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.

While it doesn't exactly give a quick overview, you can probably figure out what's good and what's not over at Elitist Jerks. Used to be pretty serious about raiding back in WotLK. Well, as far as 3x3 hours a week allowed, anyway. Did have a bunch of top-100 parses, though top-20 was typically out of reach for me. Suppose you really need to get the ideal professions and such to rank that highly. You got some raid parses around somewhere? I'd be interested in seeing the numbers these days. They're bound to be pretty crazy now that players have more hitpoints than bosses back in ZG used to have :P

Evasion seems to work fully against teleport-bombs as well - it's pretty much your only defence against them. Defence drones also work nicely against missiles, even if they aren't 100% bullet-proof.

Usually, I tend to grab the first five upgrades relatively quickly, as those up your avoidance to 35%. Having more avoidance then leads to your crew gaining experience in piloting and engines more quickly, so you pick up that free +10% avoidance from skills faster as well. After those first five upgrades I tend not to bother unless I have a huge amount of spare scrap - the last three upgrades are pretty expensive, have diminishing returns (they only add +3.3%), and generally speaking I don't have enough juice to power the upgrades anyway. I just finished the campaign using the Engi's space-donut vessel. It feels a bit clunky early on, only being able to do indirect damage. I was lucky enough to find another Ion Blast relatively quickly. With a duo of ion cannons you can basically lock down two systems for most of the time, which rendered enemy vessels completely harmless after I managed to chew through their shields. The Drone Arm augmentation is a must though, especially if you pick up a second drone early on. You can sell it near the end, too, assuming you have sufficient drone parts in supply, and doing so allowed me to pick up Fire Bombs right before heading into the final sector. As it turns out, Fire Bombs are pretty good at taking out the boss' weapons. They bypass shields, and one hit typically means two fires, which will roast the crew member manning the weapon system. Between a barrage of ion shots and two angry drones chipping away at the flagship's hull, it went down relatively quickly. Cloaking was lovely against its special attacks, too. The biggest pain during the fights were the droids boarding my ship during phase two. As it turns out, having a damaged and depressurized engine room is not so good for your avoidance, and not having any avoidance means pain when there are a million drones and guns firing at you. Good thing there's repair stations :P

The FTL Wikia seems to be in a pretty bad shape right now, and the comments sometimes reflect this. Regardless, even "pointless" boosts to systems like O2 and the medbay have their uses, because even if you don't have sufficient juice to actually power these updates, they can still take a single hit without instantly being disabled. It's the same with the piloting subsystem, really - even though the auto-piloting upgrade seems relatively pointless, the ability to take a stray shot to the bridge without losing ALL of your avoidance right away is really nice. Plus, upgrading systems across the board allows you to make the most of certain events. For example, with a level 2 medbay, you can basically cure the "dude living on the planet" of his mental disorder without fail, resulting in a free crew member every time. Often you can also buy crew at shops, which is something to consider if you're really hurting for dudes. Humans only cost 40 scrap, after all. As for boarding, having strong doors is a really big boon as well. Being able to suffocate invaders helps a great deal, even if it does not always outright kill them. Four mantis with 20 health each are a lot less dangerous than four who are fully healed, after all.

