Installed Vista x64 - advice on making it faster

[Bloodcloud]

why does everyone sym-link multiple copies of wow?

I've only put one copy of wow on my pc and run all of my accounts from it.
Is this for some special key binding? Aren't the key bindings by account anyway?

I run WoW from two folders WOW1 and WOW2 (data dir is junction)
I run my mains and solo mode I run from WOW1 and my slaves I run from WOW2

In both game-dirs I junctioned the accounts together so I share there the Saved variables.

Even before multiboxing I had My accounts Junctioned to share the data dir because of the Saved variables. So I could see restedXP friendslist, Characterinventory...accross my accounts.

Nowadays I have a housekeeping batchfile which copies AH-scan data from WOW1 to WOW2 and I only do certain actions on WOW1 (e.g. scanning AH)

[FunkStar]

why does everyone sym-link multiple copies of wow?

I've only put one copy of wow on my pc and run all of my accounts from it.
Is this for some special key binding? Aren't the key bindings by account anyway?

Because you almost always want different graphics settings, sound off, different mods, etc between your main and the slaves. So you run two directories (one for the main, another for all the slaves) and symlink the data directory to help the OS and hard disk caches.

I have also started symlinking a few files in the wow directories since it tends to confuse itself after patches, but that's not really necessary.

I wonder though, what the fastest would be.
At the moment I have:

2x 1 TB spinpoints in raid0
2x 750GB Spinpoints without raid (was planning on making them a second raid0)

My main wow folder is on the raid0 of 2TB
I was planning to make the 2x750 gb a raid0 as well and put my 2nd wow folder on there, so I run my main from the first raid0 and my 2 alts fromt he 2nd raid0.

Would this give better or worse performance than running them all symlinked from the first raid? (aka 2 wow folders on the first raid0 that shara data map)

My choices atm basically are:
1. Main on First Raid0, Both alts on 2nd Raid0 out of the same map (since they dont need separate config files)
2. Main on First Raid0, First alt on 1 750disk nonraid, second alt on the other 750 disk nonraid
3. Main on first Raid0, Alts also on first Raid0 but a different map, sharing data map symlinked

I have 0 experience with symlinking, so I really can't 'compare' them myself.

Thanks!

[Zakalwe]

For a start you can remove any of the excess rubbish that Windows in general likes to have sitting around by navigating to: Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off.
Remove the things that you won't need for your PC, like tablet PC and windows meeting space etc.

I usually turn off all the eye candy on gaming PC's since i personally can't stand all that crap. Right click Computer > Advanced under performance click settings. Choose "adjust for best performance" then apply. Then go "custom" and turn on these 3: smooth edges of screen fonts, use drop shadows for icon labels and use visual styles on windows and buttons. Whilst you're in the performance options click the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory click change. Click "no paging file" > set then reboot. Once it has rebooted go back into this option and set it manually. This puts the paging file at the start of the disk which makes accessing it faster. Make the initial and maximum sizes the same. If you have more than 4Gb PHYSICAL memory set it to 512Mb. DO NOT SET IT TO 0, WINDOWS NEEDS A VALUE HERE!!

I'd also recommend getting a good commercial defrag program and defragging a few times once you have your initial setup done. Ones like http://www.diskeeper.com/ , http://www.oo-software.com/ or http://www.raxco.com/

Do a thorough disk cleanup. Click start type "cmd" (no quotes) in the search box, hit enter. At the command prompt type (without quotes): "cleanmgr /sageset:1" hit enter. In the disk cleanup settings click all of them then ok. Then at the command promp type (without quotes): "cleanmgr". Choose the drive, click ok. Choose what you want to remove then ok.

Get a good registry cleaner, the one mentioned in that Vista tweak forum seems alright. Also optimize the registry with NTREGOPT found here: http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

You can also use crapcleaner to give it an even more thorough cleaning: http://www.ccleaner.com/

JV Power Tools is also pretty rad for doing some optimization: http://www.macecraft.com/

phew....that should make it fly!! 8)

[Hachoo]

Hehe, I've already done most of that. I've been a Sr. System Admin for ~11 years now (although the last 2 was ONLY dealing with Unix which is why I haven't used Vista before) so I know all the tricks that apply to "all" windows. So far vista feels faster with all the changes I've made, still slower than XP but not by much.

Couldn't test out 5 boxing last night because I'm waiting on keyclone to reregister my system key so hopefully tonight I'll be able to try

Only correction on the above post is that you'd actually want the page file to be at the end of the drive if you want it to be faster. Physics. Drive spins 7200 RPM, which portion of the drive is actually moving fastest? (Hint: its not the inside, its the outside) This is the same reason when you burn a CD or DVD, and watch the burn speed, it slowly increases the further you get into the disc, because the outside of the disc is moving faster than the inside.

[tushygalore]

http://www.vlite.net/ anybody use this?

[BobGnarly]

why does everyone sym-link multiple copies of wow?

I've only put one copy of wow on my pc and run all of my accounts from it.
Is this for some special key binding? Aren't the key bindings by account anyway?

