running wow on crappy laptops. tips?Follow

Turning off your addons would help, you don't need much for what you are doing except maybe gatherer. Another 512 ram chip would make quite a bit of difference if the laptop is upgradable, not sure what your laptop is but all the ones we get are. Probably pick up a chip cheap as, well umm, chips on e-bay for it.

A couple of suggestions:

1. RAM is cheap (as someone mentioned) and although it won't make your computer GREAT, it will relieve some big hard drive bottlenecks and should make things smoother. It shouldn't cost more than $20-40 for another 512mb or 1gb, depending on what kind of RAM you need and how available or unavailable it is.

2. Defrag your hard drive, if you haven't already done so. It'll make a big difference if you haven't done it in a while.

3. Play on absolute minimum settings with no mods. It's ugly, it's clunky, but it works.

4. Get a netbook for Christmas next year. The next gen of netbooks will have the nvidia ION platform, meaning a 9300M graphics chip, and will be ridiculously practical for $250-300 :) ... Okay so this last suggestion might not be in the cards for you, but the next gen netbooks are worth getting a bit excited about.

I run WoW at the lowest settings on a pretty crappy laptop as well when I'm at work or traveling: a Dimension 6000. The only difference between mine and the one in the link is that I upgraded to 1GB of memory, and it only has the onboard graphics (which suck). However, with the extra memory, it gets a reasonable (but not good) framerate of 25-35 FPS, except in Dalaran or busy areas where the game looks like a picture slideshow at 4-5 FPS.

I never tried the game booster software, but basically shut off unnecessary services and background programs. If you want, you can also try opening Task Manager while WoW is running and set the priority above normal or high- but do this at your own risk. Basically, it will then set the game at a higher processing priority than other programs for the duration of the game. I didn't experience any problems playing it this way, but I stopped doing it because I tend to alt-tab between WoW and my browser, and doing this made the browser painfully slow to load.

If you want to know more about turning off unnecessary services, I highly recommend http://www.blackviper.com/. It also has tips for Windows 7 services.

Edited, Jan 19th 2010 8:34am by Wondroustremor

I have a truly crappy laptop, too - which I use from time to time. What I did, was copy WoW from the PC to an external HD and plug that to the laptop whenever I want to play. Works like a charm, and it leaves lots of free space on my laptop :o)

you need a serious bump in ram. google the model number and put the max allowed ram in there; cross your fingers and hope it's 2gb. if it's 1gb allocate 128mb for the gpu, if you can get 2gb allocate 256mb in the bios (hold del during startup.) you'll have to play on the lowest settings, but you should be able to bump up the view distance a notch or two.

don't run wow in windowed mode. if you absolutely must browse the web while playing, keep firefox open to a blank page, but install the allakhazam or wowhead search bars. flash-heavy webpages in the background will seriously bog down your wow framerates. save guides to your hd and view in offline mode.

bumping from 512mb to 2gb of ram will make the biggest difference, and it should be huge.

Try Leatrix GFX. It's an addon that will let you disable a bunch of graphic effects you probably don't care about to improve performance above and beyond what you can do with the actual Graphics window.

When I'm at work(don't tell the boss), I run it on my crappy laptop with the settings all the way down, no add-ons, and from a portable hard drive. Basically, I just check my mail and do dailies on it. It's not good for much else.