I now officially hate Shat-n-Shat City

[Razman]

There was a software workaround to this with vista by linking some files -- I cant remember the link may have to search for it. I never implemented it myself as it came with a disclaimer about it not being tested with an update which put me off as I think 3.0 is going to be bad enough when all my addons break.

[paul.monaghan]

Vista X64 + 8GB Ram = W!n. I had all kinds of problems 4 boxing on my PC so I upgraded to Vista X64 and 8GB RAM and it runs like a dream now. I can even have other applications open.

P

[Ken]

I have XP64 too and I used to have 4GB of RAM. I disabled the harddisk swap file(because of performance issues) which worked fine with 4 WoW clients(memory-whise). When I upgraded from 4 to 5 clients I got into trouble because all WoW apps would frequently exit because "there wasn't enough virtual memory available".
I upgraded to 6GB and the crashing was resolved, BUT WoW also started using more memory(700MB+ instead of 550MB+). Windows then used about 2GB+ for caching so I ended up with only about 500MB available. For some reason(memory fragmentation?) my performance dropped down when having this kind of heavy memory load.
Then I upgraded to 8GB and all was fine.

You can run 5 clients with 4GB memory too, but then you have to make sure that you have the swap file enabled (and fixed size and at least 4GB big). The biggest downside of the swapfile is performance, because your PC will often write unused memory to harddisk (which is slow).

[blast3r]

I don't get it.
I run a 2.5ghz quadcore and 4gig ram, Shat and other big cities are a cake-walk for me.
Try running your copies on multiple hard-drives, that did it for me.

This helped a lot for me. Before i did this I had pretty much the same experience as the OP. now I just lag a bit when i get there then run around like normal.

[Coltimar]

Yeah, RAM isn't the issue here, it's your data access. You could get a cheap fix (80gb WD hard drive for around $40) and get a decent boost. Someone else mentioned Symbiotic Links. Doing that helped me a lot as well. I am eventually going to a Solid State Disk because I am still not happy with my performance. If you can access more than 3.7GB of RAM the extra memory will help a bit but that is probably more expensive and it's not addressing the main issue.