Doomster

If not done already, do the 4 resource dungeons that are open at your level: Dwarven Mine, Edgeville Dungeon, Karamja Volcano, Daemonheim. When soloing, have a good hunt round for resources, you can often source a full set of armour for free. If you have high alch runes or can RC them (yes, F2P can make nats here, with the right level), then alching torn bags pays better than selling to the smuggler.

Wasn't aware the power spec changed between USB1 & 2. AFAIK, it's always been 500mA for a single port or high power device, 100mA for a standard "low power" device, and if an unpowered hub is used, then everything on it is drawing from the one port. Front panel ports may be operating through a hub, particularly if they are combined with a card reader.

One laptop site puts it in the "tier 2" class, and it could run all but one of their test games at acceptable frame rate, though not at maxed settings. http://dragonage.bioware.com/info/demo/ - Demo (though looks like it's 2, rather than "origins") launches Feb 22, so try the demo and see how that runs.

http://www.bloodshed.net/compilers/index.html - Quite a big list of free compilers (not all for C), and Bloodshed's is worth a look http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/gtomar/ComparisionofCandcsharplanguages10242007013053AM/ComparisionofCandcsharplanguages.aspx - differences between C# and C++ The choice of free C# compilers is more limited http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/csharp.shtml

At the moment, Revs are high risk, low reward - now if they were offerring a chance of a free pop at some PvP kit dropping Revs....

For average hit, it should be 7.5 - looks like all the combat spell calculations assume an average 50% hit rate.

If your local Aldi has the Medion "2 in 1" (also use as mousepad), then that seems to be a rebranded Aiptek Hyperpen Mini, which is a rebranded Waltop Q-Pad http://www.waltop.com.tw/download.asp - and there is an OSX driver for the Q-Pad

With 20:20 hindsight, the poll was pure spin, would have been a shock if it had gone any other way, and if they'd already put considerable work into planning, would they have been prepared to drop it? They'd better have their anti-bot strategy well tuned, or legitimate woodcutters and miners will once more be frozen out by the bots. They are going to have to squeeze abusive IP ranges until the pips squeak.

Can't be a CBT3 pure and do mage (even for non-combat), as mage gives combat level. A Dunging skill pure is quite a challenge, as you'll depend on finding a combat based partner to actually beat the dungeon, who either needs a skiller, or is prepared to carry passengers

Key point, just what is the particular Sempron? If its the old style Socket A "2800+" then it's less powerful than a Pentium D @ 2.8GHz (the entry level D820). If it's a newer style Sempron @ 2.8GHz, then it's actually more powerful than the Pentium D The P4 / Pentium D "netburst" architecture was not Intel's finest moment - it was meant to have great clock scalability due to massive pipelining, but the power consumption scaled much faster than the clock rate.

If you dungeoneer, then do it ranged, since it seems you get full xp, and you can usually manage on the table supplies plus a few bought. May not be a great way to train range, but if you want to get some dungeoneering in...

The other issue with Pro's "XP Mode", is that it runs a virtual XP with a pretty weak emulated graphics card, so it's really for mission critical business applications. If you have a game that won't run in Windows 7 or under "compatibility wizard" (which is included in Home Premium), then it's unlikely to be usable in "XP Mode".

I hope the suggestion that only "players in good standing" will be able to have free trade / open PvP turms out to be true. And also, hope they retain some revenant worlds, as in the case of trying to use the wildy without PvPing, 1st preference would be finding an open PvP world with no opposition, 2nd choice, facing down the revenants, 3rd choice, facing down actual PvPers

Seen stacks of people get infected with AVG, and heard a lot of aggro with the toolbar. 8.0 ??? - Ancient! The positive vibe seems to be on Avast at the moment, though the new Microsoft Security Essentials may be worth a look (no nags to upgrade to pro!) Outpost Security Suite free give you a decent firewall and a VB100 (passed the last few) certified AV.

You want cheap? http://www.amazon.com/Micca-MPlay-Digital-Player-Drives/dp/B003D0WIQS/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1292949984&sr=1-2 Ok, cheap!

If you cannot uninstall a security softwaredue to a damaged uninstall, it sometimes helps to re-install it, then uninstall. Or try the official AVG removal tool from here - http://www.avg.com/us-en/download-tools Intended for use if uninstall / repair / uninstall has failed

If it's giving you the $79.99 offer for a velociraptor, then that is a mega deal for a superfast HD The "300 MBps external transfer rate" is the SATA 2 / SATA-300 transfer rate, the speed at which any data already in the drive buffer can be fed through the interface, and faster than current drives can actually retrieve data fraom the media. SATA 3 is doubling this rate, the interface capable of transferring at 600 Megabytes (6 Gigabits) per second, though in practice, there is not currently much to be gained. NB. SATA 3 motherboard interfaces are backward compatible with SATA 2 or SATA 1 devices. Going the other way, where the device supports higher speed than the motherboard interface, may require an option select on the device for some interfaces which do not correctly negotiate speed. One other thing, many good current drives can give similar transfer and seek rates to the Velociraptor, if partitioned down (aka a "cut drive"), though losing in rotational latency to the 10,000 rpm drive. For instance, a "Caviar Black" partitioned down to about 1/4 for the "busy" partition, and the remaining space can still be partitioned and used for dumping less speed sensitive stuff into. If you can manage with a smaller main partition though, SSD is the way to go.

