And the mask comes off.

[Waffles]

I can safely say the worst part of building any given PC is the power supply's installation.

[Arcana]

I can safely say the worst part of building any given PC is the power supply's installation.

I always thought it was when you discovered your case holes didn't quite line up with your motherboard.

[darkgob]

I always thought it was when you discovered your case holes didn't quite line up with your motherboard.

Close, it's actually every pancaking time you drop a screw into an inaccessible area at the bottom of the case.

Spoiler for Hidden:

EVERY TIME

[FloatingFatMan]

^ You're all wrong.

The absolute WORST part of building your own PC, is turning it on for the first time.... and nothing happens!

[Shadowe]

I've never built my own, but I did re-case my existing machine a while ago (moved it from crappy case into much nicer Cooler Master case with extra fans to help with cooling problems). And after hours of laboriously studying the photos I took of the guts to make sure they were the same afterwards, and very, very carefully moving everything across... the damn thing won't deliver POST tones. Still no idea why.

It works, though. So I try not to care.

[Fridgy Daiere]

The absolute WORST part of building your own PC, is turning it on for the first time.... and nothing happens!

I must be very lucky for that never to have happened, then!  However, I have had someone bring me their computer because it wouldn't turn on (for 3 years), discover a faulty power supply, replace said power supply and reboot umpty-million times installing Windows updates with no problems.

When they got it home, it wouldn't boot.  I blame dirty power.

And now for something completely different; Happ and I were meandering through Youtube this morning and came across the original trailer to City of Heroes.  I really like the globe model in Atlas Plaza at 3:05.  (Hint hint nudge nudge, Irish Girl!)

And also one of my favorites from Samuraiko.  Have a great week, everyone!

[Teikiatsu]

I really like the globe model in Atlas Plaza at 3:05.

I've often wondered why they swapped out from that frame-work globe to the solid version on live AP.

[Goddangit]

I've often wondered why they swapped out from that frame-work globe to the solid version on live AP.

At a guess?  People kept getting stuck inside it?

[FloatingFatMan]

At a guess?  People kept getting stuck inside it?

More likely to be a performance related reason.

[srmalloy]

I always thought Virtue was the home of the catgirls

I had a character in the Legion of Catgirls SG on Guardian, so Virtue wasn't particularly exclusive.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

At a guess?  People kept getting stuck inside it?

More likely to be a performance related reason.

i would tend to guess both. To make a hollow framework requires a lot more geometry and depending on the size of the openings you might be able to get a result like the old guard towers in various zones before doors were added.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I had a character in the Legion of Catgirls SG on Guardian, so Virtue wasn't particularly exclusive.

Same here, actually. i don't think Virtue was especially notable for having a higher catgirl ratio. i'm almost tempted to say as a percentage of the population it was lower, but i don't actually have any numbers to back it up and being a member of the SG would almost certainly skew my personal observations. 

[srmalloy]

http://freedomforce.wikia.com/wiki/Nuclear_Winter

Now I'm going to have to go back and shuffle through my Sentinel+ files to see how many Russian heroes/villains I fabricated for backstories.

Very early in the game, I happened to see "для" in chat; a little experimentation proved that CoH was perfectly happy to accept Unicode in chat. So I created a number of characters with foreign origins, particularly Russian/Soviet ones (Yadernii Ogon, Zabastovka Molniy, Umstvenniy Ulan, Stal'naya Deva, Obmorozheniye), and fabricated organizations and individuals to use in them, like the state-sponsored hero group Народная Армия (People's Army), heroes and villains like Генерал Зима and Красная угроза (General Winter and Red Menace), and dug around to find real research facilities that could be used to explain origins, like the I.M.Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry and the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, and made sets of Russian-language chat binds, like replacing the 'Ready!' call with 'Готов!', for a little extra characterization. I never went through and established powersets and costumes for any of the 'background' characters I created, though.

[Twisted Toon]

Same here, actually. i don't think Virtue was especially notable for having a higher catgirl ratio. i'm almost tempted to say as a percentage of the population it was lower, but i don't actually have any numbers to back it up and being a member of the SG would almost certainly skew my personal observations. 

I had a cat guy on Guardian who was offered honorary membership in the Legion of Catgrls.

[Ironwolf]

When building a new PC give us your list:

1. How much is the budget
2. What will it do
3. How long do you want it to last without updating hardware
4. What Operating system?

Pay attention to the 4 main things Power, Memory, Processor, Motherboard and try to get the best you can afford and see if any have specific issues - like some Motherboards liking only certain memory.

Cpu performance:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-6.html


CPU/Motherboard/Memory combo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1814671
Cost $1,193


Power supply/Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1837343
Cost  $175
Nice Thermaltake case and PSU


Now drives and such are up to you, what I do is buy a smaller SSD to boot from and then a larger standard drive to run game and such from it:

SSD - Crucial 256gb http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148820
Cost $111

Hard drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5AD1P08389
Cost $90


Video card ASUS DirectCU II R9270X-DC2T-2GD5 Radeon R9 270X 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 CrossFireX Support Video Card
Cost $199


A fairly high top of the line system costing total $1769
Now you can mix and match cutting some items and raising others but this would be a very nice gaming rig that will last you quite a few years.

