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02-16-08, 12:56 AM   #1
Thrae
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 42
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.
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