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Posts with tag technical

Forum post of the day: Doomsprocket's Dilemma

Posted Jun 30th 2008 3:29AM by Amanda Dean
Filed under: How-tos, Fan stuff, Forums, Hardware, Forum Post of the Day

I have this annoying habit of taking things for granted. For instance, have you ever really thought about how wonderful bone marrow is? My hands, feet, heart, and all the other parts work just the way they should. What would WoW be like if I couldn't use both hands?

Doomsprockt of Mauradin faced just such a dilemma. He (Jaime) was in a struck by a car in an accident that left him paralyzed on the left side of hisbody. Among the challenges of recovery, Doomsprocket sought to regain access to WoW, but his first solution, a frog-pad failed to do the trick. He appealed to the Mac Technical Support forums for assistance.

Continue reading Forum post of the day: Doomsprocket's Dilemma

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A Carrot-on-a-Stick for your PC

Posted Sep 20th 2007 1:00PM by Mike Schramm
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Tips, Tricks, Odds and ends

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.
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Tweaking the garbage collector (for techheads only)

Posted Sep 10th 2007 4:04PM by Mike Schramm
Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard

Bewarned: this post has to do with a technical, hidden process in your WoW client, something involving how your computer's memory is used and how you might be able to make it a little faster. But if you're not interested in the technical side of things, don't worry: this post is extremely skippable. The upshot is that while you can download an addon right now to possibly make your memory usage a little faster, the same functionality is coming to the regular client in 2.3. So feel free to move on to the next post if that's all you wanted to know.

If you're still reading, you probably know by now that we're talking about garbage collection. Cladhaire has a well-written thread started in the UI and Macros forum that goes over exactly how garbage collection works in your computer's RAM-- after Burning Crusade, the WoW client uses a process called "incremental garbage collection," which dynamically deallocates memory as it falls out of use within the application. The problem, as I understand it, is that sometimes the memory won't actually fall out of use, which means the garbage collector won't kick off, which means garbage will sometimes sit in memory for a while waiting to be collected. For those times, there's GCTweak, an addon which you can install that will occasionally force the garbage collector to do its thing. If you have really low system memory, this might help, but only slightly.

At any rate, while this is interesting (probably moreso to those of you comp sci majors out there), it's really a nonissue-- Slouken confirms that exactly this functionality is being built into the standard client in 2.3. If you're really good at this technical stuff, GCTweak might let you tweak your system enough to pump out a few extra FPS on a lower end system. But if you don't know RAM from ROM, and can't be bothered with all this technical wackiness, just wait until 2.3, and you'll get this same functionality anyway.
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