Big Lag Little China

Hello,

I am new to multiboxing, started yesterday. I got all my stuff set up, octopus, maximizer. Was running three characters (on WOW), two on the lap top and one on the main.
In terms of performance it worked fine, no graphic lag on either of the comps.

I did have one issue, which was that for my lap top (which was running the two alts) i would have to sometimes click the screen on one of the instances to get it to receive keys. Every time i would click the lower screen (one was top the other was bottom, top was having problems) i would have to re-click the upper screen for it to receive Key presses. If i just clicked the top screen i would not have to re clock the bottom screen for it to get key presses.

But that is not my issue. My issue is that i have come across a strange type of lag wherein one of the instances will "lag out". This is not any ordinary lag though, it is of a strange nature.
Here is how it happens.

All of a sudden on one of my instances the world will stop updating, people will stop moving and i cant move items in my inventory. Yet i can still run around. So then i go to my main instance and i move my main around, the alts dont follow and i look towards the alt screen and the main has not moved. Now.. I go to my alt screen and i move my character around and on my main screen i see my alt move, yet within that alt screen all of the other characters in the world are not where they are on my main. It's quite confusing.

So to re-cap,
Everything works fine.
An instance laggs out.
Other instances stay fine (other alt follows leader and leader is not lagging)
Go to the laggin instance and move chaaracter around.
Movements update on the main and other alt, but new positions of main and other alt do no appear on the lagging instance.

I am using an actiontec modem with wireless router, the lap top (for the alts) is hooked up to the wireless router part.

Pls help

thank you.

That sounds suspciously like a network data starvation issue. I ran into a similar problem (usually leading to "Disconnected from server") because I had my firewall software set to low priority, which was starving it of CPU cycles and basically hanging up all my interwebz data. Once I reset it to normal priority and set my wow.exe processes to low priority, everything's been liquid smooth. Might give that a try first.

[edit]

I would also recommend setting Octopus to High process priority.

On a related note, Process Lasso is an excellent free Windows tool for automagically setting process priorities (and/or killing unwanted processes) as soon as they show up. I swear by this app. :)