3 Things You Can Do To Make World of Warcraft Run Faster In Vista

So, if you like I took the plunge into Vista thinking it would make everything better and faster I'm sure you're equally as disappointed. So without giving you any technical reasons why it is running slower (on the same computer you used with Windows XP just a week ago ...) lets jump right to accelerate things.

First things first, let's make sure we have the latest video card drivers. Until now, every time a new driver came out of your graphics card, it is the single biggest impetus to WoW performance every time! So, update the drivers often! If you can not say what graphics card in your system, right click on desktop and click on adaptation (remember, were in Vista now). Then click on "Display Settings" from the drop down box you should see the make and model of your graphics card. Mine is a NVIDIA card so I should go to download the latest Nvidia drivers. If your card is the ATI card, go ahead and go to ati.amd to grab the latest drivers.

Well, now that we have the latest video card drivers (and restart our computer) let's look at the next highest incentive. Many people will discuss his proposals in that area, but it's good, because depending on your graphics card model, driver version, DirectX version, and whether or not you have the Adobe products loaded on the system (strange is not it, fortunately it does not matter, because we play with the settings here anyway ...) this setting will be different for everyone. So let's World of Warcraft Display Properties.

While Warcraft is running, run your mouse over the latency bar. Yes, that little green (though, more than likely yellow if you're in one of the damn original servers) bar that tells you your latency between you and the wow servers. Did you ever feel the recent patch, it also shows us our video FPS (frames per second.) So, here is what I want to do. Start changing the settings in your video options menu and keep restarting WoW and check that number. Smooth game hovers around 30-45fps (and of course more on faster computers ...) and will go up and down, depending on where you are (in Orgrimmar expect low FPS, and the arena can be expected much higher FPS) to make sure that you are in the same place when you take each sampling. It is very time consuming and annoying to do, but after the optimal settings for your system, you play the game will be much smoother. Remember, when you hover over the video settings, Blizzard generally tells you whether or not the setting will help or hinder performance.

This last setting applies only to Windows Vista. Here are two settings I wish to note that destroyed performance on my system. Duel monitor instrument will slow wow way down in Vista, but not Warcraft in full screen will be a great curse on performance. Now let's talk about the Vista settings. What I want to do is right click on World of Warcraft icon and go to "Properties". The properties you will need to go to the "Compatibility" tab. Check "Disable visual themes", "Disable desktop composition" and "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" and click Apply. This will disable some of Vista's special effects, and the World of Warcraft is running. This will help WoW's performance. I did not see "Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows XP (Service Pack 2)". To make any difference

Well, these are just three things I did to my system go faster, and I would love to hear any feedback to the other things you can do to make WOW run smoothly on Vista. Please drop me a line via my site and I'll be sure to share it with everyone I can.

For the horde! (And yes, Vista is quite an upgrade from XP and will eventually be able to play as well as XP. For those of you who have not yet switched, you May want to consider if you have extreme WOW players.