Janmanden

Hmm.. Could it be that there is some 32bit involved somewhere in the process? OS or maybe even some format related FAT or FAT32?

It doesn't need to be balanced because the user has a choice in it's use. If the player buys/obtains(from pre-order) a cheat, it's their own fault they break the game in it's use. It doesn't effect us. It affects us because the game is now designed to contain microtransactions. They don't make the game and then throw these things in afterwards for people who might want to pay for some extra power, they bake it into the design from conception in order to maximize profits. I'm sure they'll make heaps of cash doing it, just like they've made heaps of cash dumbing games down to the lowest common denominator, driving popular franchises into the ground, and stripping features out to later sell as DLC. I wont touch any games that employ these tactics; in fact it's precisely why im here, and supporting all the other Kickstarters and not giving my money to the big publishers. There was a time when I would have agreed, but that time is past. I have played some really nice games over the years and I can't help but feeling a bit sad about them being all done, abandoned and forgotten. They used to look great on small monitors of the past, but now they are increasingly painful to look at. It would have been really great if the developers had kept doing just "that" i.e. developing on these games, offering me new content and them getting paid for their work. Great games would never die as long as interest kept them alive and they would be kept up to date with resolutions, gf-efx and so on for a price of course as it should be. How is that a bad thing? Unless you just want it to be over and done of course, but maybe then gaming in itself is more of psychological thing like an act of compulsion.. Hmm..

Strange thing happened a while ago. After I moved to Ukraine, The Origin Shop stopped working, because of the inherent geo-ip locator, which meant that all my payment options were rendered invalid.. After quite a few attempts I finally found a working shop page on EA, which despite being in Russian left me with little doubt about the contents, so I managed to buy 800 biopoints, but after that transaction went through the shop page was suddenly displaying a 1600 bioware point item on that page as well.. Right at that moment I lost every interest in game and I haven't bothered with it since. Due to some messages on the KoTORII subforums here about the game, like "black screens" and "not working" I started playing it again. It feels really ackward somehow to play a main character without a voice and having dialogue options that are actually spelled out and with all the time in the world to decide on what to select.. Not to mention that I can name my save games.. Big improvements over the now, but sadly that's all in the past.

MM6 was very impressive.. Somehow it manage to use a few tricks to fool my memory into thinking it looked much better, still. The last MM game that only had a number (latin number for 9) for a title was pretty horrible. This one is more or less, mostly less, but actually more, than the last one.. (Last one was IX, which is more than X, but at the same time less.. to speak).

Got the game on Steam and ditched Bitdefender for Windows Defender. I notice that AP got two inbound private rules for the APLauncher.exe i.e. TCP & UDP, maybe setting up those will help.

Are you audio drivers up to date? What kind of soundcard do you have? Is EAX enabled? Have you tried using Force Software?

Erm.. Are you replacing a PC with a laptop?

I would like to be able to customize the colour, size and shape of 'circles' for each character. It would make it easier to assess the tactical layout..

No, that actually makes sense geographically. It would be like calling an American an Indian..

As the story goes.. <insert story>.

Isn't that obvious? Having a bigger screen with the same resolution will make everything bigger and thus it requires less strain on the eyes.

The 16:9 or HD1080 is better suited for movies (and reading if you can rotate it 90 degrees) than for work. Going from a 23" 1080 to a 27" 1080 is .. if nothing else, better for your eyes and .. you should definitely be good to your eyes. I really like my 26" 1920x1200 and I know that that I would love 2560x1440, but I am already on glasses.

The first games I played and enjoyed on the PC was mostly adventure games, but the first game wtih RPG elements I played was Master of Magic in 1994, which is without a doubt the best game I've ever played - still. While it's more of a strategy game it was the game that spurred my interest in CRPG. It was also this game that got me into programming in C++, because it was getting a bit too easy for me and I realized how to edit the savegames to expand the game, speed up and increase the difificulty of my gameplay.. I think I would have been a lost soul without this game.

First time I saw a reference of it was in a discussion about graphics cards, something about 'bitcoin mining' or some such and I assumed it was related to some kind of gpu-computing.. Didn't care much about it. Never tried it.

Sounds like the PSU is probably failing and if that's the case it could severely damage your brother's system if you keep fiddling around with it unless the PSU got some form of protection vs. power failures, overloads and so on. I had a PSU from Chill Innovation fry two of my Graphics Card, totally melted all transistors, before I noticed that surge of energy it spat out on Power Up.. Might be a defective or detached component somewhere. Maybe the memory Sticks or CPU are loose. If at all possible you could try to load the system with a minimum of components, remove some memory sticks and detach all non-essential parts to save power and remove the number of culprits. Perhaps resetting the CMOS and load the system with a default setup of some kind. Argh, those bullets pierced my eye balls... Missed the changing psu's part.

Hope it's not the psu, because that's a Pandoras box of problems, been there.. In case it's the PSU I hope the model you have got some fail-safe protection vs. over/under-voltage. My old ATi HD 4850 still works, even though I replaced it, but it was having a problem with one of the DVI outs for quite some time, which were showing up as a very annoying flickering.. Like some kind of Winter Olympics game in the background. Have you tried switching the gfx output?

Toms Hardware got a test of HD 7950 which verifies that it is indeed a quiet clunky one.

So you are looking for a new silent Card with 2GB of GDDRx memory and a ton of heatpibes as a replacement for what exactly and at what Price range? Hard to fit, is it a small case or just a very big Card?

