on-the-road
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Breakfast Topic: WoW on the go
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. All of us have a life outside of Azeroth. People always say how much more important real life is than the game. However, if we say we are going to be somewhere in the game, shouldn't we take that commitment as seriously as one in the real world? If we tell our guild or friends we will be there for a raid or to PvP, shouldn't we do our best to not let them down? Isn't telling your WoW friends that you will be somewhere and simply not showing up without any notice just as bad as if it were your real-life friends? Since I am a tank for my guild, I pretty much have to be at almost every raid. In order to make raids when not at home, I have raided on laptops and at other people's houses, just so I don't let people down. By not always playing on my home PC, I have learned to be a minimalist with mods as well as learning what the minimum settings I can still effectively tank with. This has allowed me to maintain most of my real-life and in-game commitments. Have you ever had to play WoW outside of your own home to fulfill your social obligations? Do you have a gaming laptop for this purpose? Have you played at a friend or relative's house on their PC? Do you have different UIs or mod setups for your PC and laptop?
Guest Post: Northrend truckers -- a tale of WoW OTR
This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. After spending three years crammed into a call center with 600 reps sitting in quarter-cubes so small I could hear the other reps on all sides of me, I decided it was time to ditch the tech support world and go see America. Four weeks and $2,200 later, I had my Class A Commercial Driver's License, thanks to a truck driving school outside Springfield, Mo. Before venturing out, I wanted to purchase a decent laptop for gaming (we were attempting to do full clears of Zul'Aman when I decided on my career change). I ended up purchasing a HP Compaq NC8430, after catching it on special. It had the Intel Core 2 Duo T5600, ATI's Mobility Radeon X1600, and I upgraded the memory to 4GB of DDR2-667. After loading WoW and all my addons, I was happily running around Shattrath at 60 FPS! I also purchased Skyworth's 19", 12-volt LCD TV to use as a second monitor and to also watch television on in the few occasions I stopped overnight near a big city (Big Bang Theory is not available online). I didn't want to mess with a laptop and a GPS system, so I purchased Microsoft Streets 2006. MS Streets came with a plugin USB GPS that had about a six-foot cord on it along with a suction cup. Through blind luck while surfing the web, I also found Jotto Desk, a very nice laptop for semis that mounts to the base of the passenger seat and has an arm that extends over to the driver seat for easy access. While a bit of a pain to install, the effort was well worth it. The people who invented the Jotto Desks deserve an award or a free case of Bawls or something. Having successfully installed Jotto Desk and mounted my USB GPS to the front windshield, I was almost ready to hit the open road! All I had to figure out now was a way to get internet no matter where in the United States I happened to be.
Guest Post: Raiding on the road
This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. I have been playing World of Warcraft on the road for the last three years now, and what an adventure it has been. I started out on an old HP Pavilion zv6000 weighing in at about 8 pounds, with a 800 x 600 resolution and 800 MB of RAM. Not only was the beast of a laptop fun to haul through security lines at the airport, but it was heavy and slow. 25-man raids were next to impossible (I'm talking to you, Heigan), with frame rates under 5 FPS most of the time. I was eventually convinced to buy a new machine, and I decided to go with a MacBook Pro. I'm currently running version 4, which is the 17" widescreen with the Intel Core 2 Duo with 2.6 Mzh GHz processors and 4 GB of RAM. It's a pretty decent machine, with frame rates in the 30s in Dalaran and 25-man frame rates around 5-25 FPS, depending on the fight (less if I'm trying to FRAPS a fight or Marrowgar's fire is involved). The biggest changes I have made between playing on my desktop (Dell XPS 720 series) at home and my MacBook on the road have been in regard to addons and special effect details in the video settings. I have optimized every addon I use to keep the lowest memory usage possible (for example, Skada instead of Recount), making use of all 4 GB I have on that machine and ensuring my machine is doing the best it can. I use Addon Control Panel to turn off every non-essential addon come raid time, including Auctioneer, Jamba (for when I am dual-boxing), SexyMap, etc. I love Addon Control Panel, as it lets me save addon sets in different states depending on what I am doing. I have a raiding 10-man version, a raiding 25-man version, and questing-, leveling- and auction-based sets that I can flip between at the click of my mouse.
Sony Ericsson outs CNN, Skype, Mytopia panels for XPERIA X1
Sony Ericsson's Panels interface hasn't taken off the way HTC's TouchFLO 3D has, but it's still a nice way to momentarily forget that you're being forced to use Windows Mobile 6.1. At any rate, those who plunked down some eight bills to procure an XPERIA X1 should probably give this a look, as SE has just unveiled the latest Panels for its first (and likely last) HTC-designed smartphone. Available starting in mid-March, users will be able to suck down CNN, Skype, Mytopia and 'On the Road' Panels. For specific details on what each will provide, you know where to head.
