N3C14R

Port forwarded the games required ports on your router/modem? Are you giving your friend your internal or external ip? Allowed your game server through your firewall?

Apart from the aftermarket MSI cooler, the Evga one has a higher overclock and lifetime warrenty.

I guess you didn't notice the fact that it can't detect anything other than false positives. Its heuristics are a joke, its definitions are often months behind. The company only exists at this point because they have bundle contracts with computer manufacturers and can get the occasional uninformed consumer. Norton is almost just as bad. A company which exists less for their product than the name of their product. In general, any product pushed by an ISP or as bundled software tends to be utter crap. There are few exceptions. I would recommend Kaspersky, except that their internet security 2011 package seems to have a small memory leak somewhere that can result in the program taking up 1gb+ of memory if you leave your computer running for a few days. Only a handful of customers seem to experience it, but they don't particularly seem inclined to solve it. This is just the latest step in the trend of Kaspersky becoming more and more like Norton, lack of quality or support for their product, lack of timely updates, dependency on obtrusive scans and constant popups. For instance an anti-spam feature which gives you a big flashy warning if you havn't trained it on e-mails, and gives you constant warnings when it is disabled. Not a big deal for those of us who need/want a program deciding what is and is not spam for them, but fairly annoying otherwise. My best recommendation at this point would actually be AVG and Spybot, maybe with Malwarebytes as a safety net. AVG seems the most relaible out of all out there, and is free, so you don't have to pay a subscription fee unless you really like the program and want some extra features. Spybot has rather consistently always been good for finding stuff other softwares miss and can prevent many threats from even taking hold. But if you need some of the firewall stuff from Norton and Kaspersky, Comodo is a good alternative to AVG, provided you can sit down and spend the time getting it setup and working. Kapersky, fine but AVG and Norton? Seriously? The 2 most resource hogging sercurity/antivirus programs and most new malware generally tend to avoid detection from. :/

Then I'd recommend getting a p67 mobo with preferably two pci-e x16 slots for future sli/crossfire expandability, adequate number of usb 3.0 slots with internal front header capability, none of that bulls*** usb 3.0 pass through cables and decent OC capabilities. Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, XFX are decent brands since I'd used them in the past and present with no problems.

I use McAfee Antivirus Plus. Seems decent, no annoying messages and such, the only thing I dislike about it is that it prevented some of my firefox plugins from working. :/ Avast is also another AV program I recommend, been using it flawlessly for just over 2 years, before I switched to McAfee.

Any reliable mobo is good. It's usually user preference that makes one better and another one inferior. Be more specific on what you're using the 2500k for. Workstation, games, future proofing, 3d modelling/rendering, 2d imaging, audio production, web hosting, overclocking, etc.

Started reading Dragonlace Chronicles - Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Good and immerse so far. :thumbsup:

That graphics card will certainly improve your overall FPS in Fallout but I would opt to get a mid range GTX460/GTX465 instead. It may be 1 generation older but it is much faster than the entry level GTX550 for around the same price. The only thing to be weary is that the 460/465 uses more power than the 550 since its a more powerful card and it uses the older, less efficient GF100 chip, compared to the newer, revised GF110 chip of the 550. Make sure the PSU in your PC can handle the added power draw before buying either card. If you're going for the GTX550 it is not a bad choice, it's soft on the power bills too, assuming other parts of your PC are also energy efficient.

Just because the PC is pre-assembled does no dictate its quality. I've seen and repaired a handful of computers and some of the premade ones were absolutely atrocious. All pretty on the outside, crap on the inside. Most manufacturers cheap out on production costs to increase their profitability by using lower quality components, from capacitors, voltage regulators all the way to the power supply and ram the choose. Most companies like Dell/Alienware put in place ridiculous price markups that sometimes inflate the price to over 20% of what the PC is actually worth on the market. Plus don't even get me started on the Warranty and customer service, it's like they hired a bunch of teens from geeksquad to work in customer support. I'm not saying all corporate system manufacturers are bad, but some of the units they sell are so entry level and overpriced it's not even funny.

You should of gotten the 2TB, for the that price it was well worth the extra $$. You'll be surprised how fast 1TB can be used up. Disc backups, renders, game installs, movies, music, etc eats up free space like a disease.

Quickly googled the drive again, I think your right. Some sources say it's 5400, 5940 or 5944 rpm. :confused: But the Seagate is 7200rpm for sure. I've been using 3 of them for the past 5 years and they're great. :)

Note that the Seagate is a 7200rpm drive while the Hitachi is 5400rpm. Other than the difference in Capacity, the speed difference is hardly noticeable by the average consumer since the transfer speeds are the same. The Hitachi drive will seek data slower than the Seagate but for the price of 2tb, the Hitachi is better value. I'd go for the Deskstar as storage > speed.

Print scrn + ctrl p + paint.

Not necessarily, Back a couple of years ago when I was on vacation in Singapore, I saw some generic branded fanless 1200W PSU with terrible efficiency (think it was 70% efficient) and a single rail for sale for around $90. A similar one but with WAYYYYY better specs goes for about $300 nowadays. I wouldn't trust my $1000+ hardware to some budget sub $100 PSU. That's one component that most system builders tend to overlook and if they're unlucky, sooner or later they end up with a $1000+ paperweight.

There's a LOT more than just wattage. Like whether the PSU is modular, maximum amperage, 80 plus certification, amount of 12v rails, overload/surge protection, component quality, maximum rated output, rated operating temperature, etc. There's an obvious difference between a $40 and $100 PSU of the same wattage if you get into the finer details.

Not really, just because Seagate had the "7200.11" incident doesn't mean it's instantly less reliable. All it does is damage their reputation to the weary consumer. Just like what the "Deathstar" did to Hitachi a few years back. You can still unlock 6950's, you just need to find one with a reference pcb, like the MSI HD6950 twin frozer II for example.

Ah well, at least I know it wasn't my photoshop skills at fault. :)

Wireless G, B or N are just the standards that are used for wireless transmission. Just google your routers model and see what standard it uses. For example if your router uses wireless g, get a wireless g PCI card, etc.

Anything but a GTX550 Ti, In all the benchmarks I've seen the card preforms atrociously slow. A last generation GTX470, GTX460 or GTX465 absolutely destroys it. Here's a list of almost all mainstream GPU's according to ranking. http://www.overclock...-time-last.html

Switch off the computer when you go to bed, enable speedstep if you have an Intel CPU.:thumbsup:

There are many different tools and tutorials on the web to how to unlock gpu's. All I did was explain the basic terminology. I remember trying to unlock my old fx5200 into a fx5500, it was a little nerve racking at first by hey, it still works great after 6 years. :) Yes your motherboard has 3 PCI slots so any wireless PCI card would work. I would recommend any wireless card that supports wireless G, B or N depending on what signal your home router can utilize. Transfer speeds between 54mbps to 108mbps and adequate signal coverage would also be great. Linksys, D-Link and Netgear are a few of the well known names in the industry. As for Wireless USB dongles, I've never used one before but I assume they are the same as a PCI card but they connect directly to a USB port.

I'm trying to remove the scars from Geralts face but I've run into a little dilemma regarding of what I think is the alpha channels. I already removed the scars from the the geralt_h1 file and tried redoing the alphas on the geralt_h1_n file. But when I add it into the game the shading/deep cuts for the scars are still there. :verymad: http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/7489/twtch220110613211758.png http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/4082/twtch220110613211742.png Any ideas what am I doing wrong?

Has anyone played it? I'm playing it on an old XP machine with a 3DFX Glide emulator. It's so fun yet most of my friends which are also TES enthusiasts never even heard of it before until I told them. Voice acting in game is pretty good considering the audio equipment they used for recording at the time the game was developed. The only thing I felt it lacked was a decent combat system, switching from combat to normal mode is such a pain in the ass not to mention the fact you could only directional movement in combat mode is strafing left or right and moving forwards are backwards. What do you guys think?

All that program does is end some non critical system processes to free up more ram/cpu time and restarts them after your exit your game, etc. This can also be easily done up opening up task manager and ending processes. Or by removing start up programs/services from msconfig.

Most GPU manufacturers deliberately take their higher end cards like the 6970 and "lock" some of the features eg, pixel pipelines, memory chips, etc and sell them cheaper as lower end cards to meet market demands. Rather than spending more money redesigning and manufacturing a lower end card, they get the higher end ones and lock some of the features. Unlocking is when you take the locked piece of hardware and unlock it into a higher end model whether its by a simple bios flash or a physical hardware mod, etc. This practice has happened in the past with various hardware manufacturers eg, Nvidia FX5200 unlocks to FX5500 Nvidia 8800GT unlocks to 9800GT Nvidia GTX465 unlocks to GTX470 AMD Athlon 2 X3 unlocks to Phenom 2 X4 AMD Phenom 2 X2 unlocks to Phenom 2 X4 AMD Sempron 140 unlocks to Athlon 2 X2 Most GPU unlocks are done by flashing the bios of the locked card with the unlocked cards counterpart bios. Essentially transforming the card into a "new" card. This procedure permanently unlocks the card so make sure you back up the original bios if you want to switch back your card to the lower end one. Most CPU unlocks are done by utilizing a motherboard that supports a feature called "Advanced Clock Calibration". Switching it on essentially transforms your cpu into the higher end variant. This feature is not permanent, so when you remove the cpu from your mobo, it gets switched back to being the lower end model. Yes, you'd need either a wireless USB dongle or a wireless PCI card thats goes plugged into your motherboards PCI slot. I have a wireless PCI card in my computer as well and it works great.