RAM or another HD?

[DeathRush]

Hi, I am running a system Windows XP, 8400 3.0 GHz, with 4GB of RAM, Hitachi 1 Terabyte HD 32MB Cache at 7200RPMs, with a GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, 22" wide and 19" screens, I have 5 separate wow directories.

Right now I have a 5 shaman team, and everything was going ok, untill I got to Shattrah and Outlands, I had these weird crashes where One or Two wow's would just go down randomly after I play for like 30 min or so. And I also sometimes get these episodes where every window would just go super slow at 1-2FPS and the ground looses texture, and the only way out of which is to shut the wows down and reboot the computer.

I think I might have a bottleneck with my 3GB of RAM that XP can see, even though I have 2x2 GB sticks in the computer. So my question is, should I get another 4GB of ram (cheap now) and upgrade to Vista 64, or should I get another Hitachi drive and place the Alts folders on that drive? I already think I know the answer to this question (which is probably try and do both or do the RAM idea first, but any input would be appreciated).

I also noticed that at times when my FPS would drop, one of the wows would be eating up 500MB of RAM, while the others are at 325 each. DO you guys experience these spikes in memory usage? (I have disabled all the UIs in the game, no Help Quest etc.)

[Ògil]

heya,

thats strange. i also use 3gb ram and it uses only 40-50% the HDD part might be a good idea just try it out with another 72.000 and put 3 clones on that one.

but do you also get wow errors?

Greetingz

Ogil

[DeathRush]

When one or two wow's crash I get a WOW error message, "your wow crashed do you want to send this report to blizzard".

I haven't downloaded the 3.0.1 patch update, i don't know if that could be causing my problems, will get the patch today.

[Jelatin]

Are you using Symlinks? That would be a good idea to look into, Also, if your going to get another drive, get one exactly like the one you already have, and Raid 0 Them if possible.

Two monitors, are you running in dual view or one large desktop? I remember reading something about using extended desktops makes your fps suffer, try using horrizontal span if your not allready.

[DeathRush]

I am using horizontal span, i know there ways to link directories and they are different commands depending if you are using windows XP vs windows Vista, has anyone actually used this to help the performance? and if you did, are there any helpful posts that explain how to do it in windows XP?

[The_Whack]

I think I might have a bottleneck with my 3GB of RAM that XP can see, even though I have 2x2 GB sticks in the computer. So my question is, should I get another 4GB of ram (cheap now) and upgrade to Vista 64, or should I get another Hitachi drive and place the Alts folders on that drive? I already think I know the answer to this question (which is probably try and do both or do the RAM idea first, but any input would be appreciated).

For me, adding a second hard drive made for a huge performance increase. I put all my slaves on the second HD. I did eventually upgrade to Vista 64 cause i would use up to 3 gigs ram and run into the same errors.

I now have Vista 64 with 7 gigs of ram, 2 HD's. Shatt is a total non-issue, in fact, no difference running 5 accounts from one account.

[feralia]

Hi there , im also running 5 shaman on a quadcore q6600 one harddrive and 4 gig of ram ...
Its runs perfect exept if i went to shattrath.
Same as you here , lose grafiks , wow error (that destroyed the whole wow) and low fps...
Result was ram was not ok ..... switched the ram and everything is ok .. no wow error
Still got lags and low fps in shatt :D

[DeathRush]

"Hi there , im also running 5 shaman on a quadcore q6600 one harddrive and 4 gig of ram ...
Its runs perfect exept if i went to shattrath.
Same as you here , lose grafiks , wow error (that destroyed the whole wow) and low fps...
Result was ram was not ok ..... switched the ram and everything is ok .. no wow error
Still got lags and low fps in shatt :D"

So you increased your memory and switched to Win Vista? or your memory was bad.
I will probably get the extra hard drive and memory together when I can afford it :)

[DeathRush]

I had an interesting evening as I was playing around with the macros that somebody on these forums posted to change your graphics settings to low/medium/high and on Low I was for once getting amazing fps, this mind you was after I ordered my new HD and 4GBs of RAM. So I go back to the website and cancel my order, go back to my game and play for 5 min, and two of my wow windows go down. I was like AHHHHH!!!!!, went back to newegg and re-ordered the RAM and the HD :)

I defenitly believe its not my graphics card that is not able to handle it, it should be the RAM. Anyhow so I am gonna upgrade and also install windows vista so that my computer would be able to see my extra RAM.

I have two questions:

1) Are there any problems with Vista that I should be aware off if I decide to switch from XP and continue to multibox?

2) Which Vista do I need for the computer to see my 8 GB of RAM that I am gonna have? (do I really need the 64 version or 32 can see it?)

Thanks