To whom it may concern: Uwk texted me just a bit ago saying her computer got hacked. She may be out of commission for a bit. I don't know if she had a house in NOTD or what server . . . but if she cant get on I may be able to help.
I'm sort of kind of home, tentatively for now (thanks again, Q, for letting folks know! ); I doubt I'll be doing any economic transactions online for a bit (especially not for only 25% off BoL; what were they thinking?), and will definitely be doing Full Scans with my lovely paranoid antivirus program, even more often than I normally do. :-/ But I will do my best to get back to my deco projects (both of them... X-P), especially the ToT swap, whose deadline is coming up first! Wish me luck! Uwk
Uwk, I recommend quarterly checks with the full Major Geek's Malware Removal Protocol, and additional runs if your computer is acting strange. This will normally fix any malware, viruses, etc.
Da Hubster to the rescue; he's a professional electronics hardware techie and knows much about software as well. He left work early to come back home and help; such a prize he is! As far as anything taken, we're on a creaky old DSL line connection, with a creaky old Win7 Home Edition, and I yoinked out every cable I could see connecting the computer to the outside world. I'll probably take Sigrd up on her suggestion for further digging, though our current antivirus is pretty awesome, and so far hasn't found any problems yet...knock on wood. It would definitely tell us if it had, but it might be a sneaky bit o' malware we got hit by. :-/ Uwk
On the other hand, I haven't tried to do any economic transactions since it hit... :-/ Uwk still paranoid
Hope you get everything sorted and can come back 100%. Now I understand why you were paranoid about the tags that were showing on my post. You should see what I do just to pay bills online cuz I am paranoid too. I don't even use my everyday computer to do taxes.
You are very wise, my friend! My hubby was making noises about possibly getting me a laptop for my birthday; I'm wondering if I should save my desktop just for the important stuff and port everything else over to the lappie, including my Internet surfing and gaming. :-/ Uwk
I know I was playing EQ on a laptop some years ago with Win 8.1. Video cards are not necessarily required these days, but it might not work well in intense combat. My Acer Aspire x-704g with a video chip, and 1.6GHz CPU has problems in the rain in game. We have 200 gigabit 'gamer bandwidth'.
GIGABIT?! Dang! We're looking at shifting away from DSL to a real connection (though I'm just glad we actually didn't have that nailed down yet; worse things might've happened ;->), and we're looking forward to getting 200 Mb over the lines, vs. the 700+ Kb (used to get a good 3-4 Megs before AT&T "consolidated all DSL hubs for [our] convenience! " [NOT]). Of course, any more computers, like a laptop me hubby is thinking of getting for me, would probably have to be Win10, but I think I could live with that. ;-> As to rain effects, they'd always kill me within 5-10 minutes if I'd lingered too long in a city back when I still had Win98; I have NEVER turned on the stupid "speculum lighting" or whatever they want to "accent the light on the rain drops ". Good heavens; I wouldn't've lasted a minute with that on. X-P Uwk who still probably won't turn that, or Flora, or Shadows on...
owners of desktops/laptops with very weak video card, if they still want to see how game looks when all available graphic effects are turned on (or try to see how effects look in best quality), but their desktop/laptop "hovers" when they turn them on all, can try using setting file "EQ2Settings.exe" in client folder, set minimum available screen resolution (this setting is locked in game). for example, for 5:4/3:4 monitor, these resolutions are available in four variants (1024*768, 1152*864, 1280*960, 1280*1024). unfortunately i don't find in client folder ability to set resolution according to arbitrary values (in some games this feature is available) and, moreover, with much lower screen resolution than "EQ2Settings.exe" file allows. in fact it would look like iPhone 1 sized window on your laptop or monitor screen when launched. in this case, gpu load is sharply reduced, which allows you to reproduce effects that earlier are not available for viewing, and together (of course, if they are supported in gpu specification). on other hand, quality of monitor itself is also important for displaying effects and even connecting cords. although, perhaps, someone can tell how to set screen resolution in eqii, for example 512*384. i remember long time ago i played skyrim at this tiny resolution, because there was no video card
Oh, yikes! I can't imagine playing anything on a postage stamp; well done! I could turn on everything, but back in my Win98 days, I'd last online for about a minute or less of well-graphicked glory before it spewed all over itself and died that way due to "Memory Usage," which the Powers here always said was a thing that didn't exist. X-P Now that I've got a half-way decent system (haven't had that particular issue come up again ever with Win7), I just got out of the habit of being curious about all that visual hooey, and I like my Custom settings the way they are. Not sure I could get them back, otherwise... ;-> Uwk
My Win 7 computer has 8 gigs of ram, and a 1 gig video card. It handled EQ very easily. Now it overheats. I air can cleaned the PSU and the CPU fan. Still overheats. So I think its the CPU thermal grease between the heat sink/fan and the CPU has dried out. I see two stores in my area that carries it. $8 a pop. Not bad, at least I don't have to have it shipped to me. The shipping would be a price I couldn't see spending. Thinking about upgrading it to Win 10, but since its a SATA 1 hdd, might be difficult.
You might actually want to save your pennies for a SSD HD. I've had more problems with Win 10 than ever with Win 7. Back in March, I upgraded the motherboard, chip, and graphics card and added water cooling so I can overclock. That helped a TON. I already had a terabyte SSD.
At my last job, we had lots of SSD problems, but that was around 10 years ago. I really prefer spin medium, unless its a thumb drive. My first computer with a hard drive, was 52 megabytes and 102 megabytes. An Amiga A3000 SCSI drives.
windows isn't updated in back direction (unless only if before installation disk will be completely cleared of previous system, including boot sector with partition table, or to new disk with newly created boot sector (mbr) with new partition table)
