Couple of questions: Mainly about FFXI bandwidth

[Natallon]

Alrighty, so I am moving away to college this fall! (yay)
But i had some concerns regarding whether I can play FFXI there or not.
The whole campus is wireless but the dorm rooms are all wired with a connection.
It's ethernet, but from what i gather, it isnt very fast. The only standard they said was that you couldnt connect to XBox Live.
Now i was wondering how much bandwidth FFXI uses and whether this slower connection speed would affect gameplay at all.

Im also buying a laptop for school. Considering a Mac, and I was wondering if anyone had any experience playing FFXI using Bootcamp.

Thanks so much

[Cephius]

You could play FFXI on a 56k connection, in fact it was designed with that in mind. It would be playable but certainly not enjoyable. However, while your school may have a slow connection by today's standards, it will certainly be enough to play FFXI. I estimate you only need about 20-30kb/s download bandwidth to play FFXI comfortably.

The only problem you may come across is with your school firewall. Some firewalls will block the ports that FFXI needs to connect, resulting in connection errors for you. I never had this problem at my university, but some have, so it's something to keep in mind if you do run across problems.

[The Stig]

I had one of them mobile internet cards during a few months placed elsewhere of work.

Basically, over 1 evening (5-6 hours?) the data usage from download/upload totals to roughly 25mb with odd internet browsing here and there. This was a decent connection capable of downloading up to 100kb/s.

To play comfortably, based on my the speeds of my available card, 15-20kb/s is sufficient. Even Besieged was tolerable.

[Isiolia]

Most likely they just have a single 10 or 100Mb line going into a dorm. So everyone using it at once makes it slow, and inevitably you're going to have someone running P2P on it that will just plain kill it.
That'd be my guess anyway >_>

Far as Boot Camp, it works fine. Really what you need to consider is the actual hardware in the Mac. I have a Macbook, I can run FFXI on it, but the video hardware is rather crappy for gaming. Most other models would be better though.
All Boot Camp really does is let Windows boot up without a BIOS, since that's really the only major difference in hardware between a Mac and a PC now.

[desertigloo]

I played my freshman year on 56k.
It actually wasn't that bad, logging into the game took a bit longer than I would have liked, but once I was in the game there really was not that much change in speed.
Just watch how much youre online, i had to get 4 diffrent ISPs over the course of that year because i went over the allotted time

[killerx]

I played my freshman year on 56k.
It actually wasn't that bad, logging into the game took a bit longer than I would have liked, but once I was in the game there really was not that much change in speed.
Just watch how much youre online, i had to get 4 diffrent ISPs over the course of that year because i went over the allotted time

you could just get unlimited aol?

and the games not horrid on dial up but its not exactly wahoo fun

[Natallon]

well i dont think we have a limited time to be online but i will check into that

a lot of my worries are gone now haha
still torn as to whether i should buy a macbook or PC laptop

[desertigloo]

i didnt have a lot of money, so i went with the cheapest service, which was like 3-4 bucks a month :/ forget what it was, was about 4 years ago, ISP prolly isnt alive anymore

[Isiolia]

still torn as to whether i should buy a macbook or PC laptop

Depends on what you want out of it, and what you need. What will your curriculum require/favor?

The advantage of a Mac is that you can run most mainstream OSes. You can use OS X as a reliable day-to-day platform that's extremely malware free...and boot Windows if you have a need for it.

A PC laptop would give you more choices in terms of hardware, and more compatibility with legacy PC crap, but no Mac OS (though you can always put a Linux distro on as a backup).

[Natallon]

im going into Biology study.
I've asked a couple of people and they said it really doesnt matter unless you are doing hardcore artsy stuff like photo editing or movie stuff.

That, they favor a Mac, and understandably so.

[The Stig]

Go with PC Laptop.

Also, I doubt you'll have time to do the arty/movie/photo stuff with Biology study. It's quite hardcore (well, in the UK it is).

[Amele]

You could play FFXI on a 56k connection, in fact it was designed with that in mind. It would be playable but certainly not enjoyable. However, while your school may have a slow connection by today's standards, it will certainly be enough to play FFXI. I estimate you only need about 20-30kb/s download bandwidth to play FFXI comfortably.

