UIs and How to Load ThemFollow

Not sure about the casting 'gems' that you refer to... you mean hotkey buttons?

Hit the Escape Key.
Click "Interface".
Click "Action Bars" on the left.
Click the "Right Bar" button, put a check in it.
Click Okay.
Close the windows.

You should now have a row of buttons on the right side of the screen... oh wait, you said LEFT side. Uhhhhh yeah you need an addon to do that lol. I assume you're referring to a Horizons/Istaria type game (EQ is very similar I've seen from screenshots).... lots of addons let you move your hotkey bars around, not sure about that.

Anyways, I Do know the answer to the addon question, though:

The addon you downloaded may have been out of date. When you're in the Log In screen (where you see your character standing there), click the AddOns button. Put a check in "Load out of date addons".

Assuming you put the addon in the right place, it should work (unless the out of date addon is broken).

Also, a lot of addons require you to actually activate them in-game, go to the Interface menu as I described above, but this time, click the AddOns tab if it is there. Sometimes you have to play with those settings to get it to show up in-game.

Some of them have text commands (Recount does this, you have to type /recount show to get the recount window to pop on-screen sometimes).

Edited, Jan 7th 2012 1:38am by Lyrailis

Thank you both for your responses. The instructions helped a lot as I'm still getting used to the WoW interface. I didn't even think of the trial version maybe not working with add ons - that makes sense.

As far as the word "gems" - I was using that to refer to the EQ default UI of having the spell location set up vertically on the left-hand side of the screen vs the WoW default of the the spells being on the bottom. Since I am so used to having the spells in that location I thought it might make it easier/faster for me when/if I group. But now I do recall the group info is on the top left of the screen. Hmmmm...wonder if a different add on could change that as well.

At any rate, this does answer my basic questions atm. When I get the full version of the game I'll check out some different UIs then.

Most of the Blizzard stuff is locked in place by default, but you can get an add-on like MoveAnything that will let you, well, move anything. Add-ons like Dominos, BarTender, XPerl, PitBull, etc will create new UI elements, hide the old ones, and let you move them, re-shape them, and rearrange them.

You can also look for total UI packages that will either be compilations of other add-ons with some pre-loaded settings, or be total customized UIs.

You may want to get Addon Manager too.
It allows you to turn add ons on or off without needing to log out...and only needing to reload the UI.
Good for finding a recalcitrant add on that's either buggy or really wonky.

As you get more into customizing your addons and updating the game, give some thought to backing up the wow directory. I use some directory syncing utilities to backup my entire wow directory to another disk on my network daily and weekly. I can restore back to an earlier version easily, either the entire directory, or just the addons.

Wow is nice in that you can restore back the folders, make an icon for the Launcher, and you are good to go.

I keep a few TB of network storage at the house for image backups of the family pc's and data. Of course, I'm in corporate IT and spend most days recovering from users crashed hard drives or malware infections. At work we still have some pc running Windows 98 on manufacturing test stations, so hardware failure is all too common. So yes, I'm a bit of an extremist when it comes to backup.

It's not really very hard. If you want to be able to get your pc easily back to a known state including applications and OS, an image backup will do that for you. I use Clonezilla, which is a free, open source imaging program. You create a boot cd from an iso file you can download for it. You can store an image on a second drive on your system, or to a network (specify Samba) share. I have a home NAS (network attached storage) device, but you could share a drive on another pc. Image backups let you easily recover from a total disk failure, or totally messed up system.

If you aren't trying to make an image of your entire drive, but simply have a copy of Wow or your documents and pictures, you will want to copy it to another drive or share. The first time you could drag and drop it. If you are going to keep it updated, a syncing program will copy only the changes, so is very fast. You can even schedule it to happen automatically in Windows Scheduler. Free options include Robocopy, xcopy32, or Microsoft's Synctoy. Personally, I use a paid utility InSync, which I've used for 10 years.

It's good to give some thought to backup before disaster strikes.

Edited, Jan 17th 2012 3:45pm by dadanox

Generally, if you can make just a little bit of sense out of the terminology, you can have these things up and running in no time.

Can't speak for all devices, obviously, but for a QNAP TS-210 for example, all you need to do is install the hard drive(s), power it up, and then click your way through the configuration wizard thing in your web browser. Takes maybe 10 minutes in total for a basic configuration. Everything beyond that depends on the amount of extra features you want to use.

Edited, Jan 18th 2012 7:59am by Kanngarnix