All_Bogs

Heh, yeah, manually typing anything into the constitution input is pretty much impossible. You'll tab to the input, hit backspace once, have the calculator go 'you can't have 1 constitution', and have it immediately be corrected back to 10. Could consider letting people enter 1-99 in the constitution input as well, and then internally using a minimum value of 10 anyway.

Currently greatly enjoying Path of Exile. Some would argue that it's the game Diablo 3 should have been. It's completely free to play, and not play to win, and while it's still in beta it generally works like a charm. These short race events they've been hosting lately are a good deal of fun, too.

You mean as in the old combat calculator that you can access through the Internet Archive? Don't think it's within the crew's power to do anything about that. Not sure if there's any functioning calculators around, but the RS Wiki has the formulas (here) if you want to calculate it manually.

Your computer should be able to handle RS just fine. With your Java being up to date, I have no idea what could cause it. Did you try using the downloadable client? (you can grab it here) Oh, and yes, the 635m is your graphics chip.

Things aren't really black and white. For certain games, such as those using an overhead point of view (e.g. Diablo 3) 30 FPS will be more than enough. However, for stuff like first person shooters, I find that looking around inexplicably feels very "jerky" when you're running at just 30 FPS. Then there's Skyrim, which has severe frame-drops in certain indoor locations for me, and even though FRAPS reports frame rates of around 25, the game feels like it's playing at single digit FPS and actively looking around in those conditions causes motion sickness more quickly than I'd like. I think that in the end, it mostly comes down to how responsive a game feels. If you're running at 30 FPS, I think that the minimum response time of the game will be 1/30 of a second. Similarly, at 60 FPS, it'll be 1/60 of a second. Anything higher is probably wasted, since your monitor can't draw frames fast enough anyway. So, if you're watching somebody else play a game, you might not notice 30 FPS vs 60 FPS, but when playing the game yourself, it might be very noticeable, especially if you're sensitive to response times or if the game simply has issues with responsiveness (e.g. Skyrim, in my case, and reportedly Far Cry 3 suffers from the same thing). Even when just watching things, I can actually see it. Certain Starcraft 2 tournaments have experimented with 60 FPS streams in the past, and my first reaction will be like "hey, this stream feels smoother than usual". But once the novelty wears off, I kind of stop caring, so I'd say they're mostly wasting their bandwidth.

Good suggestion. The price increase should be minimal, and going from 1333 to 1600 actually nets you a small but noticeable increase in performance with modern CPUs. Do you really need those four extra fans? Since you're going with a modest video card and a processor that can't be overclocked, spending extra money on cooling might not be needed. Similarly, I think going with a 620 watt power supply is way overdoing it. NVIDIA recommends a 400 watt power supply for their GTX 650 Ti, which I think should be more than enough to power your entire system. You sure you don't need an optical drive? I occasionally use mine to install old games, and something like this one is both pretty cheap and from what I hear, pretty silent as well.

I wouldn't worry about it. Performance wise, RS has turned into an absolute monstrosity over the last few years. I'm getting better framerates in Skyrim's cities than I am in RuneScape's for crying out loud. As for Chrome, if you hit shift+esc while inside Chrome you can see what each process is doing exactly. I thought that the mean reason behind having multiple processes was that if one process crashes, you don't have to shut down the entire browser, just the one part that is causing issues for you. I'm no expert though, so don't take this for a fact.

Okay, so I'm assuming that all you care about is how well Runescape plays, then. Memory: does not matter at all. Any laptop you buy today will have sufficient memory to run Runescape. Graphics card: depends on how you play the game. Do you play the game in "fixed mode" or in a small window that doesn't fill much of your screen? Then just about any graphics card will perform adequately. Do you play the game in full screen, or in a window that fills your entire screen? Then you will need a little bit of juice in the graphics department, but still not a whole lot. Processor: the performance of Runescape depends heavily on your processor. The cheaper AMD processors are really limited in this aspect, and I am not sure if they would have sufficient juice to play the game at 30+ fps, so I wouldn't be comfortable recommending anything that isn't Intel. Unfortunately, there's only so much you can do with $400. The lowest set-up that would cover all your bases would be an Core i3 processor with an HD 4000 integrated graphics chip, but I'm not sure if you can get that at that price point. You might be able to make meet your demands with lower grade processors (in particular if you play in a small window), but I can't promise that the lower processor speed and the worse integrated graphics would be able to produce 30+ fps consistently. They might, or they might not ... I just don't know. Careful suggestions: http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model-datasheet/NX.M17AA.002 ($430, but the processor might be too slow ... ) http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model-datasheet/NX.M2DAA.009 ($500, but will definitely be fast enough) Maybe you can find a good deal somewhere on a laptop that's normally around $500 or so. I can't really find anything for $400 for which I could promise that it would run Runescape well enough.

