Quick XP & Vista Performance Tip!
 

It's COMMAND-LINE time people! With a little bit of command line scripting power, we can get you a little more FPS, especially for low-end systems. You see, XP and Vista can give higher or lower priority to any running process, including our own little WoW.exe. We can take advantage of that by giving WoW.exe a higher priority. Make a new file in your WoW directory (usually C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft) and name it WoW.bat. Make sure it's WoW.bat and not WoW.bat.txt! Put this in it:

start /high /wait WoW.exe

That will start the program, WoW.exe, under a higher priority then all other processes. This will allow increased performance even on medium to some high end systems, especially with Vista that has tons of threads running in the background.

Vista Only
However, we can do better! You see, AMD and Intel have both implemented a way to underclock their processors. Vista uses this to save you energy and therefore $$$ when the system is mostly idle. However, leaving Vista to decide when is a good time to put your CPU up to 100% power doesn't work as well for games. Let's open up a command prompt.

- Press Windows Key + R to get the run box, then type in "cmd".
- Type in powercfg /L > powercfg.txt
- Type in notepad powercfg.txt

- Note the power configurations. The one you are currently on has an * next to it. You want to find the "High Performance" or "Max Performance" out of the list, and the one that is currently set to. Example:

Existing Power Schemes (* Active)
-----------------------------------
Power Scheme GUID: 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e (Balanced)
Power Scheme GUID: 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c (High performance)
Power Scheme GUID: a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a (Power saver) *

So, what do we do with this information? We change the batch file a little. In my case, it would be...

powercfg -S 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c
start /high /wait WoW.exe
powercfg -S a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a

Bah, all this gobbly-gook, eh? Look at the list above and see that 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c is "High Performance", while a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a is "Power Saver". So while I'm gaming, such as World of Warcraft, I'm on "High Performance" mode -- 100% CPU power, no underclocking. When I'm not gaming, I'm on "Power Saver" mode -- 5% to 50% CPU power, saving precious energy and letting laptops increase the battery duration.

All this may seem scary, but it's a no-cost increase in performance for you! Have fun, and happy gaming.

This is not for the faint of heart!

There's a little freeware proggie out there called GameXP which can tweak your XP system for better performance by removing unneeded services, background programs, tweak Windows systems, and tweak your video card settings. However, much of its power goes deep into the vastness that is the REGISTRY, and as such, you should not do this unless you're prepared to have to go into Safe Mode and repair it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't do it! Even though GameXP makes a backup of the registry, user beware. For those that feel OK with a program changing registry entries, here's the download:

http://www.theorica.net/download.htm

For securing your desktop, you may also be interested in SafeXP, another freeware proggie.

Drivers

New official 174.16 Nvidia drivers!
Users of Nvidia chipsets in both desktops and laptops may find tweaked / leaked drivers over here: http://www.tweakforce.com/modules.ph...download&cid=1, under the "XtremeG" set. I have noted good performance increases on a lot of games on my 8800GT. Since this is a third-party bundle, and many times a bundle of beta / leaked beta drivers, be prepared to have to reinstall your drivers in Safe Mode!

For users of ATI chipsets in both desktops and laptops, nothing beats http://www.omegadrivers.net/. The same warnings apply -- use at your own risk!

Happy gaming!

Ok, I'm good up until the "Type in powercfg /L > powercfg.txt" part.

I've tried typing this in a few different ways and keep coming up with an error in the cmd window that says it does not recognize the command given.

Does the command prompt need to be at a certain point, or am I just missunderstanding what I'm supposed to by typing in the cmd prompt?

Could you clarify what to type exactly in quotes to eliminate my confusion, please? I would appreciate it.

Sorry to be a bit of a dunce, but I think I would benefit from what you've described here.

Thank you.

That line should be:
and

Just as my own two copper... I would be wary of changing processing priority (Step #1 of this guide) if you are not sure of what you are doing. Changing priority can have some very adverse results on your computer (although Thrae is right, it could increase performance). Just be careful and don't set anything above High.

If you are not on a laptop, and don't care about power savings, you can easily put your computer into High performance mode all the time in power options, found in your control panel (in vista)

I would also suggest nLite. It let's you make you a customized version of windows XP.

opps.................

I strongly recommend against vLite -- it's still in beta and already has a lot of problems with the upcoming SP1. The savings from vLite are really minimal anyway. If you want a good guide of which services to manually disable, try BlackViper's guide: http://www.blackviper.com/

Fixed .

Oh, ah! Alternative Nvidia drivers! Thank you, I'm "new" to the Nvidia range of cards (haven't had one since my Ti200) and I've loved the Omega drivers for ATI... the whole time? ;)

Definitely going to check the XtremeG set out!

New official 174.16 Nvidia drivers! These were released for the new Series 9 chipsets on Nvidia's website, but tweakers thankfully hacked the setup file to allow the new driver's general application enhancements (directx, opengl, etc.) to apply to series 6, 7, and 8 chipsets as well! Get the tweaked version here:

http://www.tweakforce.com/modules.ph...download&cid=1

Fair warning;
I got a spyware infection shortly after installing the XtremeG drivers (174.16 for 32bit XP). I don't know if they're the cause of it, but that's what happened. I can't recall installing anything else, so this currently my suspicion.

Could be a false positive. If you want to download official (leaked) 174.20 drivers for XP 32-bit, try here:

http://downloads.guru3d.com/ForceWar...load-1866.html

Some say they've had more success with the 174.20 then the 174.16, even if they're non-tweaked.

Oh, and here's for Vista 32-bit too. No 64-bit version of these yet, sadly.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/ForceWar...load-1863.html

Definitely not a false positive, as it was identified as Vundo/Sysprotect, and subsequently removed by http://vundofix.atribune.org/
I am not sure, however, that the driver package was the source. The problem has been resolved, however, and should anyone finding themselves in the same position as me after having downloaded said drivers, then please speak up. The solution, thankfully, was not hard at all.

I'm not any familiar with these Drivers so could someone tell me what should I do to check my current drivers and how to install new ones? I would really like to get my WoW run faster: I'm on very old computer.. I have like 10-30 fps when my video settings is set to the lowest and I would like to raise it even a little..

Thanks in advance!

For most people, it's just as simple as downloading and running the setup program. It will uninstall the current drivers for you if necessary.

I just installed OmegaDrivers for XP/2000 (I have WIndows XP Home Edition and I have Radeon 9200/9250) And now when I start WoW it just says: "World of Warcraft: Failed to find a suitable display device. Exiting program."... What I need to do to get rid of that error and be able to play again? O.o

Follow the instructions? Usually when upgrading drivers the routine is:
- uninstall current drivers
- reboot
- install new drivers (cancel any windows drivers that want to install)
- reboot

If you have problems with orphaned files, then Driver Cleaner Pro is decent.

Well, I did everything what was said in Driver Cleaner Pro Readme file but it still shows me the same error.
I did everyhting like it was said:
1. disconnected from net
2. uninstalled current drivers (OmegaDrivers.. couldn't find anything else)
3. rebooted in safe mode
4. (SP2 didn't try to install new drivers... Wonder why?)
5. Ran Driver Cleaner Pro (only the ATI IGP, should i need to run every each option there?)
6. deleted all files from Recycler Bin (there wasn't anything new or anything related to the drivers)
7. rebooted in normal mode
8. installed OmegaDrivers and Control Panel (and also MultiRes which came with the installation)

And it is still not working..
Could someone help me?

Check if your card is on the list of compatible cards? :P