The old F2P / P2P arguments will rage forever. The point about no "item shop" is a good one though, as in many that are free play with item buy, the free players are always at a disadvantage, while in RS F2P, it is a level playing field - I don't know, would you rather have access to all the content, but be disadvantaged unless you buy certain shop items. As for others, this is another "best free MMO": http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-free-mmo-games-online/ - all 3 are "item shop", however, and a chunky download - it seems that in some cases, games which could not drum up enough subscription commitment get re-invented with item shops.

If you can rustle up a spare few GB hard drive from another relic, may be worth trying that (on secondary master) for the swapfile, or even a memory card in an IDE adapter, as a cheap SSD (yes, the heavy write load will eventually kill a flash swapdrive) http://www.dansdata.com/flashswap.htm NB. You cannot use a USB pendrive for system swap, as it isn't "alive" early enough, though you could possibly use it for specific programs scrach use.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169923 - read the reviews for these, a lot of info around on using them in wireless repeater / wireless to lan bridge etc. - and SO CHEAP! Ok, so it's single antenna N-150 (some call it N-lite), rather than the full MiMo N-300

Most mainstream desktop hard drives will be 7200RPM, some drives are faster than others though, for instance, Western Digital have the "BLACK" - fastest, "BLUE" - mainstream, still 7200rpm, but lower power/quieter seek and "GREEN" - variable rpm. The Samsung F3 is also a pretty fast drive, slugging it out with the Caviar Black - they seem to be the two top ranked drives. Another thing creeping in with some drive versions is "advanced format" or "4k sectoring", while it has some advantages, there are some serious trip-ups, as while Windows 7 formats in an optimal manner for 4k sectoring, some backup or transfer tools may not, leaving the NTFS 4k allocation units 512 bytes out of step and converting all 4k page writes into double read, modify writes. There are solutions to this misalingment, from a jumper on the drive which makes the allocation mapping line up correctly with the OLD way (but not the new), or tools which can shift a partition to bring it into alignment. If your OS and any other tools used are "4k aware", then no workarounds are needed, the alignment issue also applies to SSD. Another related issue with advanced format, is that smaller data writes can also end up becoming slower read modify write operations. Advanced format is NOT, at the moment, a passport to better performance.

Sounds like a rebrand of "Onspeed" - http://www.onspeed.com/ Accelerated dialup is basically adding quality-degrading image compression and a few other tweaks - mostly snake-oil. You can get up to 4:1 compression on the text parts already, usiing a 56k modem's built-in compression. Might be worth trying http://www.opera.com/browser/ - with "Opera Turbo" http://www.opera.com/browser/turbo/ - And they are being honest, about 2x faster is a more achievable goal - and not bad for a free browser! Trying to remember the tweaks I ran on dialup, I tuned the MTU optimization and RWIN, made sure the modem was set to use high speed serial, and I seem to recall using some moidem comm and tweaks to lock the upstream to max 28.8, as that often allowed better downstream than 33.6

Ensure all phones, extension bells, faxes, answering machines, alarms, sky boxes etc. all have filters. One trick used with the 3 wire ringer system (UK and some other places), is to disconnect the ring wire (number 3) where the master socket feeds the extensions, as the ring wire tends to unbalance ADSL. One other suggestion, is to turn off the modem router, make a call, them turn it back on with the call in progress, then if there are some ADSL sub bands sufferring "suck out", it may be able to avoid them.

The BIOS (system health) with voiltages and temperatures, may also report the battery voltage - actually, most BIOSes do seem to report battery failure. I think the system should retain time and settings using the 5VSB if it's in "soft off" rather thgan completely mains power off, so if it's losing under those conditions, that would be worrying.

Got to compare like with like, so laptop versus complete system desktop (with screen). Even then, you get more grunt for your money in the desktop. Laptop specifications are either lower, or more expensive - one particular aggravation, the DVD-RW - if this has seen better days on a desktop, it's generally no biggie to replace, while it's a pretty expensive bit of kit for a laptop. In the lower end, there is not so much in it, but the higher the performance and features, the more the laptop price climbs compared to the desktop, for instance, onoboard graphics moving up to lower midrange, is a small jump in the desktop, a much bigger one in the laptop. In short, unless the portability is truly essential, don't go for a laptop - oh, the only other built-in laptop advantage, is that it is its own uninterruptible power supply, though that doesn't help if you were online and just lost the broadband modem.