Valentine

Trainers in Org will work fine yes. Got my monk to 70something yesterday and having great fun with it. It's nice the LFG queues are pretty non existent with all the new characters around although i think i have done pretty much all of them with a 5 monk male pandaran party (which works fine). It's a shock when you get a female pandaran monk and even more of a shock when you get another class.

Getting to grips with the monk class here (Pandaran of course) after starting a new character after being fairly disillusioned with all the other I have. Leveling with a friend in instances mainly with him as the tank and me as the DPS/Healer, and with the monk that role really does exist. For the content at the moment (which admittedly is very easy) I can heal the whole party just with passive heals through doing cool kung-fu melee moves while not being far behind decent DPS'ers and ahead of most of them . The talent system is a bit sucky when leveling, only getting to pick something every 15 levels but I can see why they did it for end game play.

The Black Widow keyboards use blue switches which they are almost alone in supplying as "gaming" keyboards. They are lovely for typing and RTS games but aren't so great for games where you want to use keys for movement like FPS or MMO games. Good description of switch types and other things mechanically related here.

For quite a few MMOs it is against the TOC to use programmed keys for anything more than initiating a single action. So while you can rebind individual actions to them you can't have actual macros. Warcraft in particular is one that says this, whether their anti-cheating program will be able to tell is a different matter. Mechanical keys have much less travel than keys on a membrane keyboard as the actuation point is a long way before they bottom out, they also pop back up much faster. On the other hand some mechanical keyboards are very unforgiving for typing, black and red ones are non tactile so you get no feedback when the key actuates, you do get used to it though. For MMO playing you are probably better going for Brown or Blue (as long as you can stand the noise) keys. Mechanical keyboards are one of those things that pretty much everyone that buys one says they are so good they would never go back to membrane. Whether this is because they really are that good or because they were stupid enough to spend £100+ on a keyboard is harder to work out .

If he doesn't mind having a non back-lit mechanical keyboard there are some under the price you mentioned (Qpad mk-50 for example). If you want the snazzy back-lighting you are looking at £95+. I am using the Gigabyte Osmium myself which is around £100 but has all the snazzy bits plus a volume control which a lot of the mechanical ones don't have. The type of switches you want to get depends a lot on what games he plays too. ...and yes mechanical is that good.

Not sure which server i will be playing on yet but a few things to note... As no servers have been officially marked as "English/UK" other countries are picking servers to be their countries unofficial server, Ring of Fire - Russian, Blacktide - Polish. Although a lot of non UK people actually tend to speak English in game some really don't (Russians for example). Desolation and Gandara are the big UK ones but will most probably be full very quickly, and in GW2 when a server is full you can't create new characters on it so friends will be unable to join the server if not on it already. The Mainly UK ones are: Aurora glade Desolation Gandara Gunnar's Hold Seafarer´s Rest Check EU Guilds | GW2 Guilds - An up to date list of guilds for Guild Wars 2 for more info.

News just in... Multiplayer is now fun on Inferno since the patch.

Spent quite a lot of time trying PvE and PvP content this weekend. The most fun I had was when myself and 3 friends all created Mesmers with almost identical names and appearances and then joined a Warzone (or whatever GW2 calls them) as a team. This basically meant every time there was a big group fight there were 16 identical looking characters and no-one knew what to actually kill (we won every game doing this).

The best way of getting gear/money at the moment (to make inferno possible) is just to team up with someone and skip all content up to Act 4 inferno (you do have to kill the end act bosses but they aren't a huge issue compared to the rare packs). On Act 4 you get Tyrael as a helper who can kill things for you including some bosses which drop the highest level gear possible as its Act 4. It's a shame this is the best way to gear up for actually killing things yourself on inferno, but it is.

Not quite invincible but it did make bosses a joke (some are still a joke on inferno without it). They seem to be trying to remove any abilities which enable you to finish the game currently Demon Hunters will probably get another nerf soon as they can still do it. I would say no class can kill all types of rare pack on inferno yet (at least not without dying a huge amount) but unfortunately teaming up with other people just makes all of you even less able to kill any of them rather than making it easier which they really need to fix.

I do like how hard they have made inferno mode but they do need to fix exploited builds (wizard especially) so some classes can't just 'breeze' through it while others hit a very large steel plated brick wall very early in inferno. I guess I am used to WoW where things like this get fixed almost instantly. Although i will say I am going to take full advantage of having a wizard until they do

Having great fun on my Wizard so far, half way through Hell difficulty. For those who are worried about the game being too easy at first have no fear, it really ramps up at the start of Hell and you have to think carefully about pretty much everything you do. Having a party with a mix of classes helps hugely as you don't just get the extra buffs but you also get 3x the loot as you can just swap items with each other. A hint to others would be start getting any gear you can to make you survive before you get to Hell as you will need it.

23:01 Tonight!

