2nd HDD and Memory Limit

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.

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.

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

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.

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...AE/PAEmem.mspx

Cheers,
Stealthy