Windows 7 - tips from the experienced requested

[falsfire3401]

After a post of mine elsewhere on these forums about graphics lagginess when running a copy of WOW on my 2nd LCD, I've decided to try out Win7 64-bit.

Here's my setup, and my plan:
Currently:
XP Pro 32-bit installed on 200gb C:
One copy of WOW in C:\WOW1
Other copy of WOW in D:\WOW2 (2nd physical drive, also 200gb)

Plan: Partition drive C: into two 100gb partitions. New partition will become E:\ (since D: is already taken by other drive and I don't want to change it, too many things point to it)
Install Win7 64-bit onto the new partition.
Let it setup dual-boot functionality.

* I assume that when it boots up it will appear as though Win7 is on drive C:, drive D: will be the same as drive D: in my XP setup, and the actual WinXP drive will either appear as E: or have no letter assigned (and I can just assign it E:)

QUESTION:
Now, since I want to run both my WOWs from their current folders (on D: and E: as far as Win7 will see it), what do I have to do to copy my WTF/Interface/etc folders? I know that in Vista it loads them from C:\Users\blahblah\World of Warcraft instead of from the wow folder...

How do I go about having *each* world of warcraft have its own interface folder and WTF folders under Win7? Anybody know? I don't want my 2nd wow to have all the addons of my main wow, and since I swap which account/toons are on the main vs secondary WOW client I don't want to constantly have to be checking/unchecking addons to load everytime I switch which screen I'm playing a given toon on...I want that to just come automatically from which WOW folder I launched from.

[Trick]

I'm currently dual-booting Vista 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit RC. Here's my Vista setup:
4GB RAM
C: drive - 500GB, Boot, holds C:\wow folder
D: drive - 500GB, used for writting FRAPS
E: drive - 160GB, holds E:\wow2 folder
F: drive - 160GB, holds F:\wow3 folder

I'm not symlinking anything, each drive contains full copy of WoW. All of my mods are in C:\wow, and nothing but Jamba and TooltipOnMouse for the other two.

Now when I chose to install Windows 7 64-bit, I just installed it straight to my 2nd drive (D: to Vista). Even though it installed to a separate physical drive, it still enabled the dual-boot menu (I was prepared to use one-time boot menu in BIOS to access the 2nd drive, but that wasn't necessary). Now here's what happened to the drives under Windows 7...
8GB RAM
C: drive - 500GB, Boot, used for writting FRAPS (D: drive under Vista)
D: drive - 160GB, holds D:\wow2 (E: under Vista)
E: drive - 160GB, holds E:\wow3 (F: under Vista)
...

Only 3 drives. Apparently Windows 7 tries to play things safe and refuses to automatically assign a drive letter to the Vista C: drive in order to prevent you from screwing up that OS. A quick trip into Disk Manager and I was able to assign F: to that drive...
F: drive - 500GB, holds F:\wow (C: under Vista)

As I use batch files for starting up my 3 copies of WoW with Maximizer, I just copied those batch files to the new desktop in Windows 7, edited them to update the drive letters, and off I went.

[Trick]

Oh, and unless you have Partition Magic or something similar good luck trying to repartition your boot drive without frying your current Windows install.



You might be better off just installing to your D: drive assuming you have the space, and don't have a Program Files folder on that drive already.

[falsfire3401]

Thanks for the tips.

I do have Partition Magic. I don't have enough room on D: to put Win7 on it. It's sitting at about 15gb free with all of my data files, documents, mp3's, etc and one of the wow installs on it. So I have to take my 200gb C: drive and partition it down to two 100gb partitions.

I, too, will have to reassign a drive letter to my XP boot drive when I get going in Win7 and to access the "primary" wow installation.


My main question though was does it allow you to use all your addons etc right out of the WOW folder or do they have to be in the C:\Users\blahblah\yadayada folder? My WOW is *NOT* in Program Files, it's installed right off the root of both drives, so I'm hoping that with UAC turned off I'll be able to run both as admins and access their addons without moving them.

Also, I use HotKeyNet for key broadcasting and for launching my 2nd wow client (main one I just use the normal link to launch it, 2nd one I use HKN to launch, resize, reposition, and rename it). No SymLinks either, just two straight separate wow installations.


Also, in the not-too-distant future I'll be adding a 3rd drive where I will move all my "crap" (read: data, storage, documents, etc), a 1TB drive...since they're down to only $115cdn now.

[Trick]

My main question though was does it allow you to use all your addons etc right out of the WOW folder or do they have to be in the C:\Users\blahblah\yadayada folder? My WOW is *NOT* in Program Files, it's installed right off the root of both drives, so I'm hoping that with UAC turned off I'll be able to run both as admins and access their addons without moving them.

Thankfully WoW is not one of those programs that saves anything like addons into the User home folder. The only addons that each WoW can see will be the ones buried in the Addons folder of each copy of WoW. If you want to do like I mentioned and strip down one of them, just drill down to that folder in one of the WoW copies and clean house (being mindful of the Blizzard addons though).

[Simulacra]

I've been running win7 for about a month maybe - I downloaded it from a bittorrent site ;) and installed to a sep partition created with partitiion magic. Install very smooth. The nice thing was that win7 recognised my symlinked data directory onto an ssd so there was no need to reconfigure. I simply run wow from what is now the d drive where it used to be c. The only gotcha in this was I needed to run keyclone in xp compatibility mode and let it run as admin. All smooth and I'm getting amazing frame rates.




Lets not talk about what could be perceived as software piracy. kkthks - Svpernova09

[falsfire3401]

Ok cool to hear that. I'll be running HotKeyNet, what I currently use, and am prepared to run that in administrator-XP compatibility mode if need be.

[Freddie]

Judging from user reports, HotkeyNet runs fine on Windows 7 except for the KillMutex command.

If you notice any incompatibilities, please let me know.