Originally Posted by Barleduq
I will try disabling the Astrolabe addons, but my goal in this effort is to find out what I can do *other* than disabling daily/all-toon-useful addons.
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There really isn't anything you can do to magically make addons load faster. You can shave off a little time by running standalone libraries, but like I said, it's not going to make much of a difference. You're just running a lot of addons, many of them very large and/or long past due for a total overhaul (*cough* Astrolabe *cough*), and your computer is old and weak. It is what it is.
Defragmenting your hard drive may also help a little, but probably not much either.
Originally Posted by Barleduq
... every time I /reload, I get disconnected.
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I also started experiencing this problem post-WoD and resolved it by ditching Examiner. I don't see that on your list, but if the disconnecting is fairly consistent, it shouldn't take too long to track down using a
binary search pattern.
Originally Posted by Barleduq
Yes, we have upgraded the graphics cards to the best we can afford, and have the best drivers we can find for them. (A few months ago we were getting errors from Blizz about our graphics card drivers, and upgraded as required.)
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What do you have? I have a number of old graphics cards laying around and nothing to do with them; if any are an upgrade I'd be happy to send one your way. That said, upgrading your graphics card will only do so much, as your CPU is a major limiting factor for WoW's older graphics engine. Despite all the graphical improvements to the game, I'm not sure how much they've done to modernize the underlying engine; someone with more technical knowledge in that area may be able to weigh in here.
Originally Posted by Barleduq
I don't *think* that our internet connection - a DSL line - is responsible here.
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It's not. If your connection was too slow you'd see lag -- eg. your instant-cast spells wouldn't actually cast for a second or two, other players might appear to jump around in the game world, etc. -- but it would not affect your framerate.
Originally Posted by Barleduq
One more thing: is there a difference between having an addon installed but disabled, and removing the addon altogether? For example, I have Enchantrix enabled only on my auction/bank alt (to know what's useful for what), my enchanter, my alchemist and my JC. I have it disabled for others.
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Generally speaking, no, there is no difference. Technically speaking, there is a minor difference, since WoW indexes the entire contents of its folders on startup, but that would only affect how long it took the game to launch, and would have no effect on logging in or reloading the UI. And as an exception to the rule -- which I'd call a bug in WoW -- if you use AddonLoader or anything else identified as another addon's LoadManager, and disable it but leave it in the AddOns folder, then everything that names it as a LoadManager will not load.
Originally Posted by Barleduq
I have a profile on Archy for the toons that do not have archaeology trained, which I *think* has things turned off.
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That, on the other hand, is not the same, especially with regards to loading times. Hiding or "deactivating" an addon in-game will stop it from responding to events and such, so it shouldn't continue to impact your game performance (ie. FPS in combat) but it won't make much of a difference in terms of how long it takes WoW to load the addon in the first place. If you don't use an addon on a particular character, you should just disable it entirely on that character.