The thing I love most about summer is the thunder storms. Forget the constant days of 90 degree weather making my apartment bake even when the air conditioning is on, it's those storms rolling in with lightening striking a few hundred feet from me that I love. My guild-mates are going to love that too, especially when I'm raiding with them.

We've had our first couple weeks of this in game, and already I've heard "Be right back, Tornado," from some guildies living down in Kansas. Luckily everything was okay and no one got hurt, but the fact still remains – we lost our head Mage for 30 minutes, and that's 30 minutes of our life we can't have back!

While a Mage having to take a break in the middle of raids isn't a show stopper, having the main tank (my role) go offline is. I've had the unfortunate situation of having that occur a couple days ago. The computer I was raiding on wasn't plugged into my UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply), so I was disconnected from everything when we lost power for about 30 seconds. However with a bit of tinkering around, I was able to put myself in a situation that lets me stay on even when the power hiccups.

Lots of us purchase these nifty mice from the local computer store. Be they a fancy new Logitech mouse with a dozen keys placed strategically around the unit, or a slick new beauty from Apple, the mouse is a strategic part of your game play.

At least, it should be.

All too often people don't utilize what they have in front of them. Today we're going to look at how you can increase your game play by using your mouse more effectively. In particular, the buttons.

However before we look into buttoning strategies, lets just quickly cover moving with the mouse. It's pretty simple, right? Push both buttons down, move forward. Right click and hold to turn your character. Left click and hold to look around without moving. Mike Schramm covered this in a post about a month and a half back, and it's a pretty good read for those interested more in the topic of mouse moving.

So now that that's out of the way, let's look at basic mouse buttoning techniques. I own two Logitech MX5000 cordless optical mice. They work very well and have a battery life of a couple days; but even then I recharge them both every night just so I don't have disaster strike me in the middle of a raid when the battery goes out.

Theflamecrow on WoW LJ provides us with our quarterly reminder: it's probably time to update your video card's drivers, if you haven't done it in a while.

If you're on a Mac, you don't need to worry about this (Software Update's got you covered, and the latest graphics update already helped your framerate). For PCs, Nvidia card drivers can get the latest version here, and ATI card owners can grab the latest files here. If you're not sure what kind of video card you've got installed, you can just follow along with this simple guide from the last big video card reminder, or one of the many other driver update guides available.

I should warn you: 99% of the time, updating your video card drivers will fix all kinds of problems-- it'll usually help your framerate, if it needs it, and it will often clear out problems with artifacts and other graphics glitches. But doing any system activity like updating drivers has the potential to harm your system, so always follow all instructions (like turning off all other programs and restarting the PC when asked) and, if possible, have a backup ready when you update. I've never had a system problem while updating graphics drivers, but if you're not careful, it could happen.

If you didn't look closely, you could mistake Ideazon's Zboard for a standard keyboard. It's about the same size and shape as your average keyboard, with 108 keys and a row of hotkeys and multimedia buttons along the upper edge of the keyboard. A glance at the box shows us a left-handed key configuration designed for gaming and a pair of USB ports. So is this a gaming keyboard with a few extras? Hardly! This is only scratching the surface of the Zboard's abilities -- the real magic of a Zboard lies in its customized keysets.

Curious? Keep reading!

Just yesterday in fact, I was at my local computer store after having a bite of lunch to make my semi-regular browse of their wares. One of the items I saw that screamed "Buy me! Please!" was a Zboard Fang. I'd seen them at EB before, but they were always hanging on a rung so high you'd have to be Michael Jordan standing on the back of a Tauren to reach them. These Fangs were close enough to the ground for a gnome to reach so I picked up the box and had a look. I am definitely a keyboard guy. I hardly ever use the mouse at all – except to click totems on occasion with my shaman. The allure of the Fang and it's programmability was strong though. I only set it down and walked away when I started to think about how long it would take me to get used to it.

Today while following a story tip, I found a proverbial bee's nest of forum activity about one of the Fang's competitors, the Logitech G15. Although the G15 has a full QWERTY keyboard and and adds a programmable LCD display, it's core function and purpose is the same. It allows you to define programmable keys for in-game functions.

The question arises (and has arisen many, many, many times before) whether these products are legal for in-game use. The answer from more than one blue poster in the previous link is: "YES! They are legal!" Blizzard draws the line between right and wrong not at what keyboard (or accessory) you use, but what you use it for. A button to open your bags is not going to get your account banned. A timed macro to run around in a circle and kill everything in your path while you watch Twister in the next room will get you banned, because you're essentially "botting" at that point. The line seems to be drawn between attended and unattended play, but common sense is clearly the watch word here.

What other hardware input device toys do you use in your day-to-day play? What do you think about these Zboard and Logitech products that are marketed so aggressively to the MMOG market? Your comments are key!

Lev over on WoW Ladies is bummed because her computer plays WoW so slowly. Well, we here at WoW Insider are nothing if not helpful, so here's some help! While WoW is definitely a pretty forgiving PC game (unlike, say, Bioshock or the upcoming Crysis, which will make slightly older computers drop into a fetal position while sobbing), there are still a few simple things, some free, some not, that you can do to speed up your computer a bit. (Note: Most of these tips are for Windows only, although with a little Google searching, some of them can be adapted for Macs as well).

