Author Topic: A suggestion  (Read 2553 times)

chuckv3

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A suggestion
« on: May 03, 2014, 01:36:58 AM »
I live and work in the Phoenix, AZ area (Glendale, actually... it's a burb). When CoH went offline, I was living in Silver Spring, MD. So in the move I gave away my desktop tower with its Geforce 210 card, and I have only laptops and netbooks. So, I will be buying a desktop computer, sticking a decent graphics card into it, and installing Win7 (I'm mostly an Ubuntu user at this point, since it's free and it works very well).

I love CoX enough to devote time to it. Meetup.com used to be a cool place to find local folks with similar interests, but they charge a fee and that's LAME. I know some local CoX meetup groups used to exist, but who knows anymore.

So I have TWO suggestions, actually.

1. If anyone out there is not technically-inclined, living in the suburban Phoenix Area, and needs to get a computer together to play the game, send me a private message and I will help you out. I have built PCs for the past 30 years (yes, really, google S100 Bus, and when you stop laughing come back here), and I know what I am doing. I will charge NOTHING for a fellow CoX vet trying to get back in. You pay for the parts we decide on, and I put them together. I know ways to put together a minimal system for about $250, and a better systems upwards from there (no need to spend more than $350 usually). If you have any kind of existing Windows 7 license that you're willing to re-use, subtract $50 from that. If you have a capable SATA hard drive that you can re-use, subtract another $50. If you want an example of what I am personally doing, check the bottom of the post.

2. If we can get our game back, there will be those of us who want human interaction combined with the in-game. I understand those who do not, but there are those who DO. For those of us who do want to put RL faces to our fellow players, and might actually want to form out-of-game friendships and relationships (not in a creepy way!), I think Titan should have some kind of forum category for LOCAL MEETINGS or REAL-LIFE MEETINGS. I'd be willing to organize the Greater Phoenix or (if there are too many) the Glendale local group. Meetup.com used to be good for that, but they charge a fee for no good reason. If Titan Networks can make forum areas for LOCAL GROUPS / Greater Phoenix / etc... we can organize real-life get-togethers this way.

And for the technical details... I bought a Win7 Upgrade when my school had some deal to get them for $45. I also bought an old OEM windows XP CD years ago. Bottom line on all that -- I have a Win7 install I can use. I also bought a solid-state drive for a netbook, but I'm going to put back its original HDD and use the SSD for a game machine. So I have the OS and a hard drive, I need 2 more things: A working desktop machine and a graphics card. eBay is a good source for machines that boot to the BIOS, show that the RAM and CPU are working, but if they have no hard drive that's about all the seller can do to test the thing... but 90% of the time that means the machine is fine. So I'm bidding on a "small form factor" machine that has a PCI-e x16 slot, and I can probably get that for $50 including shipping. For $85 on newegg I can get a new GeForce GT 640 card (PCI-e x16 2.0) that has brackets for a small form factor machine. I also purchased (eBay) a lot of seven untested (but again, probably fine) 2GB memory sticks (which match the specifications of the desktop machine). Four of those (which cost me $11 for the lot) will get this machine up to 8GB. The machine comes with 2GB working and tested, so even if those memory sticks are non-functional, the machine will still run fine.

So there you have it. Total cost for me: $150 (because I have a HDD and OS I can re-use) for a dual core 2 duo CPU at 2.33GHz, 8GB RAM, an SSD (a.k.a. hard drive), Win7 64-bit, a graphics card whose "video benchmark" score is 1200 (the high end cards score 3000 to 4000, but I used to play just fine on a GeForce 210 card which scores 185). Notice that the majority of the cost was for the new graphics card. If you are hurting for cash, you can also get used graphics cards on eBay, but you want to look up the 3D performance here (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php), and shoot for something at least above 200.

« Last Edit: May 03, 2014, 09:44:54 PM by chuckv3 »

chuckv3

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Re: A suggestion
« Reply #1 on: May 04, 2014, 01:22:00 AM »
removed
« Last Edit: May 08, 2014, 02:45:02 PM by chuckv3 »