WoW Performance Boost: ...Windows Media Player?

im always running WMP, so i wouldent notice! hmm... ill have to try closing it and seeing if there is a difference :)

I works for me for every program, media player, firefox, etc. Its because the processor works better opening smaller applications run in background and then run the larger, more complicated ones later.

Although if I run WoW and then Media Player afterwords, it will retain previous performance after 15+min

Im running Windows Vista
AMD Athlon 64 3700+
nVidia 7950 Gt
with 6mbs IP

This worked for me, and I didn't expect it to. I went from a steady 17fps in silvermoon/shatt to about 95 fps. Interestingly though I get strange loot/mail lag while it is on in the background.

My system is pretty obsolete at this point, so the FPS gain makes it worth dealing with.

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.

l2usecomputers. windows itselfs reserve some resources you wouldnt get, but MS learnt that their media player needs a lot of cpu power so when you start wmp windows release reserved power for most consuming process. wmp does not generate any need (if theres no music or video played), so wow gets all the released resourced, its seriously decrease loding time and improve fps rate. for most of people it works.

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

Please post a link to this file (srcdsfpsbooster.exe) as I have searched the internet extensively and I'm unable to find it for download.

Thanks.

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'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.

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.

lol @ Dolk

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.

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

this just sounds too good to be true.

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

Vista and dual-core CPU

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.

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

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

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.