• Cleanliness is next to ownage: Nobody likes a mess, and your computer doesn't either. If your hard drive is extremely full (as in less than a few hundred megabytes free space), big programs like WoW won't have the space they need to stretch out. So make some space by uninstalling programs you don't use any more, and then run a defrag program to reorganize and refresh your hard drive.
• Slam that spam: Another thing that makes your computer run slow is viruses and spam programs that run in the background and are a pain to get rid of. If you haven't done so in a while, have your virus checker do a complete system check and delete any nasties that show up, and then download both AdAware and Spybot S&D, and run a full check using both of those. It may take up to an hour or so, but it'll be worth it.
  
• Needs more RAM! One of the easiest (and cheapest) ways to make your computer run faster is to put more RAM (Random Access Memory) in it. It'll take a little bit of research on your part (to find out what type of RAM your computer's Motherboard uses), but RAM is cheaper all the time, and installation is a snap-- literally.
• Videocardorama: But while RAM will lower your loading times, the only way to speed up 3D performance in WoW is to get a better videocard. The good news is that they're just as easy to install, but the bad news is that a nice videocard will be fairly expensive, depending on what you're upgrading from-- if you're playing on an old integrated video card that Dell installed, you could get a nice upgrade for as cheap as $100. One thing I do is keep an eye on sites like Techbargains-- when a good deal on a newer card rolls past, nab it up.

Keep your system a lean, mean, clean machine, and upgrade it with the newest, fastest hardware when you can, and you'll be seeing Azeroth at 30 FPS in no time.

iPhone World is reporting on an anonymous tip from a "reliable source" that Apple's forthcoming iPhone will run WoW:

• The Source said, "watch out for the iPhone and their new video iPod when it comes to gaming. Imagine playing WOW on them using the touch screen interface. Think of the impact its going to have on the handheld game market and Apple's revenue."
• He/she said He/she was told that WOW on the iPhone worked with both WiFi and EDGE (without simultaneous phone use) and full multi-tasking with 3G in the future. New iPod will utilize WiFi.

My instincts say "no" on this one. I don't know much about the iPhone's ARM11 processor, but I'd be surprised if even the most powerful of phone CPUs could render a game like WoW playably. And even if it could, would you really want to play on a screen that size? Heck, I had enough trouble on my old laptop's 12". Furthermore, I believe Blizz have said that they think a keyboard and mouse are essential for playing WoW, when giving reasons for not porting the game to consoles. But enough baseless speculation. Does anybody know about that ARM11 CPU? Let me know in the comments if this is impossible or merely unlikely.

P.S. The above image isn't evidence of WoW on iPhone, it's just a quick Photoshop.

Back in October, Mike Schramm let us know what the Burning Crusade system requirements were going to be. Now that we're in the holiday season and the expansion is a matter of weeks away, do you plan on making any upgrades in order to get the most out of the Outlands?

I've been playing WoW on a number of systems since beta. I started on a 12" PowerBook G4, then swapped to a 1GHz Duron desktop, then to a 15" PowerBook G4, then a 20" iMac G5, and now I play on both the iMac and a recently-purchased Core 2 Duo system with an ATI x1900. Through all of those systems, the two most important factors I've found in playing WoW are system memory and the video card.

For memory it seems that 2 gigabytes seems to be the sweet spot for playing WoW on OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. With only a single gigabyte, all of my systems have seemed to chug a little, relying on caching to keep everything going. If you play with Teamspeak or Ventrilo, or have iTunes running in the background, you're definitely going to want 2 gigs of ram.

With the video card situation, it's all about where you can move the sliders in your Video Options. On my iMac, I play with the default settings except that I've turned the viewing distance down to minimum, and that's with the 128mb ATI 9600 pro that comes in the system. With the PC, everything is cranked to maximum on the 256mb ATI AIW x1900. I've played around on different systems, from the AMD Athlons through the Core 2 Duo chips, and it seems like WoW's not really a system resource hog in terms of processing power.

So, what system did you start playing WoW on, way back in 2004? What do you see yourself playing WoW on in 2007? Is the expansion inspiring you to upgrade or change your system at all, or will you stick with what you've had all along?

Frostbolt went out and got himself one of those shiny new 20" iMacs, and he says wow, WoW looks good on it. One of my favorite things about WoW is how well it seems to run on almost any hardware, but I know what Frosty means-- there's a big difference between playing with all the options off and turning on the underwater, drunk, and glowy effects. Spells, buffs, and instances look so much better when you have a nice rig and all the effects turned on.

Right now I'm running WoW on a PC I've had for a while-- it doesn't look too bad chugging along at 1.8ghz, 512mb of RAM and a GeForce 5200, but by the time Burning Crusade hits, I'll be done building my new monster: overclocked to 4ghz with a watercooled processor, 2gb of RAM (that's right, baby), and a GeForce 7900 GS in the PCI-e slot. All I need is to find a deal on a case and the RAM, and I'll be set to build my monster WoW machine.