[MM3squints]

To make a PC I have a website at home (unfortunately I don't have access to my home computer right) that helps you plan your PC. This website not only gives you a chart on what components you want, but will also tell you how much power you are going to use in total so you can properly buy a PSU. The website will show deals and promotions that it pulls from all websites for each part you select and if bookmarked,  it will save the choices you made and self update daily with new promotions, sales, and mail in rebates by staying on your cache or you can save the link provided. Furthermore this website gives you a timeline in how much the price of the components all will cost over time. Interestingly enough the next computer I'm making, I'm waiting till Cyber Monday to make it (for obvious reasons) would cost me less than $1,600 (at the current price, not with the Cyber Monday sales) for an iTX rig, i7 3930k, 16gig DDR3, and a EVGA 980 GTX superclocked in. Ill post this website when I get home.

[srmalloy]

My first PC ever was a Dell that my grandma financed for me (bless her heart). After that though I've built every other one I've owned. Its really easy tbh. Its basically plug and go.

I still remember my first PC, an ITT Xtra -- an XT clone -- and the things I did with it. Buying a 20Mb hard drive for $400 and wondering how I'd ever have enough programs and data to fill it up. Adding an aftermarket upgrade to boost it from 4.77MHz to (IIRC) 6.8MHz, and discovering that the system had an early SIO chip (the controller for the serial port) that wouldn't run at the higher speed, so I had to pull the computer apart, unsolder the SIO chip to remove it from the motherboard, and solder in a replacement. The upgrade to a 10MHz XT clone, adding an ARLL (Advanced Run-Length Limited) controller card that would let me not quite double the space on a standard hard drive when Seagate was having reliability issues with its RLL drives. Buying a pair of AST RAMpage expanded 2Mb expanded-memory cards that I only had populated to 1.5Mb when the price of 256kb x 1 DIP RAM chips went through the roof. Having to MacGuyver what was essentially a CPU fan because the 1/4" high heat sink glued to the CPU wasn't enough to keep it cool during the summer. Coming away from a computer show with ten copies of a VGA demo on highly-reusable 3.5" 1.44Mb HD floppies when they were new and a box of ten cost $65.00...

[Darkojin]

For anyone doing upgrades, or just curious on what is in their current system, this is a great program to have. Totally free, and will even tell you the temp on certain areas of the system (CPU, GPU, HDD, etc).

https://www.piriform.com/speccy

[chuckv3]

Wow, $175?  Are you salvaging parts and OS from another computer?

Not really. I re-used my existing 22" monitor, and a keyboard and mouse. Everything else was acquired. Here's the basic breakdown:

$30-ish for HP mini-desktop with Intel Core Duo (2.1 to 2.4 GHz) and 1 to 4 GB RAM (has PCIx-16 slot for video card -- that's critical) (eBay)
$20-ish to upgrade from 1 to 4 GB RAM (or if it came with more Ram, the above will be higher and this lower) (eBay)
$30 for least expensive new SATAII HDD (NewEgg)
$70 for GeForce 640 GT card PCIx-16 (I got a $40 rebate one 1 of the 3) (NewEgg)
$30 for Windows 7 home premium COA (eBay), downloaded installation ISO from MS web site

Of the 3 mini-desktops I bought, 2 had CDRW/DVD-ROM combo drives and one had DVD-ROM.

I also spent $11 to get a multi-card-reader that would fit into the floppy bay (for only the one I'm keeping).

You have to know enough to get the proper RAM type for the machine, and to buy a machine with a PCIx16 slot and then a video card that goes into that type of slot. FWIW, PICx16 1.0 can almost always take 2.0 cards (which are all you can find new). Almost everything else is so standardized these days that you will be able to slap it all together and it will work.

Note that the eBay stuff was used (of course) whereas the NewEgg parts were new (HDD and video card).

I forgot $1 each for a special type of screw needed to mount the HDD into the "modular bay" of the machines. No biggy there.

[LaughingAlex]

Not really. I re-used my existing 22" monitor, and a keyboard and mouse. Everything else was acquired. Here's the basic breakdown:

$30-ish for HP mini-desktop with Intel Core Duo (2.1 to 2.4 GHz) and 1 to 4 GB RAM (has PCIx-16 slot for video card -- that's critical) (eBay)
$20-ish to upgrade from 1 to 4 GB RAM (or if it came with more Ram, the above will be higher and this lower) (eBay)
$30 for least expensive new SATAII HDD (NewEgg)
$70 for GeForce 640 GT card PCIx-16 (I got a $40 rebate one 1 of the 3) (NewEgg)
$30 for Windows 7 home premium COA (eBay), downloaded installation ISO from MS web site

Of the 3 mini-desktops I bought, 2 had CDRW/DVD-ROM combo drives and one had DVD-ROM.

I also spent $11 to get a multi-card-reader that would fit into the floppy bay (for only the one I'm keeping).

You have to know enough to get the proper RAM type for the machine, and to buy a machine with a PCIx16 slot and then a video card that goes into that type of slot. FWIW, PICx16 1.0 can almost always take 2.0 cards (which are all you can find new). Almost everything else is so standardized these days that you will be able to slap it all together and it will work.

Note that the eBay stuff was used (of course) whereas the NewEgg parts were new (HDD and video card).

I forgot $1 each for a special type of screw needed to mount the HDD into the "modular bay" of the machines. No biggy there.

You'd need to be seriously careful about shenanigans.  Old equipment can have faults in them, and heck, may even be the reason people are trying to get rid of it is because its about to break, hasn't, but they know it will, so they put it on ebay or craigs list.  At least you get a new hard drive.