Because you almost always want different graphics settings, sound off, different mods, etc between your main and the slaves. So you run two directories (one for the main, another for all the slaves) and symlink the data directory to help the OS and hard disk caches.

I have also started symlinking a few files in the wow directories since it tends to confuse itself after patches, but that's not really necessary.

I wonder though, what the fastest would be.
At the moment I have:

2x 1 TB spinpoints in raid0
2x 750GB Spinpoints without raid (was planning on making them a second raid0)

My main wow folder is on the raid0 of 2TB
I was planning to make the 2x750 gb a raid0 as well and put my 2nd wow folder on there, so I run my main from the first raid0 and my 2 alts fromt he 2nd raid0.

Would this give better or worse performance than running them all symlinked from the first raid? (aka 2 wow folders on the first raid0 that shara data map)

My choices atm basically are:
1. Main on First Raid0, Both alts on 2nd Raid0 out of the same map (since they dont need separate config files)
2. Main on First Raid0, First alt on 1 750disk nonraid, second alt on the other 750 disk nonraid
3. Main on first Raid0, Alts also on first Raid0 but a different map, sharing data map symlinked

I have 0 experience with symlinking, so I really can't 'compare' them myself.

Thanks!

I obviously haven't run your exact setup, so I can't say for sure what will work best for you but I'll tell you what I tried.

First on raid. I'm not a big fan of the built-in raid controllers because they aren't hardware controllers. They use your CPU to manage the raid partitions which means that not only is it going to be slower, but it's going to consume CPU resource that could otherwise be used elsewhere. I tried raid0 with two 10k raptors and was not impressed at all with the improvement. So, I wound up just un-striping them and using them as two separate drives (mainly so that I wouldn't have to worry about losing everything if anything went wrong). YMMV, just sharing my experiences.

After I decoupled my raid configuration, I first had two directories both on the same drive. I was curious if spreading it across two drives would help, so I tried it it. It didn't, in fact it slowed it down pretty dramatically. My speculation is that by moving it across two disks, you are bypassing any disk caching (first time you load file A from client 1 it will be in cache on the disk so it would be faster to load it for subsequent accesses). So for me, having it all on one disk proved to be a faster solution.

From there, I found that symlinking all the data of wow sped it up quite a bit when loading and whatnot. I believe this is because when a file is symlinked the OS knows it's the same and can cache in memory after the first load. This made a huge improvement for me on loading or zoning.

My last effort was to put all the symlinked data on an SSD drive. You don't want everything on SSD, but having the stuff that is mostly just read (not written, except during patches - not very often) definitely helped as well.

So basically, what I wound up with is multiple directories all on one disk, with the "read only" data symlinked to a separate SSD drive. This configuration works really well, especially if combined with Vista and a healthy amount of RAM (for caching). I can load my 5 toons up almost as fast as a single one.

Hope that helps.

[Hachoo]

Well I started 5 boxing in Vista today. With 6GB of RAM my hard drive bottleneck is pretty much gone. I can run around Dalaran now with 5 toons and my HD light stops after 30 seconds and never flashes again.

Unfortunately, it just brought me up to another bottleneck - the CPU. So now if I leave task manager open while I'm in Dalaran, both cores on my CPU are pegged at 100% the entire time. I'm sure this is also affecting my max FPS when solo boxing too, as I have a GF9800GT and I never get more than 62FPS even on a single client.

So the question is, what would be better for 5 boxing:

Quad core 2.5GHz
or
Dual Core 3.4GHz

Opinions wanted, thanks!

[emesis]

Whilst you're in the performance options click the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory click change. Click "no paging file" > set then reboot. Once it has rebooted go back into this option and set it manually. This puts the paging file at the start of the disk which makes accessing it faster. Make the initial and maximum sizes the same. If you have more than 4Gb PHYSICAL memory set it to 512Mb. DO NOT SET IT TO 0, WINDOWS NEEDS A VALUE HERE!!

Windows does not require a paging file. I have mine turned off entirely on my gaming PC, I do NOT want any use of virtual memory. I have 8gb on a 5-box machine, BTW.

[Bloodcloud]

I think all you ever wanted to know about vista tuning is here : TweakGuides

[Hachoo]

Whilst you're in the performance options click the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory click change. Click "no paging file" > set then reboot. Once it has rebooted go back into this option and set it manually. This puts the paging file at the start of the disk which makes accessing it faster. Make the initial and maximum sizes the same. If you have more than 4Gb PHYSICAL memory set it to 512Mb. DO NOT SET IT TO 0, WINDOWS NEEDS A VALUE HERE!!

Windows does not require a paging file. I have mine turned off entirely on my gaming PC, I do NOT want any use of virtual memory. I have 8gb on a 5-box machine, BTW.

Believe it or not you will actually take a performance hit having no page file at all. Google for it ,but you don't really need a large one, just 512MB will be fine. Not having one can cause the OS to take extra time doing a few operations and will actually slow the system down slightly. If you have a lot of memory and a small page file it will only get used to speed up a couple operations it is needed for.

So, in short, set a 512MB page file at least.