But sometimes you don't even need a whole computer-- a few months ago I went ahead and invested in a sweet 24" Dell widescreen monitor, and that, as Robert Frost says, "has made all the difference." I couldn't imagine healing a 40 man raid with a 15" or even a 17" monitor-- all those meters would cloud up the place before long. Then again, I've seen screenshots around of people playing WoW at 800x600 resolution. I'd consider that unplayable, but maybe I'm being elitist. According to the latest Steam survey, 1024x768 is still the standard for Half-Life players-- Blizzard doesn't track the same info (or at least they don't release it), but I wonder if WoWers tend to skew their tech faster or slower than that. Thoughts? What kind of rig are you playing this game on?

As usual, this Wednesday is maintenance day for European players, and it also marks the second in a batch of hardware upgrades for selected servers -- upgrades which have already caused an extended extended maintenance. These upgrades are long-overdue by many players' reckonings, with plenty of stories of fatal lagspikes during raids or other adventures flooding the forums.

Reader Hammer writes in with a few other complaints of note (thanks!):

• The main wow-europe.com website is frequently down, with many parts of the site either bad links or inaccessible -- including the all-important Account Management section.
  
• Several servers are repeatedly experiencing problems and random downtime; poor Draenor is an example. Here's hoping the upgrades help with this.
• The new forums may look good, but they're often down -- for example, when the EU login server was broken for several hours yesterday, nobody could get on the forums to find out more. The forums, designed for European players, run on American time, adding extra confusion.
  

We Europeans may have been sitting smugly through US players' tales of woe for the last few months, but it looks as if the game's popularity has caught up with itself on our continent as well as across the pond. So, it's not just the Americans and Australians who have material for complaint; Asian players haven't spoken up yet, but we'll give them time.

After much waiting, the time has finally arrived. Patch 1.12 will be deployed on US realms during Tuesday's maintenance (and presumably on EU realms during Wednesday's maintenance). The maintenance has been extended by two hours to give time to apply the patch, so it should start at 3:00 AM PDT and end at the usual 11:00 AM PDT. However, in addition to the extended maintenance required for patch 1.12, a number of realms will be coming down tonight at 11:00 PM PDT for hardware upgrades - to come back online with the rest of the servers when maintenance ends on Tuesday. Servers coming down early for upgrades include the following: Aggramar, Argent Dawn, Arthas, Azgalor, Bleeding Hollow, Bloodhoof, Burning Blade, Burning Legion, Durotan, Earthen Ring, Elune, Eonar, Eredar, Gilneas, Gorefiend, Kargath, Laughing Skull, Lightning's Blade, Llane, Lothar, Magtheridon, Malygos, Mannoroth, Medivh, Shadow Moon, Shattered Hand, Skullcrusher, Stormrage, Thunderhorn, Thunderlord, Warsong, and Zul'jin.

Update: Further proof that this is, in fact, a roll out of patch 1.12 is the fact that the public test realms have been closed.

CM Thundgot has announced plans to retrofit all existing realms with new hardware over the next month - in preparation for the expansion's release. These upgrades should result in an immediate performance improvement - however, the realms involved can expect additional downtime periods in which to perform these upgrades. The realms needing upgrades have been divided into three groups, and will be receiving upgrades group at a time (with specific dates and times to be announced).

There were a lot of updates and questions about that bug with temporary item buffs yesterday, so I figured it might be a good idea to look at it in a little more detail.

Back in 1.11, Blizzard introduced a feature that allowed temporary item buffs like poisons, sharpening stones, and oils to last through logouts and zoning between instances. And there was much rejoicing, because it was a feature a lot of people wanted-- everyone entering an instance had to rebuff when they got inside, and allowing those buffs to be persistent saved time (and gold).

However, the patch didn't exactly work out as Blizzard wanted-- the hardware couldn't exactly handle keeping all of those buffs straight. So Blizzard first said they'd remove the feature in 1.12, but eventually decided to remove the feature in the hotfix yesterday (causing the bug we posted about, that we're told is now fixed). Bottom line: Because Blizzard couldn't keep up the hardware, temporary item buffs are no longer persistent, and they won't be until new hardware shows up with the expansion. Someone asked if non-expansion people would still get this feature-- Neth has said that the hardware would be put in place before the expansion, so I'd assume yes, but I'm still asking Blue to make sure.

Which leaves just one more question, which comes to us from Methodical: Did Blizzard try this fix out on the test realms before they sent it live? Why didn't they realize it would give them hardware problems ahead of time?

You know the hardware upgrades mentioned on Thursday? Well, some of them are already becoming reality. Three US realms will be brought down at 4:00 AM PDT for a scant two hours in order to install short-term hardware upgrades. There's no detail on what exactly is being upgraded, or what precisely the upgrades are expected to accomplish - though all must hope for overall performance improvements.

The lucky (or unlucky?) realms in question are Arthas, Bloodhoof, and Stormrage. The response to this upgrade seems mixed - many with the opinion that it's too little too late, and many more complaining that their servers need upgrades more urgently. However, what performance improvements even these servers will gain is still left to see.