Sounds great to me too. I tried my hand with Photoshop back in 2000, but at the time it seemed too complicated for me and the learning curve was too flat for my limited time and since it was just too expensive to bother with considering that a mix of Paint brush and various semi-not-quite-pro-.-.-.-actually-quite-far-from-pro freeware graphics apps and online tools since has proven quite useful and efficient for my 'utilitarian' needs.. Photoshop CS2 works fine on Windows 8 Pro, but it asks me to register each time I use it, even though I already did it on the first run and even though I selected "do no register" on the third use and every time since then.. Guess I'll have to fiddle around with some registry key somewhere to suppress that.

Playing.. More accurately; Trying to play Alpha Protocol. I am not sure whether it's bugs, flaws or design blunders that complicates the game, but I am pretty sure that it could all have been avoided, but then it would probably be a much shorter game. I think I would like that game more. I find the game to be strangely intriguing, baffling and disappointing.

Not sure what happened with the link. Died on me. Searched ncix for 670 as I assumed that it was still your choice. The Gigabyte Geforece GTX 670 OC 2 GB Windforce is a pretty cool and quiet one: "Idle noise levels are outstanding, actually the card is the quietest GTX 670 we tested so far in idle. Under load the fan ramps up a bit but ends up being much quieter than the NVIDIA reference design. It is barely audible under load, but we've tested other cards like the ASUS DC II that is even quieter. "(TechPowerUp) And with the massive OC also pretty close to GTX 680.. But then I noticed that the link wasn't quite the same. Regardless, Gigabytes custom Windforce is a pretty cool and quiet cooling solution.

I am not familiar with PNY, but I've read that.. "The fact that the PNY GTX 670 uses the same reference design means that it uses the same radial cooler which is somewhat unfortunate. Our biggest gripe with the GTX 670 is the flimsy and fragile feel of the cooler that occupies the right side of the card. The noise-level of the cooler is also a tad loud under load compared to the GTX 680 despite their similar looking. While it is not vacuum cleaner loud, it is definitely audible. The idle noise is quieter, however." (Bjorn3D) But also being the cheapest means that there should be some headroom for adding a custom cooler without raising the cost bar too much.. But it isn't really that cheap, even though you can save $70 and perhaps more after mail in rebate.

It seems that the other races are so much more useful as monstrous infantry for the Reapers.. The humans on the other hand are just turned into mindless husks, the cannonfodder of the Reaper army. Not sure how you'd turn a bunch of braindead humans (corpses) into any sentient Reaper being and even if it was possible there is no way in hell that Reaper would be useful for anything else than bickering with itself all the time.

I would have suggested that you ask yourself and your wife whether you really want to be a big family or run your own show, because if you do want to be a big family I think you both have to treat them with a bit of cautious politeness. In a way you have to get to know your family again and let them get a chance to adjust to you and your wife as well, slowly, and as far as I can tell that isn't going to happen unless your wife learn how to put some restraint on herself for a while to repress those things that upset your family at least until your family get to know her other qualities better. Until your family learn to love her like you do, which is probably going to time some time, since they seem to be quite sensitive and not quite as tolerant somehow, not sure which, but it sounds like they've got some grudges. In a sense you need to build up some goodwill if it all possible. With ten years of toxicity in the bag it's probably not going to be all that easy for everybody, but surely nobody can be interested in keeping up a bad faith forever since it's mostly just a misunderstanding anyway, or so I thought.. Think your choice of action is a good one too.

I just switched to Windows 8 Pro 64 bit instead of that 32 bit version I installed online. Setting up the system a second time is quite easy. I wonder if I could simply make a script to do it, hmmm... And if I could why wasn't it done like that.. It's a bit strange to set up a system called Windows to be windows-based for a multi-tasking environment. It's just too tablet-oriented at the default settings. It feels like everything was designed just to waste space, because the.. designer.. didn't.. think thereerm, would be much to play around with anyway. Maybe I missed some key-pointer somewhere saying that you are supposed to use a 7" monitor or something, because that's what it feels like was the intended target. Even when you break up the screen to have Metro on the side, the sizes are fixed, I could easily have both, side by side, but that's not available. Sometimes I trigger the Mail App and it's not really all that bad (unfortunately any App you open keeps running in the background, have to use End Task a lot) even though I've managed to send some rather important mails where I forgot to add a subject (d'oh), that woman in the video on-top she's not very bright, but I doubt few people would be on the first use of anything.. I am getting used to the Edit Group Policy, but it's a really bad design that force me to use a ton of navigation and clicks to do something that could have been done with the single push of a button. Like turning of the Preview and Details pane. There is room for an extra button here, but no, I have to go through search, typing a name and click my way through 16 categories and then it's just an on/off switch, but the disabled buttons are still visible in the file explorer even though they are disabled. Enough whining, it's not really that bad, but it's a rather stupid move. I wish Microsoft had made some choices in this regard, like System Profiles (Tablet-oriented or PC-oriented) because it's not really that hard to change, but it's bit of a nuisance to replace all the default tablet-oriented App associations with windows-based desktop explorer applications.. That almost broke my tongue, but it also sounded a bit poetic, somehow.. It nearly rhymed, sort of. I really like the new Task Manager and the performance is great, keeping my system cool and smooth, even my AV runs faster and once I got the Classic shell menu for a Start menu and got all my toolbars setup and Windows even go straight to the desktop after login.. It's like a tremendously improved Windows XP. There are still a few things with bad or missing design that confuse me, but I am confident I'll find a solution. Didn't like the new Visual Studio 2012, which is apparently kind of free or something for Windows 8. It's just too flat and full of bad choices. Had to go. Got a nice old Visual Studio Express 2008 without all the Webmatrix and SQL Server ****.. I just use Regular Expressions a lot and the way 2012 had me click the same button 15 times to get to the point.. I just find that I get really distracted by annoying interfaces and there are an increasing number of those.. Hmm..