A bit of history on my system, it's a HP Pavilion laptop that I received as a birthday gift two years ago, never had any major problem with it (or minor problem come to think of it even though I run Vista 32-bit) until my stock hard drive was corrupted about a month ago. When I got back from a vacation (during which it became corrupted) I took it in on warranty to Geek Squad/Best Buy, where my parent originally purchased it, and they put a new 320 GB Seagate SATA drive into it, the complete turn around was only an hour. Got home, started dutifully installing Windows Vista updates from '07, and started to try to re-install World of Warcraft onto my laptop.
When I started the installation it was going at the rate of about 1% (of a ~7 GB installation), then 5% an hour, then finally installed it in 36 hours. I've played WoW for about a year and a half and have NEVER encountered any problems with installation or patching with WoW on this computer even though I run it on all low settings. So my thoughts immediately went towards pointing the figure at my new hard drive, just for comparison I download a different online game (Conquer 2) and install it within 20 minutes. Other apps like Firefox, Ventrilo, VLC media player, and Symantec Endpoint Protection installed fine and were speedy. I started to patch WoW (10 patches, 7 were <25 MBs each), the first patch took an hour, second patch took an hour, etc. Before the hard drive pretty much every patch was taking 15-20 minutes or less even. I posted various times in the WoW Tech. Support section, they've suggested to install and patch in Safe Mode (which worked with various random freezes) but not the speed, then suggested that I update my chipset (which I did) and that didn't help. I know this is not a software support forum, so I'm just wondering where I should point my finger. When the computer came back it was randomly freezing for a few seconds every 30 seconds or so, but now with SP2 it's not doing that so much, but does an almost full lock up when I try to run an WoW updater app not in Safe Mode, and NOW Safe Mode doesn't work. I'm just trying to figure out if this computer is just going to be an internet mule until I can save for a new one.
Specs: Windows Vista 32-bit (SP2) on a HP Pavilion dv6000, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core processor TK-53 1.70 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 320 GB SATA Hard drive, nVidia GeForce go 6150
Sorry for the essay
When I started the installation it was going at the rate of about 1% (of a ~7 GB installation), then 5% an hour, then finally installed it in 36 hours. I've played WoW for about a year and a half and have NEVER encountered any problems with installation or patching with WoW on this computer even though I run it on all low settings. So my thoughts immediately went towards pointing the figure at my new hard drive, just for comparison I download a different online game (Conquer 2) and install it within 20 minutes. Other apps like Firefox, Ventrilo, VLC media player, and Symantec Endpoint Protection installed fine and were speedy. I started to patch WoW (10 patches, 7 were <25 MBs each), the first patch took an hour, second patch took an hour, etc. Before the hard drive pretty much every patch was taking 15-20 minutes or less even. I posted various times in the WoW Tech. Support section, they've suggested to install and patch in Safe Mode (which worked with various random freezes) but not the speed, then suggested that I update my chipset (which I did) and that didn't help. I know this is not a software support forum, so I'm just wondering where I should point my finger. When the computer came back it was randomly freezing for a few seconds every 30 seconds or so, but now with SP2 it's not doing that so much, but does an almost full lock up when I try to run an WoW updater app not in Safe Mode, and NOW Safe Mode doesn't work. I'm just trying to figure out if this computer is just going to be an internet mule until I can save for a new one.
Specs: Windows Vista 32-bit (SP2) on a HP Pavilion dv6000, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core processor TK-53 1.70 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 320 GB SATA Hard drive, nVidia GeForce go 6150
Sorry for the essay