I would always recommend buying a PSU from a well known manufacturor, badly made ones can be a real problem further down the line. No need to get an I7 for gaming, there is virtually nothing that will use the extra cores so stick with an I5. You can also get Ivy Bridge CPUs now (3xxx rather than 2xxx), at first look i think the motherboard you linked supports them. RAM - Get 2x4gb rather than 4x2gb, leaves room for expansion. Graphics is fine, thats just where to chuck the extra money to reach your budget so if you can afford a better one then do it. It will run the games listed perfectly well. Assuming I am allowed to post links to other forums have a look at OcUK Full Systems & Bundles - Overclockers UK Forums as every day there will be a "i have £xxx money to spend, make me a good PC" post

No recent Diablo III threads? I am shocked. Playable from Monday evening for those who don't know and judging by the beta weekend it's going to be well worth the £30. It is the last day you can unlock some special banners to use in game today so head over to Diablo III if you haven't already!

I was very impressed with the GW2 beta weekend just because they are trying to do something different with the genre. SWtOR failed because it didn't innovate with the MMO aspects of it, much the same could be said of Rift although i still love the talent system. Tera has a chance too after playing the beta, the combat system is very innovative but the questing and grinding is from a 10 year old game. I was certain before playing the beta i was going to play an Elementalist but after trying every class i really have no idea now, they all seem good fun....

As it has been failed I don't think anyone can recommend using the equipment again until it is retested (whether it is fixed or the testers are just informed it isn't a risk) as certainly the school and possibly yourself could be in serious trouble if something does happen. The testers will have logs of everything that has passed and failed as it is a requirement of the testing. To be qualified for PAT it takes no knowledge or experience of anything electronic which doesn't always mean the people doing it can use common sense as they just might not know enough about it. I would hope a PAT company has some sort of qualified electricians doing it though.

If the equipment did fail the inspection part of the test then no electrical tests would have been carried out on it which probably doesn't leave you in the best position legally. It is useful to have someone in school qualified in PAT so they can retest failed devices like this.

Isn't this a fairly pointless tool until they give us a way of buying apps in bulk?

Raiding wise it all seems a bit easy at the moment, the different difficulty levels aren't really much harder than each other. We cleared Karagga's Palace on Nightmare in a couple of hours on Weds on our first attempt, just SoA in EV to go (and thats more a fight against bugs than the boss). Like any MMO I don't expect it to be perfect at launch, it's where they take it from here thats important. And still having great fun going through the various storylines while they tweak the end game bits (level with friends, it's much more fun).

Doing the Imperial version myself, 50 Bounty Hunter Mercenary (DPS). Had good fun levelling, about 50/50 solo or with a friend, both are viable and fun and if playing with others the game manages the fact you are on different "stories" (if you are different classes) really well. With the addition of companions you can pretty much level solo as any spec without too much difficulty. Tried the easiest Operation yesterday which was fun if a little simplistic after playing WoW for so long (but it was on normal mode). Also the last boss did manage to keep us all in combat after he died so no-one could get any loot which was a touch annoying. I actually think they have a lot of nice ideas with the warzones at the moment. The commentary you get in Huttball is especially amusing, and it is actually useful, keeping you up to date with whats going on in the Pit (who has the ball, failed passes, ball resets etc). They have said they are going to be doign a lot with PvP in upcoming patches included new warzones as well. The world PvP zones are a complete failure at the moment as they have no real point to them, this is also going to be changed soon also. It's still pretty raw compared to its established competitors but with the fanbase and initial interest there is it could go a long way.

Open the console, click on the person you want to find out, then.. "getav carryweight" (i think it only tells you how much stuff they are carrying so load them up with stuff first) i think level is "getav level" but i'm not sure. Followers will always say they are the same level as you but their stats will be the same as when you first met them. It's made by Bethesda, they reach new levels of buggyness with each game, that doesn't make them any less amazing each time. I would always buy their games on PC though so you can play with them and use the mods created by the excellent community surrounding them.

Also playing a sneaky archer on master mode this time after a fairly quick playthrough on the one under that with a mage (it is a little use 1 spell the whole game as Big_Ted said). Coping quite well so far without needing any magic or melee weapons, apart from quest related necessities it has been a bow for everything. I do use a follower for tougher fights where i can't manage to stay stealthed which leads me onto the most annoying bug i have encountered, the fact your followers don't level up with you. You can fix this if you have the PC version doing the following: Dismiss your follower Open the console and click on them, type "disable" Close the console Open it again and type "enable" talk to them and invite them back. This does have the annoying effect of lowering you follower's carry weight every time you do it which can be remedied by taking all their items off them then typing "removeallitems" in the console before you disable them (make sure to close your eyes if you have a female follower).

Not currently no. Hmm I see it is fairly easy to get a class list from the home page in SIMS, that looks like a quite useable way to get email addresses for me.

I think the main reason for this was to try and strike up more email conversations between the parents and tutors. I assume InTouch does everything through generic school email addresses? Edit: Is it possible to get a front page panel on the SIMS home page with a list of students in the teachers form which when clickable brings up the student record (which the parent emails can be found in)?