3.6 GHz instead of 1.6 GHz. Same 8 gigs. Now if I can just get the springs and gears to stop needing oiling, it will be A-OK. No video card though, maybe my older ones will work. PCIe x16 ver 2 or maybe ver 1. The vendor tried to get me to buy a 24" screen. But I have a 40" screen I lamented. Of course, the card slot might only handle ver 3.0 PCIe x16 cards. Onward !
Great! I hope it plays EQ2 loud n clear n beautiful! Do you use W10? I have switched from W7 to W10 and am not completely happy with it. One aspect that I don't like is that now I have to play EQ2 full screen and it's less easy to pop out over to here or to Gab as time zones take time to load ingame. With W7 I always had my Task Bar visible at bottom below gaming screen and so it was no problem to dart back n forth between game and other programs. Happy Gaming to you!
Enjoy your new computer! @WhysperWynde I just upgraded to Win 10 from Win 7 myself. I have no issues with having the task bar at the bottom. What I did was turned off Full Screen in the options. Then I used the little button on the Window at the top right that looks like a square. It's next to the X that closes the Window. That made the window max size but allowed the task bar to stay. If that doesn't work you can always drag and resize the window by hand leaving space for the task bar at the bottom. I have had to do this in the past as well. Hope this works for you!
Still downloading. I had some errands to do yesterday. At least keyboards are mostly consiseant in layout these days. At university and my weekend job, I used 8 different keyboard layouts. The function key, arrow keys, and page up down delete and insert were in different places. Egad. Its Win 10. it certainly seems to load programs faster. I was using a defrag program, not the one in Windows, to keep it fast. The faster CPU should definately help. I tend to not use full screen, so I can get to my spreadsheet.
If it's a new computer fitted with a SSD, a defrag is unnecessary and just degrades the drive faster. SSD nand cells have limited read/write cycles before they go bad, which is why manufacturers warranty them for TB written on top of the usual time based warranty.
No ssd. I let the game decide what settings. High Performance, instead of Low i had to use on my other computer. Screenshot first time i logged in, every time, took 3 to 20 seconds for something to load hanging up my session. Screenshot worked correctly first time, no 'not responding'. Still have to copy over save room layouts, character UIs, DarqUI, etc. I can see the textures in wood, rocks, wood floors, rooms, armor, etc. much better.
8 gig ram, 1 terabyte hard drive. It has a SSD slot, but I don't like them. Last place I worked, just before retirement, the SSD drives on the company laptops kept failing.
In today's day and age, upgrading from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD is pretty much the biggest performance boost you can get. It's silly to let past experiences affect you here given how many generations of SSDs there have been since they first became mainstream. Tons of people are using them without issue, they're now standard in the newest generation of consoles, etc.
I detest W10 with a flaming passion; fortunately, I only have it on my laptop and not on my main workhorse, which is my desktop. A buddy said she found a way to at least have it display more like W7; unfortunately, she can't remember what it was she did. :-/ Uwk
I haven't used full screen in years, and haven't missed it. Uwk whose main problem with the laptop is how relatively teeny the Backspace key is and where Delete and so forth are...I specifically got a 17" laptop (it's like having a Great Dane or Ovcharka Shepherd in an agility trial ;->) for the sake of a good, big keyboard :-/
See, this is why people don't like SSDs, even the latest and greatest; the quote from Treggar. According to my fully-on-top-of-the-latest-info professional techie hubby, most folks have an SSD for the OS and for the core programs, EQ2 being one of them with this group, apparently. ;-> They use a regular, generic ol' workhorse of a spinning disk hard drive for the important stuff, like storage. Apparently, the only virtue of an SSD is speed. Uwk
in case of using models of large capacity and high cost on relatively modern boards. in case of cheaper models, probability of lags in this game is higher than for hdd. in addition their lifetime is shorter than that of hdd, even for expensive models. see no reason to use ssd with outdated motherboards.. you will not be able to realize potential of their speed even by half, and frequency of errors on disk can turn into lags in game at most inopportune moment. .. after all you when buy laptop - everything inside is agreed with each other. but when you build desktop (or laptop) yourself, you should think about how interacting parts of your comp match each other as much as possible for optimal performance. often it may turn out that some element will function ineffectively. may turn out that it ssd.. which are of very different quality and differ greatly in some characteristics affecting speed and stability.. so in some cases, especially on old facilitie, hdd still more attractive.. are you ready to buy high-quality ssd, which will costs more than fully completed gaming comp, which however is 10 years old? considering that this game works not so dusty on top-end hardware previous years. really real advantages for this game can be provided in terms of comfort and speed due to processor with highest possible clock frequency and due to speed characteristics of operative and video - memory and amount of ram. especially if you have so much ram that you can keep entire game client in it, plus half of that number - used for its intended purpose.. if advantages of ssd were at present undeniable, then hdd would have already disappeared from sale. however, we will see that they will continue to be released and sold for many years to come. because some people are more interested in stability and reliability of device than in speed.. google, which indexes what is written here, writes it now to 3 hdd and not to ssd. why? because of money? i doubt.. and here they correctly said that defragmentation reduces service life of ssd (even when using third-party programs for this). although it can give small temporary increase in speed features. it's much more efficient to use file system for windows other than ntfs, such as exfat for OS.. better yet, use linux with ext4 filesystem, which is tuned (it's tunable) for high performance (this is what google uses on its servers). for game client, all this means little - it's just read (as long as there are no errors on disk or in memory and your comp doesn't stumble in other places when accessing disk). in any case, for this game, real advantages of ssd can be talked about after it becomes 64-bit. and this is unlikely to happen in the near future
Don't knock it til you try it. They used to be expensive maybe 6 or 7 years ago. 1TB SSD, huge storage, lightning speeds, zero issues. OS starts up in 3 seconds, applications, loading, zoning, refreshing, all so much faster than an HDD I would never go back. Pretty much the point of an SSD is speed, if you don't care for instant loading, then I guess it won't matter to you. /shrug
SSDs don't need defragging, not because they don't get fragmented (they do), but because there are no moving parts (drive heads) that have to reposition each time a new fragment is needed, which is what slows things down with HDs. This computer has a 250GB SSD (OS and other critical pieces) and a 2TB HD (non-critical software and data), although many install programs assume drive C or have the option to change to a different drive hidden . There are times that I really long for the old days when my computer had a 200MB HD, which was enough for Windows 3.1, Visual Basics (DOS and 3 at the time), AutoCAD R12, and a few games like Doom and Castle Wolfentein.
