WoW installation time

Mindriot

Mindriot

Mindriot

Associate
Joined
2 Apr 2006
Posts
244
Location
Warwick uni
Having recently installed WoW, it made me think. I spent 6 hours (!) installing the game on my hard drive in my old computer. which i have suspected of being a bit past it for a little while now. I know the game takes a long time in comparison to others but 6 is too long surely?

The disk drive in question is about 3 years old and is an 80GB Maxtor 6Y0080L0 if that means anything. The rest of the computer holds up surprisingly well for its age:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
512MB RAM
GeForce 4 MX 440

The game seems to run ok when its not trying to load things, so when i walk through an area ive already been to recently performance is ok (apart from being on the very lowest settings)

Any comments welcome
 
My laptop takes about 80 minutes to install it:

Dothan 2.0ghz
1gb ram
80gb Scorpio drive
9700 128mb mobility

So all in its one stage above your rig, would say 3 hours would be ok but 6 is excessive, unless that includes the full patch?

My main rig does it in about 25 minutes, so things have moved on since then. 512mb is a bit low for WoW is it not?
 
Yewen said:
So all in its one stage above your rig, would say 3 hours would be ok but 6 is excessive, unless that includes the full patch?
Click to expand...

This did not include downloading the 445MB patch, so an extra half hour on top...

Yewen said:
512mb is a bit low for WoW is it not?
Click to expand...

True, i suspected as much as it tries to access the HDD for everything making it slow and jerky. I am putting up with it as long as my laptop is being repaired (6 weeks and counting now but thats a different story). Laptop runs it briliantly maxed out, mmm...
 
Took an age when I first installed it when I was using a Sempron 2800+ with 512 ram.

Since then I lost the disks, quit, uninstalled, came back and made significant PC upgrades.

Got me a 3800+ (single core) 1GB of ram, at the time and installed from the "demo" was much quicker. could have been because I wasn't fiddling around with disks mind.

Edit: I found 1GB too low for my addon intensive UI, nerfed it a bit and was still lagging, got another 1GB and i'm a happy bunny. :)
 
I had your graphics card when i played wow, i dont know how you manage to get through iron forge with that :eek:

It took me a long time with an IDE drive but on a SATA drive its very fast install. I thought that was the only thing that matters anyway :confused:
 
IIRC there is/was a problem with one of the install CDs (CD3 I think) that took an age to extract one of the files. Did you happen to notice if your install process got stuck at one particular point or was it just generally slow?
 
yep, mine is one of the very first copies, been playing since release,

when i re-install it takes and age, and i have a 3.35ghz clocked core 2 duo with 4gb ram and raptors in raid 0 lol

the original copies were mac and pc on the same cd's are the current ones?

could be the reason for a slow install i guess?

mine takes a good 30mins to install
 
Mine has 5 CD's and it does take a while to install, dont think i can get all cd's done in 15mins.

Im going to try lol !

Ready steady go

(btw the box i have says windows 98/me/2000/XP/Macintosh PC MAC CD-ROM)

This the old one?

Edit - The 5ds just took 35mins to install on my system. Disk 3 was very slow :eek:
 
Last edited:
I've got the 4 disc set from when the game was initially released. My rig is about the same as yours too, Athlon 2000+, 786mb RAM, Geforce 4 MX440. It takes me roughly an hour to install the game, including time to patch it with 1.12.

Might be worth popping into the Hard Drives forum and asking for some tips there.
 
Mm im thinking there's something wrong here, ive started getting pretty fatal errors, and CTDs

I remember initially putting a trial dvd in my laptop and it not taking long at all. The full thing -the 5CD version - has only been tested on my possibly faulty desktop. I get my laptop back tomorrow and am planning a reformat anyway so i ill keep you all updated!

As far as my graphics card goes, yes its old but from now on this computer is not going to be used for playing games really, just watching videos and keeping messenger up while i have laptop for gaming, photoshop/3ds max etc

And yes ironforge is stressful for it - if im on a griffin, i see 2 frames as i enter: the main enterance and then the flightmaster at the other end all in the space of about 20 seconds, so that makes it 0.1 fps :)
 
On a related note - a lad came into the internet cafe I work in and wanted to install Guild Wars. The only pc left was a old Dell which I told him was crap for gaming. He insisted it would be ok and paid for 3 hours. After 3 hours the game still wasn't installed, so he paid for another 2. An hour later at 90 odd % the machine crashed and he had to start all over. The look on his face was priceless.
 
Edinho said:
Id be more inclined to worry about the gfx card.
Click to expand...

Should be ok with that assuming he doesn't throw AA&AF at it or high resolutions.

I would certainly agree with Yewen, 1GB seems to be a realistic minimum when it comes to RAM, though you'll still get slow down in busy areas.

Jokester
 
Edinho said:
Id be more inclined to worry about the gfx card.
Click to expand...

The graphics card would not cause stuttering like the ram would.

I have ran WoW on a 6150 and a 9700 128mb perfectly fine, but both with 1gb ram, with only 512mb ram the game pauses every 20 seconds as it rapes the hard drive.

Oh and through my many rigs all running ideal settings:

512mb = stutters everywhere bar the starting area
768mb = smooth everywhere solo, party in instances can get a little choppy
1gb = 5 man parties are fine, cities are ok apart from when its really busy in IF
1.5gb = handles most things perfectly fine, IF when really busy can cause paging
2gb = not yet had stuttering, even when running virus checks in the background
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom