an upgraded power supply. I personally recommend a higher rated Corsair or a PC Power & Cooling unit.

An OC version of interiors is simply too difficult to do because simply because of how Oblivion handles the weather. Rain and snow is simply a photoshoped image that is superimposed with your current view, which is why it rains underneath an arch in the IC. It is one of the limitations that modders have to work with, and is one of many reasons why Oblivion does the interiors the way it does. Now what is possible is the bigger taverns. Now I hope that when you ask for all the taverns to be bigger inside, that it is quite a bit of work to go through and increase the size of these taverns, as it requires some major interior rework. Tedious, but very possible.

Removing the CMOS battery is exactly how you reset the CMOS. Some motherboards, such as HP business class workstations and some older Dell XPS systems, have a yellow button on the motherboard that does the exact same thing.

As you have probably found out already, the amount of memory on a graphics card is not the silver bullet in regards to performance. But before you do anything, I would go out and reinstall your nvidia drivers. The geforce 6200 was not a terrible card like everyone makes it out to be; it's an entry level card that is designed solely for pushing out a display to two monitors and not particularly gaming. Somehow that makes a video card suck, haven't been able to figure out exactly how yet. You are not bound to a specific brand of card as far as ATi and nVidia are concerned. Now ATi did support the AGP slot a lot longer than nVidia did, so they would have a much better selection for that slot. I believe there some Radeon HD2000 series cards that were made for AGP, but don't quote on that. I would look on ebay and see what's being tossed around. A lower rated power supply won't cause lag per say, but it can damage the graphics. Probably why your 6200 died.

Do what lv000 says and delete, scrub, and reinstall your video drivers. Also reseat your graphics card and your RAM (always reseat your RAM when you have hardware problems, everything passes through RAM at some point in time) and verify that the fan on the graphics card is running and is free of any kind of obstructions, such as loose wires and dust. I would get some canned air and blow that graphics card out, and I would also make sure it's getting plenty of cool air. If none of that works or helps, then you're down to one of two options, reinstall Windows and/or replace the graphics card.

Reset your CMOS and turn your overclock off. If it still does not detect the fourth core then your CPU and/or motherboard is permanently damaged. Looking that chip up, I've found that it's a 140 watt cpu, which is pretty dang hot (also the reason why I don't like AMD cpus right now, they run too blasted hot for not enough performance). If your cooling was not top notch, then it is very likely that the fourth core on the chip burnt itself out.

ntoskrnl.exe is, well, Windows; it's the executable file for the NT kernel. No surprise that's it's showing up. I'm still saying that RAM could be an issue. Anytime you see an memory address starting with "FFFF" memory is a suspect.

Whatever you do, do not defragment your SSD, as it will do you no good (SSDs don't suffer from fragmentation) and defragmentation actually takes away from the life of the drive (because of the large amount of accesses). The symptoms you've described sounds like the 750GB is having issues. Yes, I've seen brand new hard drives be bad out of the box. I've also seen hard drives fail the day after getting a new computer. This is the nature of the beast; sometimes hard drive manufacturers do not carefully watch the environment the hard drive is being made in. This is important because if the humidity in their factory floor is slightly off, it can cause reliability problems with the drive (such as the drive suddenly dying). This is also one of the reasons why hard drives can only be opened inside a clean room. A mechanical hard drive, such as your 750 GB, can also fail from what's called a head crash. This is very common in laptops. A head crash is where the read/write head of the hard drive has physically contacted the platter, and a whirling noise and slow access times are symptoms of this. Head crashes are caused when the laptop is dropped, carried in a bag or backpack while in sleep mode (drives don't always park their read/write heads when in sleep mode), or from any kind of sudden shock to the system. Hope this helps.

Ok, there is a few select possibilities as to what can be causing this. But first take a look at this: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/stop0x00000007.htm Stop code 0x0000007e is an error that is thrown when the CPU receives a bad interrupt. An interrupt is basically a piece of assembler code that causes the CPU to stop what it's doing and handle an I/O operation, such as a keyboard stroke for example. Normally, the address the BSOD occurred at (FFFFFA6004AD7661) is usually indicative of a bad RAM stick, and it could very well be possible that that is the case here. When the interrupt is passed to the CPU, the address that is stored in the CPU's program counter has to be temporarily stored in RAM. So one of a few things is going on: 1) a piece of software, such as RTL8192u.sys, has passed the wrong address. Reinstalling the driver or reinstalling Windows will clear this up if this is the case. A virus can also cause this. 2) You have a memory stick installed that has gone bad. Because the interrupt has to pass through memory first, it can become corrupted during the interrupt call if the memory stick is defective. Trying a different set of RAM in your system will tell you if this is the case or not by whether or not the system still blue screens with the different RAM. 3) You have a defective wireless card. You'll know that this is the case if you've ruled the above two possibilities out. Hope this helps.