The only problem you may come across is with your school firewall. Some firewalls will block the ports that FFXI needs to connect, resulting in connection errors for you. I never had this problem at my university, but some have, so it's something to keep in mind if you do run across problems.

I played on 48.8k for over a year (at 3 month clips at a time when home from school) and could still out-compete for nm's (pre-antibot code even assuming no bot was around). the only thing you might have trouble with is targeting people in whitegate (or dynamis if your group uses more than like 50).

it *is* important to minimize how many other things are using the NIC at these speeds though. - disable auto-updates, don't run a chat client; consider lowering the audio fidelity on your voice program; don't browse the internet if you're not idle/safe etc.


if you can afford it - go with an intel mac (all new and refurbished macs available through the online store or official resellers should be these now); they have some of the best hardware, are price competitive with similar hardware from major pc companies and their driver support is rock solid. Now that mac is IBM PC compatible, the only downside to getting one is that there isn't really an entry level (<500$) laptop available from them. If your plan is to play pc games on it, you will need to pick up a copy of XP or vista (unless you have a macbook pro I'd recommend avoiding vista and sticking with XP but with the pro it's an option). but those can be gotten on newegg for 150$ and probably through your school for much much less (mine used to sell XP Pro Enterprise Licenses for 5$).

[Natallon]

alright thanks so much for the help everyone

[ReddwarfX]

Alrighty, so I am moving away to college this fall! (yay)
But i had some concerns regarding whether I can play FFXI there or not.
The whole campus is wireless but the dorm rooms are all wired with a connection.
It's ethernet, but from what i gather, it isnt very fast. The only standard they said was that you couldnt connect to XBox Live.
Now i was wondering how much bandwidth FFXI uses and whether this slower connection speed would affect gameplay at all.

Im also buying a laptop for school. Considering a Mac, and I was wondering if anyone had any experience playing FFXI using Bootcamp.

Thanks so much

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a80...shmi/POLBW.jpg

this image shows aprox how much BW POL uses a day (keep in mind, this is ALL DAY) i dont logout, and im usually AFK in high traffic areas, or Dirtmall bazarring.

[Mansin]

I had a similar question.
I'm not going to be living at home for a few months and have two options: dialup connection or mobile broadband. Is mobile broadband going to be a comparable speed to the one I have at home? And it looks like the max bandwidth I'd have per month is 5GB. so with an online time of 6hrs~ a day, that seems like enough?

[Amele]

use the dialup connection it'll be fine.

[The Stig]

I had a similar question.
I'm not going to be living at home for a few months and have two options: dialup connection or mobile broadband. Is mobile broadband going to be a comparable speed to the one I have at home? And it looks like the max bandwidth I'd have per month is 5GB. so with an online time of 6hrs~ a day, that seems like enough?

More than plenty. I was doing fine with websurfing (pics turned off) and playing FFXI only, and that was on 1GB. I rarely break 300mb, and if I don't, the last 2-3 days before reset I find shit to download and fast.

If you want to purely play the game only, dial up is fine, otherwise, if you want to do other things like surf the web, mobile broadband!

[Vyvian]

One time when my broadband had a line-out, the modem was only downloading data at 30kbits/s max, but when only FFXI was running it was between 8-15kbits/s, but FFXI never dc'd unless I tried to use vent at the same time. All I noticed is that the commands executed slightly slower than I'm used to.

Even at like half the speed of dialup I still had no problems.

[Natallon]

ok soooooooooo
getting closer to making a decision and currently looking at Macs right now.

the only game I really plan on playing much at all is FFXI, so would the $1,099 MacBook be OK?

here is the link to where im looking at and my choices :
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/hom...ok?mco=MTE3MjA

[Amele]

ok soooooooooo
getting closer to making a decision and currently looking at Macs right now.

the only game I really plan on playing much at all is FFXI, so would the $1,099 MacBook be OK?

here is the link to where im looking at and my choices :
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/hom...ok?mco=MTE3MjA

should be fine, may not be able to run it at zomgwtf resolution with all the bells and whistles but it'll run it.

make sure you get a copy of winXP to use too (the mac OS will come with boot camp and mac will have online documents to help you set up the installation.)