So, I finally got around to buying the game last Friday. Or rather, I had a friend buy the game for me, because Steam figured a Dutch person temporarily living in Sweden surely doesn't want to use iDeal (common Dutch payment method) and thus disabled the option, leaving me with no way to actually buy it. The joys of paying for stuff over the internet. I then proceeded to have the most amazing start to any game ever, and died right after making my first jump. There were asteroids, and an enemy ship, and lasers and missiles, and then no shields, and a fire in the med-bay which ended up escalating a little leading to a situation where I could not heal my crew to make them extinguish more fires. I did end up destroying my assailant (or rather, the asteroids did), but I was unable to power the FTL-drive and high-tail it out of there with the steering wheel also being on fire, and eventually the asteroids consumed me. Lovely. Subsequent attempts got me to the third and fifth sector, prompting me to switch the difficulty to easy. The difference was obviously pretty noticeable, and I managed to get to the final boss two times in a row. The first time around I took significant damage in the first round, and ended up being shredded during the second battle. The second time around, a combination of both poor planning and bad luck left me without enough weaponry to pierce four layers of shielding and a defence drone, which essentially meant the second phase was unwinnable. As it turns out, the third time's the charm, and some lovely teleporter action allowed me to quickly take out the missile launcher and the triple laser cannon, which made tanking the drones a whole lot easier. The last phase was a breeze, with blast doors and a full compliment of eight crew easily being able to handle the invaders, and the special weapon by itself unable to do a whole lot of damage. Some damage was taken though, as it takes some time to take out the missile launcher and the other weapon each time, and to be perfectly honest I might not have survived if it wasn't for an extremely conveniently placed shop. Along the way I unlocked both the Engi ship and the Stealth Cruiser, though I haven't played either of them. I did give the Federation Cruiser a shot, planning on just messing around and unlocking some achievements for the alternate lay-out. If you rush for two shields, taking out an enemy with just the artillery beam is a rather trivial achievement, as you will eventually run into a poor bastard who has nothing but a laser and a beam, leaving them unable to do any damage whatsoever. The other achievement involved making it to the fifth sector without upgrading weapons, which wasn't too difficult. However, at some point I got into a fight where four Mantis boarded my ship while theirs bombarded the crap out of me, leaving me with only two crew alive and a ship full of holes as I drifted into sector five. I figured I would try to keep going and see where I'd end up, since my upgrades were pretty decent. I ended up reaching sector eight with just about everything I wanted, including an extra burst-II laser and some missiles. Sadly, I only managed to pick up a Rock-man crew-wise, and going up against the Flagship with an entire three crew members seemed slightly suicidal. It was, because as soon as it pierced my shields and their beam cut across my ship, it was panic all over as my crew valianty tried to extinguish all the fires. By the time the situation was under control, my weapons had managed to take out their missile launcher and ion cannon, and the Flagship was ... down to four hull points?? As it turns out, the Artillery Beam is pretty good against it. It pierces shields, and hits a TON of rooms, so each swipe deals a lot of damage. The later two phases took a similar route, with my meager crew running around like headless chickens while automated weapons-fire and the beam did the damage required, and so I surprisingly defeated the boss with a mere three crewmembers. Thus far, I can't say I have too much criticisms about the game. Renaming your dudes at the start is a bit of a pain, with having to type their name, press enter, and then click accept. Sincetyping with two hands is rather ingrained into my head, I find myself wishing I had three hands going through the ordeal. As for the game itself, the controls are pretty pristine, and the ability to issue commands while the game is paused really eliminates any problem it might have otherwise. Your crew's ability to gain experience in certain tasks is somewhat easily exploited. If you encounter a ship early on that is unable to damage you, you can essentially just leave the game running until the crew manning the helm, engine and shields are all maxed out, earning you +20% shield recharge rate and +10% avoidance for free really early on. The main beef I have is that there are so many things that ruin the sense of immersion a little bit. For starters, why is my ship the only one with 30 hull points? Why are the majority of enemies totally suicidal, and why does the game explicitly state that they are powering up their FTL? I mean, they are dodging, so they obviously have working engines and a guy piloting, so shouldn't their FTL be charging anyway? Your ship just seems to be a special snowflake for no real reason. Also, judging from the in-game events, the Mantis have ludicrous names such as KazaaakplethKilik, so why are my Mantis crew members called Tom Jones and John Doe? (I understand they awarded some amount of people who donated with having their name appear in-game, but they could've just made that human-only) But yeah, immersion aside, the entire thing seems to be pretty well thought out. Definitely enjoying it thus far, and it's only 10 euros too!

I recently saw a couple of videos on this game, and it definitely caught my interest. It's on the ever-growing list of stuff I need to play when I have time :D Quick overview of the game with TotalBiscuit:

80 PLUS is basically a label that certifies the PSU as having 80%+ energy efficiency. The wikipedia article on it is relatively clear. By using a certified PSU, you'll end up using less power, and generally speaking such PSUs also have a better build quality which means there's a smaller chance of them failing. You don't need to spend lots on an 80 PLUS Platinum one or such, simply going with a regular 80 PLUS or an 80 PLUS Bronze is already a huge step up over lesser ones. If you're ordering parts on the internet to construct your own computer (something you said you would be open to), you can simply order a PSU of your choice. I'm afraid I can't make any specific recommendations, though, as I don't know too much about which specific PSUs are good and which are bad. I'm sure somebody else in here knows more about the subject. If you're going to buy a pre-built computer from a store, you could simply ask the salesman. If you're buying a pre-built computer over the internet, things might be more difficult. I tried configuring a Dell XPS (boy, they're expensive ... ) and wasn't able to find any information on the PSU at all. If the configuration doesn't mention anything about the PSU, you can almost rest assured that it's a low-quality one. I suppose you could shoot them an e-mail about it, but I don't really know ... I don't have any experience with ordering computers online. That's some poor timing. I'm not sure if it could be the graphics card ... you computer might still boot into Windows even if it didn't work, so you could still hear your hard disk rattle as it boots. They probably added memory to it in the shop to test if your memory still worked, so that probably isn't the issue either. I guess that means it's either the PSU or the motherboard that's malfunctioning. I think you can "drain the power" simply by unplugging your computer from the wall socket and leaving it off for a few hours. If all else fails, you can simply plug your hard disk into your next computer and grab the pictures then. Consider using a cloud service such as Dropbox to store pictures. That way, a system crash doesn't really matter all that much as you can simply re-download the pictures.

