Ensidia

Alright, I said I would do a small guide on how to tweak Windows 7 to improve performance, so here goes. First of all, I take NO responsibility of you mess up your own computer and make it worse than it already is. Some of the tweaks involve the register editor, so do feel free to make a system restore point before you begin. There's many minor tweaks you can do, but I'll try cover the major ones that really make a bigger difference in gaming performance. Feel free to add more things in the comment section if there's something you think should be added. 

General performance fixes: 

- Defragmentation: Keep your hard drive in good shape by defragging it weekly. Besides defragmenting program files, the defragmenting tool can also reduce the time it takes to load programs and open files. The outer tracks of a hard disk have a higher transfer rate than the inner tracks, therefore placing files on the outer tracks increases performance. A good program to defrag it would be Auslogics Disk Defrag. You can read more about hard disk defragmentation here. If you have an SSD, do NOT defrag that with a standard tool. Most manufacturers have their own tool (if the SSD got support for TRIM), which you should use.

- Core parking: Disable core parking in windows 7. Basically, it parks the cores that aren't being utilized very much in order to save power consumption. While it shouldn't theoretically impact your performance to a big degree, since the cores activate instantly, some users have reported less stuttering in games by disabling it. Read here how to do it.

- Multimedia Class Scheduler: When multimedia tasks are active, MCS will throttle down the global network bandwidth to around 10,000 packets per second. On high speed links like 100Mbps full duplex and 1000Mbps LAN connections that doesn’t use Jumbo Packets, the throttling may be significant drop network throughput. Multimedia Class Scheduler service (MMCSS) gives multimedia applications higher priority. This ensures that music and video playback will not be disturbed by other background services like antivirus and content indexing (or network file transfers). However, for some people that have shit like a music or movie player running in the background while playing WoW, some performance might be lost. Here's how you disable it. Doing this might however resulting crackling sound if your computer is shit, so if you experience that, revert this change. I'd recommend at least a dual-core processor for this change. 

- Search indexing: Disable search indexing on your hard drives. Rightclick each hard drive in explorer and choose properties. You can uncheck search indexing there, it's not too useful in win 7 anyway.

- Enhanced SATA speed: Go to the device manger, disk drives > rightclick all your hard drives and go to properties>policies.  Make sure ” Writing caching on the disk ” box and ” advanced performance ” box are checked, and check them if they aren't.

- Windows Aero: Disable Aero in Windows 7 if you can. If anything, at least disable Aero transparency.

- Computer upgrade: You might just have a too old and shitty computer and need to upgrade. I'd recommend getting a i7 920/930, a ati 5830/5850/5870 depending on your budget, some nice 6gb 1600mhz  DDR3, corsair would be a nice and price-effectivice choice. You can overclock your CPU quite easily, 3.8ghz isn't hard at all, but there's definetly potential if you would want to go through with it.

- Drivers: Keep all your current drivers updated. This is goes especially for your graphic card, as well as windows 7 through windows update. However, there's times when new graphic card drivers might not function all too well on your computer, so don't hesitate to downgrade to the previous version and wait for a new release, if the current one didn't work out for you.

Ping related fixes:

- Leatrix Latency Fix (TcpAckFrequency): Basically the old classic TcpAckFrequency baked into a script for easy use. Should definitely get this for a big improvement. You can get it here. Other multiplayer games might see gains as well.

- TCPNoDelay: This change was already implemented in World of Warcraft by default, so there's no need to do it.

- TCP autotuning: You should probably disable this if you're on a broadband connection of 512kbit/s or higher. This includes all the hobos with adsl. This will help network throughput in most cases, and sometimes improve ping. Read more about TCP autoturning here. To disable TCP/IP autotunning, in the Command Prompt type:

"netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled" 

To verify that it is disabled: "netsh interface tcp show global"

World of Warcraft specific tweaks

Video settings: The three biggest things that impact your performance is clip distance, shadow quality and anti-aliasing. You should turn shadow quality to lowest, and clipping distance down a bit, it doesn't have to be on max. As for anti-aliasing, it's generally fine to have it enabled in 10mans and lower, but for 25 man raids, you should really have it at 1x.

Addons: Combat logs such as recount eat a bit of performance, so you should consider disabling it if you're having performance issues. Raid frames are usually also a big culprit. Basically, look over all your addons and either remove or disable the ones you don't need when you're raiding. Auctioneer/cartographer/quest helper might be nice to have, but make sure they are all disabled when you're raiding. You can save sets by using the nice nifty addon ACP, which also lets you enable/disable addons without relogging. Make use of it!

ProcessAffinityMask: This was changed as of 3.3.2, and basically tells your wow client which cores are available for use. You can still set it manually if you like by editing your config.wtf in your world of warcraftWTF directory. Read more about it here which also tells you what settings to use depending on your processor. 

There's probably a few more things that I forgot about, but basically, these are the major ones. If you have any suggestions about more tweaks that you can do to improve performance, feel free to add them to the comments, and I'll look them up and possibly add them here.