It works. I timed it, and it easily cut more than half the initial loading time out.

Using the above mentioned setup and using this trick for a week now. I don't get random disconnects anymore and my framerate has improved by roughly 10 (from 25 to 35 fps so a significant change)

I've tryed it. Didnt work. But thats prolly becouse i dont have any problem with performance in wow whatsoever . Tho i can say that most people that have tryed it says it works.

Happy Fraggin'

I just tried it, I don't notice much of a change, maybe 5-10 FPS at best but that could be something else. It's raining in Eastern Plaguelands, I was getting about 40FPS with everything maxed at 1400x1050 res. Now I'm getting about 45-50. The change is slight if any at all. I'm running Intel Core 2 Duo

This sounds cool. I'm going to try it out

Definitely an improvement on load time for me, though not terribly noticeable for general overall performance. Maybe I'll hate the load screens a bit less now.

50 fps with all addons enabled in shattrath. used to be 14-18 fps. zomg. load times are insane :)

Vista and dual-core CPU

this just sounds too good to be true.

Neither loading times or frame rate were improved on my system.

In Shat my FPS was 11-14.

I'm using:
P4 1.8Ghz (single core)
1G ram
XP SP2
Win media version 11.0.5721.5230

if you go from 40 fps to 45-50 (let's say 48 for ease of calculations), that's a 20% increase. Nothing to sneeze at.

I discovered this weekend that defragging my hard drive and moving the swap file to a drive different from the one WoW is on drastically improves load times. Cut mine to a quarter of where it was.

lol @ Dolk

it's indeed an old thing, and most likely some bug in WMP, just remember it works by giving realtime prio to the threads being executed, thus a possibility to suck try any background applications.

Nothing to sneeze at? If the computer i spent alot of money on gets improved performance, ill sneeze on it all day. ;)

I'm pretty sure that any boost in loading times is due to the fact that you have just previously loaded wow anyway, therefore Windows has cached that information and can access it faster. As for in game frame rates and pings, I didn't notice any difference, and I can't see any good reason for it happening either.

Seems to have worked for some people though.

To be honest i don't it has anything to do with WoW, more likely a DirectX issue where WMP pre-loads most of it and you'll expirience that your machine doesn't use power to load this later on, common caching.

i think there are other ways to do this without having to spend the extra resources on WMP. there's gotta be some sort of lightweight program (or built in functionality maybe) that allows you to give certain tasks priority. i just don't know what that would be in window$, as i use linux.

Yes there is, there is a program that is about 20kb and uses none of the extra resources, it mimic the effects that WMP gives you

unfortunately i've forgotten the name, but it does exist, a quick search on the internet should pick it up

ill try to get it myself

EDIT: ah got the name, srcdsfpsbooster.exe used in counter strike servers to replace the WMP thing, till works for other online games i guess

ok i think this is not true, windows media player itself is a program that runs besides wow, and so also consumes CPU usage and Memory usage, and quite alot of memory usage.

if i want more performane for my games i even close windows media player, and that does the trick.