This.... wow. Sorry, but this just isn't true. I'm curious what the sample size you measured of people that don't like SSDs are, compared to those that do prefer them, or are ambivalent about the whole thing. That's pure hyperbole, much like a certain forum denizen would use. But hey, I can play that game too: Most people prefer SSDs for the noticeable faster performance, and they are far more reliable and fault tolerant than a HDD - especially when it comes to shocks from dropping, etc. I have 4 drives in my dual-boot desktop rig, and all 2.5 TBs are SSDs. Additionally, all of the devices our team uses for work run off of SSDs. The only advantage a HDD has for the bulk of the population, is when we start talking price for large amounts of storage. Joe average typically ain't gonna set out $300 for a 12 TB+ drive. Personally, I only use HDD's for off-site backups of huge amounts of data - but then you have to include the additional cost for environmentally maintained storage that shields from magnetic field fluxes. Oh, and to store the kids game libraries for their Xbox. These days, I'd recommend a M.2 SSD for the OS / frequently used items drive and a 2.5" SSD for storage in the 1-2 TB range. If you're backing up to a server with the Essentials role, I probably don't need to say anything else. If you're doing local backups (you ARE doing backups, right?), I'd recommend a large USB external. If you're not doing any backups - I'll say a prayer for you (for the love of Pete the Dragon, at least burn all your family photo's to a DVD or Blu-Ray, and label it!).
Oh yeah, definitely external USBs ftw, though they're not foolproof nor last forever (for my hubby, about a year before it died and took everything he'd saved to it with it; our main computer is a Win7 machine and he has a Mac laptop... X-P), nor do even discs; I use both, depending on what I'm backing up. I'd recommend literally printing for a brick-n-mortar copy of photos, if that didn't have failures too (flame being a big one :-/). Uwk
..i'm electricity is cut from time to time. it happens in evening just at most interesting moment of game (someone, as if saying oops, turns it off for literally one minute). or it's happens because someone forgot to saw down branches in trees adjacent to wires somewhere.. or because wires are covered with ice.. but it doesn't matter - always get same effect - system, when re-loaded, finds errors on disk and makes corrections.. so, are you sure that this will not affect life of ssd for worse? and i not. only for this reason i will not buy ssd, and not because it may be more expensive for me.. in addition, for case when you have system on ssd, insignificant performance gain on ssd in terms of writing to it ceases to be of any importance at all if you don't use paging file in your windows (or swap file in linux), abandoning it. this should definitely be done if you have lot of fast ram and you want your disk (no matter which one) to serve longer.. swap/paging file was invented at time when ram was expensive and when weren’t enough for you. and then budget models of boards began to limit ability to its install lot of it (so that you would run to buy ssd).. because even when windows comp has lot of ram, it still uses slower paging file until you forcibly turn it off. this is done so that you often buy new disks and in order to prefer using ssd. because you get impression that your comp is faster with it.. it may not be exactly, as i and said above about it. ram always works much faster than any ssd. and your disk is saved from unnecessary read/write cycles.. i repeat once again that on disks (no matter which one), performance depends to large extent on what disk file system is used and how it's configured. for default, for everyone, this isn't optimally tuned for performance. measure write speed on your ssd in case of ntfs and in case of exfat and you will see difference. as usual people are just led by nose by selling what want to sell them and not what they really need.. defragmentation for ssd isn't desirable, not because it not needs it, but because it's included in windows by default and happens automatically. you don't defragment your ssd, your windows does it for you, shortening its service life. in linux disk defragmentation isn't used at all. thus it's unnecessary for hdd as well. its meaning is coercive wear of disk. and in windows it works regardless of your desire (you with some probability may realize this by spoiling several of your own disks over course of several years by not taking trouble to disable this on your system)
Why not use a UPS battery back up? Avoid the whole power outages being an issue. We haven't had a computer in our household for years, without being on some type of UPC, primarily for that reason alone.
because it's broken (found it recently in dustiest corner of veranda). if i can ever to renovate it, so i can (don’t remember ever using it). however, don’t remember ever saving on power supplies for computers. so until now there have been no problems with failure of hardware due to power outages. but there were problems due to lightning strikes. this once became reason grave hardware upgrade. ups as far as i know will not be able to protect my comp from lightning, so i'm not sure if i really need it like and ssd.. better advise how to make reliable protection against lightning (season of thunderstorms is approaching) and preferably without spending money on it. thunderstorms and game updates with fixes - things that to an extent disturb gameplay. well, electricity isn't turned off so often that it's annoying.. it's also great reason to light candles in house and think carefully about things that are more important than play..
