Dual client woes under Vista

Mark (newsgroups) <marknewsgroups.TakeThisOut@yahoo.com> wrote:
> So anyone managed to successfully run two instances of WoW under
> Vista, or can tell me if perhaps it's some problem with my hardware?
> Perhaps the lower video memory?


I'm afraid I can't offer any suggestions to help you, but I can
at least assure you that it's probably not Vista per se causing
a problem.

I have successfully run multiple instances of WoW on Vista with
no noticable problems.

But I do have a reasonably powerful system.

--
Zil, Level 70 NE Priest, Aman Shan're, Stormrage Europe
 >> Stay informed about: Dual client woes under Vista 

Mark (newsgroups) wrote:
> Well, I ran into my first issue with Vista last night. As some may
> recall I've been running two instances of WoW on my XP machine to
> level a duo team. I recently purchased a laptop that is supposedly
> more powerful than my desktop and was keen to see if this helped solve
> the low(ish) framerates I get when running two wow clients.
>
> Desktop:
> Athlon 64 3500+
> 2 GB RAM (can't recall speed offhand)
> ATI x1950 Pro 512MB
>
> Laptop:
> Dell XPS 1530
> Core 2 duo T9300 2.50GHz
> 3 GB RAM
> NVIDIA GeForce Go 8600GT 256MB
>
> I was recommended this laptop as an able but not top of the range
> gaming platform. Yes, when I load a single WoW client I get better FPS
> than my desktop. However, when I load up two instances of WoW,
> everything starts to chug, and I don't mean FPS. Everything becomes
> unresponsive, even trying to type in my login and password took a
> couple of seconds between keypresses.
>
> So anyone managed to successfully run two instances of WoW under
> Vista, or can tell me if perhaps it's some problem with my hardware?
> Perhaps the lower video memory?

I own a Dell Inspiron 1720, which is not as fast as your laptop and I
was able to run two instances of WoW on it. I'm not running WoW
fullscreen and I set the windows size for the second client pretty low.

It seems there is something else going on with your system, maybe
disable some services, Windows Vista is running a lot of things in the
background that you might not need. Maybe your virus scanner did a full
hdd scan during the time you tried it?

Dirk
 >> Stay informed about: Dual client woes under Vista 

On Fri, 9 May 2008 03:27:31 -0700 (PDT), "Mark (newsgroups)"
<marknewsgroups.RemoveThis@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On May 9, 11:11 am, Dirk <newsp....RemoveThis@cubeworld.net> wrote:
>> Mark (newsgroups) wrote:
>> > Well, I ran into my first issue with Vista last night. As some may
>> > recall I've been running two instances of WoW on my XP machine to
>> > level a duo team. I recently purchased a laptop that is supposedly
>> > more powerful than my desktop and was keen to see if this helped solve
>> > the low(ish) framerates I get when running two wow clients.
>>
>> > Desktop:
>> > Athlon 64 3500+
>> > 2 GB RAM (can't recall speed offhand)
>> > ATI x1950 Pro 512MB
>>
>> > Laptop:
>> > Dell XPS 1530
>> > Core 2 duo T9300 2.50GHz
>> > 3 GB RAM
>> > NVIDIA GeForce Go 8600GT 256MB
>>
>> > I was recommended this laptop as an able but not top of the range
>> > gaming platform. Yes, when I load a single WoW client I get better FPS
>> > than my desktop. However, when I load up two instances of WoW,
>> > everything starts to chug, and I don't mean FPS. Everything becomes
>> > unresponsive, even trying to type in my login and password took a
>> > couple of seconds between keypresses.
>>
>> > So anyone managed to successfully run two instances of WoW under
>> > Vista, or can tell me if perhaps it's some problem with my hardware?
>> > Perhaps the lower video memory?
>>
>> I own a Dell Inspiron 1720, which is not as fast as your laptop and I
>> was able to run two instances of WoW on it. I'm not running WoW
>> fullscreen and I set the windows size for the second client pretty low.
>>
>> It seems there is something else going on with your system, maybe
>> disable some services, Windows Vista is running a lot of things in the
>> background that you might not need. Maybe your virus scanner did a full
>> hdd scan during the time you tried it?
>
>Well that's good and bad news. Good news that in theory I should have
>no problem running 2 x WoW, bad news is I'm going to have to dig
>around until I sort out the problem.
>
>No, there was no scan running at the time. I wonder, I run both WoW
>clients from the same directory in XP with no problem, could this be
>an issue under Vista?
>
>Since it's a fresh machine, I was quite interested in leaving
>everything at default settings to "experience" Vista at it's full
>potential, so so far I haven't performed any of the tweaks that people
>recommend to improve performance. Since the game runs better than on
>my desktop with only one copy open I wouldn't have thought I'd need to
>disable stuff to speed up Vista for two copies. Will start doing that
>as a last resort, just thought I'd post here and maybe see if someone
>had experienced the same thing and had a direct solution. I'll try the
>multi boxing forums later.


Try launching task manager, turn off the 'keep on top' option then
minimize it. Launch your apps, verify they struggle a bit and then
close them. The task manager should have a short history graph that
may show you where the issue is. Look at the memory settings and see
if the memory consumption exceeded your physical 2 GB. If so then the
delay was vista swapping all of that fancy desktop stuff out of memory
and onto the hard drive.

If you are really determined to get the details, you can use
perfmon.exe to measure all kinds of performance values. Use Ctrl-I or
the "+" buttton to add some categories like Memory and Physical Disk.

You might try it without any add-ons too. Vista redirects old
applications when writing to the disk sometimes, and reroutes their
output to a safer folder. I wonder if this is confusing things a bit.
 >> Stay informed about: Dual client woes under Vista 

Mark (newsgroups) wrote:
> No, there was no scan running at the time. I wonder, I run both WoW
> clients from the same directory in XP with no problem, could this be
> an issue under Vista?

I simply copied the WoW folder and never tried to run two clients from
the same directory. It's worth to give that a try I assume.

Dirk
 >> Stay informed about: Dual client woes under Vista