WoW Journal - 15-Jun-05

Grog was asking what WoW UI mods I am currently using. I don't use any compilations, neither Cosmos nor otherwise, because I found them too big and unwieldy. I'm using Gatherer, which doesn't cause any problems on my PC, to keep track of the herbs and other stuff I found. I have Telo's Infobar, which displays useful stuff like my money and the amount of free bag space on top of my screen. I still use Simplemail, although part of it's functions are now built into standard WoW. I'm also using QuestLevels, which both displays the level of the quests in my journal, and speeds up the quest display speed. And finally the newly installed BerzerkDing, which is troll specific. I have CensusPlus installed, but rarely use it anymore.

This turns out to be a bad week for playing WoW, I simply don't find the time, so you can stop reading here, the rest of the post is only faintly WoW related :). Monday I was playing pen and paper D&D until past midnight. Tuesday I had to travel to Paris and only came home late. Today, Wednesday, I'll be helping one of my D&D friends to install the new Dell computer he received yesterday. Up to now he was playing on a PC which didn't meet the minimum specifications for World of Warcraft. It is a miracle he got to level 34 with his rogue under these conditions. His graphics card isn't compatible with WoW (I tried every possible driver), and the only way the game was running at all was by adding a -opengl parameter in the properties of the WoW shortcut on his desktop. Then the game wouln't crash more than once per hour, and run at 8 frames per second, less in populated places. His PC was so slow, it ended up affecting his run speed, he kept rubber-banding back. Quite annoying when we wanted to run somewhere as a group.

Our whole group will be quite happy when he gets his new PC running, and we don't have to wait for him any more. A 3 GHz Pentium, with 1 GByte of RAM, and an Radeon x300 SE graphics card should be more than sufficient to run WoW with no problems at all. Okay the graphics card isn't high end, but it's decent enough, and much better than what he had. Should be easy to replace in a year or two, the rest of the system is solid enough for a while. And the whole thing only cost about 1000 Euros, including screen, keyboard, mouse, and everything.

Computers are still getting cheaper and better, although the clock rates don't seem to follow Moore's Law any more. Yesterday I say an ad by PackardBell, advertising "wireless music everywhere", with a guy dancing on the street to the music played by a laptop. I don't think we are there yet, for wireless music everywhere I'd recommend a cheap radio or ghettoblaster CD player. But on my last trip to the USA I saw people in the airport sitting around a laptop and watching a movie while waiting for their plane. I'm just waiting for technologies like WiMax to provide wireless broadband internet access everywhere, and I'll be able to play online games while I travel.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:10 AM Permanent Link