Just to clarify, the Alienware and the Lenovo have the exact same processor. Both of them normally run at 2.4 GHz, and both of them can turbo-boost up to 3.4 GHz for a short period of time. Lenovo is listing the base speed, and Alienware is listing the turbo speed, but there's really no difference between the two. For my laptop, the graphics card is definitely the thing that limits performance the most. Again, no idea about the caching SSD. For what it's worth, my laptop is currently using a hard disk without any fancy caching stuff, and personally, I feel that it's plenty fast for daily usage.

While I don't know what the exact problem is, I reckon that installing and using the official RS client will probably solve your issue. http://www.runescape.com/downloads.ws

For general use and a bit of gaming, a Core i5 should be sufficient. Modern games do not benefit much from the two extra cores offered by mobile Core i7 processors. Memory will almost always be expandable; some Macbooks have the modules soldered to the board, but those are somewhat above our price range anyway. You heard correctly about the GeForce 610M, it is in fact weaker than Intel's HD 4000, and as such, not really suitable for gaming. When considering NVIDIA graphics chips, the 630M and higher should offer tangible benefits over the HD 4000, but anything below that is questionable. Low-end ASUS machines suffer from the same problems as other cheap laptops, I'm afraid. Their higher end lines such as the N56 series are pretty solid, but they're a little pricier than $800 and also not really available right now, since they're being rebranded for Win8. You might be able to get last year's N55 for cheap if you get lucky; I have one of those myself, and apart from having the hard disk suddenly die it's been pretty solid thus far. I'm sure the hard disk issue was just a fluke, since it was from a reputable brand (Seagate) and not some cheap Chinese knock-off. Maybe the Lenovo Y570 would be suitable? Comes with a decent Core i5 CPU, GeForce 555m graphics (comparable to 635m), and a 500GB hard disk, and only costs $650. It does have a shitty 1366x768 screen, but finding a 1080p screen in your price range might be difficult. Also has an estimated shipping time of over a month ... If you're willing to spend a little over $800, the basic Lenovo y580 model might be a good fit. Comes with a modern Core i7 CPU, GeForce GTX 660m graphics (which is absolutely beastly in this price range I might add), 8 GB of memory and a 1TB hard disk. It also ships a lot faster. Again with the shitty screen, but picking up a nice full HD screen might simply not be possible in your price range right now. You might be able to find some more useful stuff on Newegg if you limit the price to like $600-$800 and filter by screen size and show models with dedicated graphics only. Coughed up a few more potential candidates.

I'm not really familiar with caching SSDs, so I don't know if there's a big difference between the two. Maybe somebody else knows?

Toshiba's offering doesn't really have anything going for it. The only thing that makes it stand out is the fact that it has 12 GB of memory, which probably won't make the slightest difference for your everyday usage. Coming in at 17 inch it's rather huge, and its GeForce 630M graphics are adequate for the casual gamer, but still only about half as fast as the graphics solutions offered by the two other laptops you listed. The M14X has more graphics power and isn't nearly as big, but unfortunately it does come with a rather poor 1366x768 screen. Of course, you're also paying for the Alienware brand name. Lenovo's Y580 simply has an amazing price/performance ratio. It boasts the most graphics power out of the three, comes with a neat 1080p screen that also has surprisingly good secondary characteristics (e.g. contrast and colour accuracy), has a blue-ray drive and offers double the HDD storage of the Alienware model. Personally, I find glare (reflective) screens to be a little distracting, and all of the above models no doubt come with such a display (only Lenovo explicitly lists it, but it seems to be the standard ... ). ASUS's N56VZ line of laptops offer decent graphics (just a little slower than the Alienware / Lenovo models), a blue-ray drive, pretty solid build quality, and most importantly, a 1080p matte screen. They currently seem to be transitioning from Win7 to Win8 releases, though, so you probably won't be able to get your hands on a new model right away, unless you get lucky and a boutique happens to have one in store. They should be around $1100, I think.