Ask WoW Insider: WoW runs slow
Welcome to today's edition of Ask WoW Insider, in which we publish your questions for dissection by the peanut gallery -- now with extra snark and commentary by one of our writers. This week Nick writes in:
Hello to all the writers/columnists at WoWinsider! My name is Nick and I would greatly appreciate for your help/advice. My problem is that my PC, runs on windows XP home edition, is very VERY slow. I believe that it is because of an infestation of viruses, even though I run AVG free edition, Avast, and Spyhunter. I scan once a week and nothing comes up. My gameplay in WoW is very...laggy. If I am lucky enough, I'll get maybe, 10-20fps in Azeroth and 7-9fps in outlands/isle of quel'danas. It has been like this for a long time. I play a 70 bloodelf Mage, Evolves, on Lightbringer-US while I live in the east coast, even though its a west coast server. I understand that brings my latency up but still not as bad as 1fps EVERYTIME in shatt. I need some help to speed up my computer and maximize efficiency, any ideas/advice? Anything would help me because I'm desperate and am considering quitting WoW if this continues... :'(
Sincerely,
Nick
I generally try and stay away from specific tech support questions, but a discussion about general "how do I make my computer and WoW run faster" is a good one to have.
You haven't gotten into what your specs are, so I'm going to assume you've likely that you've got a PC that's a couple-three years old, at one point gave you decent performance, and you're having over-all system-level slowness. I'm also going to assume you've got a real video card and not an integrated video chip.
Running those toola are responsible first steps -- although I'm sure people will chime in on whether they are effective or not. But doing them shows you've given this some thought. It's unlikely the server location is adding to the lag.
Your best option is probably a system rebuild. Windows is famous for getting grunky (that's a technical term) after an install a few years old; more frequently if you've played just about every MMO like and uninstalls have made your hard drive look like it should be declared a Federal Disaster Area.
Commenters are likely to chime in with some things to try -- actually, I'm banking on it; that's why I'm tossing this out there. I'd start downloading all your drivers and backing up your data. I just went through this routine this weekend (my PC was at that "turn it on and go make a sandwich while it boots up stage) and it's quite liberating.
How about you tech-savvy readers? Got anything he should try before nuking it from orbit?
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