Moving from XP to Vista for multiboxing - my findings.

[Ozbert]

EDIT: Posted in the wrong forum, sorry!! Please move to software.

Just thought I'd post a quick testimonial to how much of a benefit Vista is over XP for multiboxing on one machine, in case anyone still on XP is wondering whether upgrading to Vista is worth it.

Until recently I was multiboxing under Windows XP (32bit) on two separate machines as follows:

Main running on: Q6700 (2.66GHz) - 4GB RAM - NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX - 1920x1200 display
Four clones running on: Q6600 (2.4GHz) - 4GB RAM - ATI Radeon X1950XT - 1920x1200 display

I had to set things up this way because the more powerful machine just couldn't cope with running five clients at once over two screens under XP, even with the NVIDIA driver set to horizontal span and all five clients graphical detail on minimum.

I had been resisting moving to Vista for a long time, ever since I bought the cheapest copy of Vista, Home Basic OEM, to evaluate. It's refusal to give me full control over my own computer drove me mental, along with UAC popping up nearly every time I clicked my mouse. I also had serious permissions problems running a copy of WoW that I retained on my D: drive during the XP->Vista upgrade. After only three days, I gave up in disgust, reinstalled XP and threw a £55 copy of Vista in the trash.

Recently I've given Vista another try, this time Ultimate 64-bit with SP1 integrated and it's far less annoying now. So I decided to give a single machine multiboxing setup another try and the difference is amazing. On the same PC hardware as before (the more powerful of the two), I can now run all five clients on one machine with ease, over two screens in dual view mode. My main is still fullscreen on the first display at almost full detail (only ground clutter is turned off) and the four clones each take up a quarter of the second display each with graphical detail turned right down (except terrain distance). I get about 40fps in Shattrath on the main. Another benefit of running them all on the same machine is that the five toons actions are more syncronised and the clones follow the main more closely.

So, if like me you were resisting Vista for whatever reason, I'd strongly recommend you give it another look.

[brandonbwt]

Nice move up to the 64-bit OS! In my experience, the bump up to 8GB of RAM made a big difference in terms of performance when running 5x clients at once.

However, be sure to watch out for potential display/GPU problems from the nvlddmkm.sys error (or its ATI equivalent depending n which card brand you use) which is endemic to 64-bit version of Vista. I was running Vista Ultimate 64x SP1 for about 3 weeks and sudden began receiving a 'the driver has stopped responding but has recovered' error whenever I fired up even 1 window of WoW, much less 5. It has made WoW basically unplayable on my desktop machine.

I'm still trying to find a satisfactory driver fix for it, but this problem is fairly widespread amongst 64-bit Vista users it seems from what I've read on the Nvidia forums (113 page locked complain thread; the another rapidly filling "new" thread about it). If you run into any problems with this type of error, private message me and I can point you in the direction of workarounds, etc that I have found over the past few weeks.

[Tasty]

Two things


1: UAC can be turned off (not recommended (I turned mine off five minutes into using vista for the first time )
2: dwm.exe


but yeah vista isn't so bad

[Ozbert]

However, be sure to watch out for potential display/GPU problems from the nvlddmkm.sys error (or its ATI equivalent depending n which card brand you use) which is endemic to 64-bit version of Vista. I was running Vista Ultimate 64x SP1 for about 3 weeks and sudden began receiving a 'the driver has stopped responding but has recovered' error whenever I fired up even 1 window of WoW, much less 5. It has made WoW basically unplayable on my desktop machine.

I have seen this exact problem with my 8800GTX, but only with Crysis. Basically, when I alt-tab out of the game, or when another program forces itself to the foreground (like an instant messenger window), the video driver crashes with exactly the error you mention, and does so repeatedly every minute or so until I restart Windows. This hasn't occurred with WoW yet though.

Tasty, what's dwm.exe?

[Jayded1]

Hummm I use Xp 32 bit with the 9600GT (Inferior card to the 8800) with 4 gigs of RAM and I can run 5 clients with no lag.

[Ozbert]

But what size are your client windows and how many screens do you display them on?

I had one at 1920x1200 on one screen and four at 960x600 on a second screen. XP really struggled. Vista handles it fine.

[Ringiho]

Vista can be pretty good!

Running it through Vlite can be a good idea. I always disable UAC Run --> Msconfig --> Tools --> Disable UAC option. Done!

Vista 64 always seemed good to me. Ran well!

[Ozbert]

However, be sure to watch out for potential display/GPU problems from the nvlddmkm.sys error (or its ATI equivalent depending n which card brand you use) which is endemic to 64-bit version of Vista. I was running Vista Ultimate 64x SP1 for about 3 weeks and sudden began receiving a 'the driver has stopped responding but has recovered' error whenever I fired up even 1 window of WoW, much less 5. It has made WoW basically unplayable on my desktop machine.

I have seen this exact problem with my 8800GTX, but only with Crysis. Basically, when I alt-tab out of the game, or when another program forces itself to the foreground (like an instant messenger window), the video driver crashes with exactly the error you mention, and does so repeatedly every minute or so until I restart Windows. This hasn't occurred with WoW yet though.

Looks like I spoke too soon.

This evening I had a go at the Quel'Danas dailies for the first time. While on the bombing run both displays suddenly went into power save, reappeared a few seconds later, then power-saved again. This happened for about 30 seconds, after which I got a bluescreen and my computer reset.

Some research into the issue seems to indicate that NVIDIA drivers are responsible for 30% of Vista crashes (of those that are reported back to MS). Time to consider a new ATI card I think.

[Tasty]

Tasty, what's dwm.exe?

Desktop Windows Manager or w/e it is :P

I'm not sure if its hardware related cause I switched to vista at the same time I switched to a new laptop. On my old laptop I was running xp while the game itself lagged (crappy comp ftl) it was extremely quick and min/maxing/resizing windows. With my new laptop which absolutely beats the crap out of the old one :P, if I try to minimize a wow window or resize one theres like a 30 second wait time before it finishes doing it. To clarify, I am running vista/32. Apart from that I couldn't be happier