We need a vista sticky.

[rgirty]

I'm retiring one of my wow machines, and of course the new machine has vista, the ultimate edition. Ultimate meaning it has the ultimate amount of crap on it that you will never use, and if you wanted to use most of those features a third party probably has a better alternative.

Now, that being said I have the following scenario.

The new machine I will be playing wow on is a notebook, this cannot be changed.

It has a t2060 intel 1.6 ghz cpu.
Intel 945gm express video adapter (on board of course).
It has 2gigs of memory.

The only upgrade I could possibly perform upon this machine is more memory.

My question is, what do I need to do to achieve an acceptable performance out of this setup. I have yet to log into wow on this machine and have no idea if it would play well or not.

Please do not say format and install windows xp, that is not an option.

Settings, and perhaps memory are the only changes I can make, thanks for the advice.

[Kalos]

You shouldn't need to increase the ram further. All I can say is to give it a go. Obviously the graphics are going to be on the weak side, but with nothing else bottlenecking it further and having the graphical settings tuned down low, it should be reasonable. Not flawless, but reasonable outside of the major hubs.

On the general Vista sticky idea, it has been something I've been contemplating. I've noticed much greater stability, on the whole, in my two Vista machines. Very bad driver support with certain peripherals, but if it's kept well fed with resources it tends to do ok. It needs a pretty healthy computer to do so, wouldn't recommend the most of the older Pentium 4 or Athlon XP processors for the job. Running it in the minimum specs is a nightmare, but once you get to one gig of ram it holds ok, I recommend two for some forms of memory, it's not like Vista doesn't take advantage of it. I've got one of the rigs currently outfitted with four gig of DDR2, so Vista has decided to bloat itself up to 1.3 gig, before third party applications even come into the equation. Like WoW's old "minimum" of 256 MB of ram, Vista's minimum of 512 MB is a bit of a joke, it barely moves.

[rgirty]

You shouldn't need to increase the ram further. All I can say is to give it a go. Obviously the graphics are going to be on the weak side, but with nothing else bottlenecking it further and having the graphical settings tuned down low, it should be reasonable. Not flawless, but reasonable outside of the major hubs.

On the general Vista sticky idea, it has been something I've been contemplating. I've noticed much greater stability, on the whole, in my two Vista machines. Very bad driver support with certain peripherals, but if it's kept well fed with resources it tends to do ok. It needs a pretty healthy computer to do so, wouldn't recommend the most of the older Pentium 4 or Athlon XP processors for the job. Running it in the minimum specs is a nightmare, but once you get to one gig of ram it holds ok, I recommend two for some forms of memory, it's not like Vista doesn't take advantage of it. I've got one of the rigs currently outfitted with four gig of DDR2, so Vista has decided to bloat itself up to 1.3 gig, before third party applications even come into the equation. Like WoW's old "minimum" of 256 MB of ram, Vista's minimum of 512 MB is a bit of a joke, it barely moves.

I run 2gb in my xp boxes with video cards that aren't great, but better than this on board. I'm just hoping that it is acceptable and does not look like a slide show when trying to play.

If it does i'll have to use something else, I use a lot of addons which I'm sure isn't going to help the situation.

[Kalos]

It is certainly a weak graphics adaptor, but if it is the only one within budget, there is little choice.

[rgirty]

I am unable to modify the graphix adapter due to other circumstances beyond my control :D

btw kalos, i'm fairly knowledgeable and primarily worked as a lead tech for multiple pc retail outlets and hold some technical degrees myself :D However, I'm not as up on the new tech as you are, or nearly as good at wording answers!

You do some good work here, I don't think i've told you that before.

[Kalos]

I just get lucky and read quite a bit. I've just polished up a new rig based around Vista Ultimate (64 bit version), Q6600 processor, Nvidia Gainward 8800 GTS, and 4 (soon to be 8 perhaps) gig of OCZ DDR2 running at PC6400. The bad thing? I don't get to play with it for long, it's for someone else :grin: I like the fact I don't have to activate this version of Windows right at the beginning, that you are allowed some time. Allows me to install all sorts of rubbish of my own for testing and trying it out for a day or two, then wipe it, and simply reinstall and activate, without having to go through the whole "phone up MS" business for using the same activation key twice. It was one tedious thing with XP, not that it affects the customers of the retail business of course, but it was a pain beforehand to test new computers out and then clean up the programs without a trace, much simpler to wipe and freely reinstall, provided you aren't too slow.

Vista has some pretty good improvements, I'll give it that. As long as you don't expect it to run as fast as XP did on the same hardware, it shouldn't leave you miserable, outside the third party driver mess. But that's not MS's fault, and it is bound to get better as more of the consumer base migrates and XP is phased out of active selling.

I do my best in these issues to inform fully on what is within my experience and knowledge. I'm thankful the Recommended Hardware thread has proved to be useful on occasion, it looks like I didn't manage to overspec it out of the range of ordinary home builds just yet. I'm concentrating on clueing myself up a bit on Vista some more, now that I've got a machine with capacity to spare for a while, valuable tinkering time.

[saberz]

I had an Acer Aspire 9410Z with your same specs.

1.6ghz Core Duo vista home premium. World of Warcraft did not run that well with Vista. I was averaging roughly 11-15 fps in all areas. I knew the onboard intel as bad as it is, could do better from my past experiences.

I wiped Vista off the drive and installed XP Home/Pro edition(Same thing) and my frames nearly doubled to 22+.

Also speaking about upgrades, you can upgrade the memory(100 dollars for 2 gigs off ebay is what i did), and also the CPU. I removed the dual 1.6 Coreduo and added in a 2.12ghz dual core which was only 150 off ebay. I know average about 30fps on the low side of the things about about 40 on the high. It does fluctuate to 90's but its for seconds at best.

WoW is a CPU bound monster, the stronger the CPU the better your FPS, this goes for Vista as well. If you don't want to revert back to XP then the more CPU power you have your fps will be a bit better for WoW. The DX9 emulation is what kills your frames.

[jschild]

Ummm...Vista does not "emulate" DX9, sorry to say. It is however a CPU and Memory Hog. I didn't lose more than 5 FPS when I switched from XP to Vista. AMD 3500+. 2G Ram, Ati x850 video card.

Honestly, any video card that starts with intel......be happy if it works at all, quite simply the worst video on the market today. Any small upgrade to an ATI or Nvidia card, even last generation will be leaps and bounds better.

[Tunga]

It's worth noting that Vista uses more memory than it needs to makes things faster if nothing else is using the RAM, but it releases it if something else needs it (like a game). That's why it can take a gig of RAM or whatever at bootup yet if you check it when you're running a new game you'll notice it's taking much less.

[rgirty]

I only get 12-14 in BE now...

For some reason I lag horribly in BE. Raids are fine, other zones are good.

I don't have vista and can't imagine what it would be like.