More from my machine

[Quoth]

Hi All,

I was wondering if I might be able to call on the wealth of experience here for some opinion and advice.

I've been trying to push the envelope of what my machine can put out. I have 5 accounts and running 3 at a time is quite smooth, 4 begins to get a bit edgy and 5.. well.. 5 isn't good. Not good at all.

I currrently running with

Vista Home Premium 32 (lets not even go in to how silly I was for buying this POS.)
Asus P5W DH Deluxe - http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=1&model=1198&l1=3&l2=11&l3=248
4gb Corsair DDR2 6400
Intel Core 2 E6600(2.4ghz)
Gainward Nvidia 8800GST 640mb

Now I'm ok with the software side of things, but when it comes to hardware and upgrading I'm not sure what my options are.

I'm off the mind to buy a 2nd box to run a couple of accounts from. The advantage of this is that I can go for a lower spec as all it will be doing is slave work, but I fear this would noticed and gain quite a lot of comment from the Mrs.

So that leaves me with the other option which is to get some more bits for the one I have.. ideas of upgrading the CPU or GPU perhaps but I don't know what to get.
I was watching perf mon and both the CPU and RAM are pretty much maxed out at 4 sessions

So any thoughts would be greatly recieved, is anyone running 5 accounts (or more) off one box, and what kind of kit are they using.

Thanks in advance

Q.

[Quoth]

I can see I've been a bit lazy actually and a lot of stuff is already answered within these pages already.
Many apologies. I'm usually better at this :rolleyes:

[algol]

8GB and a Q6600 would be nice. However: try limiting your maxfpsbk to 15, looking up the LOD macro, and maybe disabling a few non-essential addons on the drones.

Vista improves on quite a few things...I'm experimenting with XP64 and find it lacking on a number of points, so I'll probably be back on Vista before long. It's the "32" part that is usually undesirable for multiboxing, since 4-8GB is standard for the "5 accts / 1 machine" model. You're going to need to install the 64-bit version in order to get use more than the 3.375GB you can see now.

[eqjoe]

XP64 drove me crazy! Too many drivers are outdated or not available. Vista64 has it own problems, but driver support is much better.


-j

[Quoth]

It's the RAM usage thats driving me most bonkers.. so it could be a simple upgrade of the OS and some extra RAM. Spent a couple of hours this afternoon digging before I realised where I'd gone horribly wrong, I should have bought Vista 64 all along. Ce la via, time to give MS Sales a call and see if theres anything they can do for me.

[Tsunami]

first of all your processor is plenty fast enough to run 5 instances of wow. you could run 10 with that processor if you had the components to support that many.
I think your easiest fix would be to upgrade to the 64bit vista and add some ram, like you already stated, but that might not fix all your problems.

running that many instances on one machine creates two other weak points, your hard drive and video card. you made no mention of your hard drive.

what is your video set-up, 1 or 2 monitors and what size? also check to see what programs are running in the background and turn off everything that is not necessary to run wow. this could free up enough memory to speed the game up enough to make it playable for you.

try turning down the settings on your slave toons. turn their settings down the absolute min. I would try some free solutions before I paid for an OS upgrade.