WoW Power User Tippity-tip

So... Seeing as how my attempt to remap the G-Keys on the Logitech G-15 Keyboard to independent keys (don't ask) has ended in dismal failure, we're going to go on to something else near and dear to everyone's hearts...

TEH PATCH!

...and what it means to you. Aside from the whole "relearning to play without addons" thing it's going to definitely mean two things to most people:

1. Waiting a long @#$!$ time for the thing to patch itself
2. Making your ever more fragmented filesystem much, much messier.

Just guess which one we can do something about.

That's right, #2! (For those claiming #1 because you can buy moar megahurts, sorry, the context of the question was "things I can just tell you how to do that don't cost munnies")

Now, for the uninformed, read speeds from a disk drive that approach anything like what the manufacturer promised you are fairly dependent on the reading of contiguous sector reads, and by which I mean "not having the file scattered all over the hard drive". To put it really simple, if I tell you to pick up a book and just kinda scan over pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 you can do it rather quickly because once you're done with page 2 you can just look right over at page 3, and then flip it to get to page for, look at page 5 and so because they are contiguous. A discontigous series of reads would be for me to tell you to grab that massive dictionary off the shelf and tell you to look at the first word on pages 34, 567, 112, 113, 114, 91, 783, 482, 401, 47 and 888. Flipping around to find pages farther away takes longer. Obviously. The same thing goes on with your hard drive (we'll talk about caching some other time) when it's trying to read a large file that is broken up into a bunch of different pieces and scattered about your hard drive.

...which is more or less exactly the state your WoW installation is in if it's older than just 2 or 3 patches. Sure, even if you're a dedicated little Windows user you might defragment your drive once a month with great zeal, and that does @#$@!-all for the WoW client actually, because Windows will refuse to defragment super-massive files, and there's no way to turn off that behaviour I've ever been able to locate. So, if you'll go run your defrag tool again you'll see that there's a rather large number of sectors colored to indicate "files Windows is too lazy to move".
This creeping fragmentation is why your hard drive makes a noise like it's screening a tiny little Rambo movie when WoW starts and tries to start pulling resources out of those gigantic files they use.

There is a solution to this. It is, in fact, Microsoft's recommended solution. It's a delightful little program called "contig" and it's free. Contig is specifically meant to forcibly defragment files, regardless of size. ...and here's the link to it on Microsoft's site (so, not a keylogger.)

Get it. Read it's tiny smidgen of documentation and go nuts cleaning up the OMGFILEOFMASSIVENESS.MPQs World of Warcraft has. Or don't read it's documentation and wait until tomorrow and I'll tell you how to use it for tidying up the Warcraft directory and explain a little more about why this fragmentation is happening.