2nd HDD and Memory Limit

[silverback]

Hey all. I've been lurking here on and off for a short while. I'm currently 4-boxing on one machine and it works well for the most part. I don't get very good FPS but good enough to 4-box with all screens showing. I get crashes here and there; mostly when flying but ocassionally in instances and just running around.

I saw a thread not long ago where someone mentioned single-pc bottlenecks often being ram and HDD access. I found some ram cheap and bought a second SATA HDD but I haven't gotten the results I expected yet because of 2 problems.

First, I went from 2GB to 3GB Ram but only 2.5 is showing. I Googled a bit and couldn't figure out the problem. May have something to do with a /3GB switch but I had no clue on how to use it.

My second problem was that I have tried multiple WoW directories before on the same drive and all I had to do was copy the original. I never noticed a benefit to doing it so I stopped using multiple folders. I see the potential in using multiple folders with multiple drives but when I did a simple copy, no workie. I can launch the game but when the launcher comes up, it does not connect to Blizzard and when I ignore that and hit play and attempt to logon, I am stuck at "Connecting". For some reason, this copied folder won't work on the second drive. Is there something I can do besides reinstalling the game there and patching it to get it to work?

Additionally, I'd also appreciate any tweaking ideas (not hardware upgrades) for a 3GB, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo (hoping to upgrade to Quad Core soon), dual Sata HDD (not looking to set up in a raid)), 2-22" monitors and 2 19" monitors, an NVIDIA 7950 GT OC and 7600 GS.

Thanks for anyone who has time to respond.

[fling]

Does your BIOS show 3gigs of RAM? If so there are a couple of switches that you can add to certain windows boot files to get the OS to see all 3gigs. I had that problem recently with one of my servers, and the fix listed on M$'s technet.com worked great.

As far as the hard drive, what I do is run 2 drives in a RAID0 config that basically doubles my access time since the two drives work as one. I am just guessing here, but it may be a registry issue... there is some pointer that is looking for something on D when it is installed on C, or something like that.

[Zseth]

make sure you got Low Density ram, cuz the High Density ram sucks balls and only shows as half of what it is

luckily its also half the price

[Bollwerk]

I quad box on a single machine and I have no trouble with 2GB of RAM. Just a little choppy in Ironforge and Stormwind. I do use separate WoW directories though. I'm not sure if that helps or not, but I have plenty of space, so I never tried just using a single directory.

Nvidia 8800GTX and Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, btw .... but only 2 cores seem to get used, even with 4 wows running.

I use Keyclone's maximizer function to have the windows in the 4 quadrants of my 24" widescreen. So each window is 960x600. I have all spell effects down/off, except draw distance.

[Stealthy]

I'll have a guess and say you're running Windows XP Pro? Have a look at this link, and it should give you a bit more information about the memory limitation of Windows XP Pro, and some of the work arounds:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

Cheers,
Stealthy