The GTX 570 might be cheaper initially, but just look at its power consumption ... fairly sure it's quite a bit more expensive in the end. Judging by the prices listed on Newegg, they are equally expensive, and that's only after rebate on the 570. Furthermore, you have to keep in mind that the theoretical tests on HWCompare are just that, theoretical. If we look at more real-world scenarios (such as the various game-tests ran by Tom's here), we can see that the two are approximately tied, with the GTX 570 unable to cope with Max Payne 3's maximum settings due to a shortage of memory. If you ask me, the GTX 660 is definitely superior to the GTX 570. Concerning the CPU, as Lowc15 said, you don't need an i7 just for gaming. An i5 should pack sufficient punch. I see many people recommending the 3570k, but the OP doesn't really strike me as somebody who'd go and overclock their rig, so going for the unlocked "k" variant seems a little pointless. You can save $15 by picking a regular 3570, and another $20 by going with the 3450 the OP was eyeing. Seems worth it to me, as in gaming the CPU is usually not the factor limiting performance anyway. An alternative CPU suggestion would be the 3350P, which is another $5 cheaper and also uses a bit less power than the 3450 because it lacks integrated graphics. You don't need integrated graphics since you'll be using a discrete graphics card. Going back to the GPU, I don't actually think a GeForce 640 with GDDR5 exists. The 640 comes with DDR3, which essentially makes it an overpriced piece of trash if you take price/performance into consideration. Judging by Tom's benchmark linked above, the Radeon 7770 seems to be the best choice. It's not that expensive either, as Newegg lists it as low as $110 after rebate. It should be powerful enough to run LotR Online and WoW with no issues, and Diablo 3 with fairly decent settings, at 1920x1080. However, if you think you might keep the system around for a long time and want the performance to last, or think it likely that you'll expand your horizon to more graphically intense games, I'd consider spending more on the graphics side of things. The GTX 660 Ti seems reasonably future proof; anything more expensive than that might be overkill. Also, if you're given the chance, spend a few $ more on a decent power supply, instead of a shitty stock one. Look for some form of 80 PLUS certification. Your hardware will be grateful :P

Merely calling it an "improved HL1" or "HL1 in Source" is a little bit unfair to the creators of this mod. It's basically a complete re-imagining of the original, which adds a lot of cool little things, and you can see that they really put a lot of work into it all. At the same time, it does stay faithful to the original. Definitely enjoying it thus far. Downloaded it about eight hours ago, the torrent worked just fine and the entire download took me around 10 minutes. Keep in mind that you must also download the Source Base SDK 2007 through Steam for Black Mesa to work. Assuming you don't have either, it's a 6-7GB download. Feel bad for those who are stuck with shitty internet :(

Kimberly is the pink power ranger :-o

It appears that the Vecna skull's bonus is twofold in this scenario. - The polypore staff's base maximum hit is (magic_level * 5) - 180. The +6 boost to magic level provided by the skull thus increases the base maximum hit by +30. - The +6 magic level boost also increases your maximum hit by +18%, in a similar fashion to other magic level boosting items. The calculator appears to only apply the second bonus at the moment. // We're attacking directly with the polypore staff. Discard everything we've done and recalculate. Maximum damage is (magic level * 5 - 180). if(weapon_id == 10){ if(document.getElementById('polypore_staff_checkbox').checked){max_damage = magic_level * 5 - 180} } The above code is responsible for calculating the base damage. A quick and dirty solution would be to replace "magic_level" with "(magic_level + parseFloat(document.getElementById('potion_select').value) * 100 / 3)", such that the magic level boost is correctly factored in. I'm not sure if this double whammy occurs in other situations as well. If so, you'd probably be better off adjusting the values in the potion drop-down and then go from there. That said, making this adjustment would lead to a maximum hit of ~430. I can't explain the 446.

League of Legends really doesn't push your graphics hardware. If you're okay with low detail settings, even last year's Intel HD 3000 should be able to provide playable framerates. If you want a bit more visual candy, the HD 4000 or just about any integrated NVIDIA or AMD graphics chip should suffice. Word and Skype don't really put any constraints on the hardware otherwise, so just about any laptop is good. Since you'll be using it for school, laptops with convenient keyboards gain bonus points, I reckon. Try them out in stores if you can.