DDO and PC specs

[kmoustakas]

It's been three days I got a new computer and ddo hasn't crashed once since. In my previous computer every single trip to orchard or 3bc was an auto crash as were every 3-4 changes of toons.

New PC has 8 gigs of ram and an ssd hard drive. I hear those are all the rage for DDO.

[PurpleTimb]

Yes.

Moving to an SSD with DDO is like going from night to day. I made no other changes to my system and I suddenly had no disconnects on startup and no freezes on instance changes.

[Knobull]

It's funny, my plain old Toshiba 500GB hard disk, 3GB ram and integrated ATI video on a six year old laptop works just fine.

I'm quite sure the issues people experience have to do with the anti-virus products they use and how they use them.

[Ryiah]

It's funny, my plain old Toshiba 500GB hard disk, 3GB ram and integrated ATI video on a six year old laptop works just fine.

How long does it take you to load DDO? From starting the launcher with a freshly booted computer to having a character fully loaded. With an SSD, it takes my system approximately 30 seconds. Without it takes approximately two minutes.

For the record I do not use an anti-virus suite.

[Knobull]

About 45s. Note that I have disabled all the stupid stuff that recent versions of windows do.

[Ryiah]

About 45s. Note that I have disabled all the stupid stuff that recent versions of windows do.

That's quite a lot to disable.

[FrancisP.Fancypants]

About 45s. Note that I have disabled all the stupid stuff that recent versions of windows do.

Care to be specific about which stupid stuff and from which recent versions?

[Knobull]

Care to be specific about which stupid stuff and from which recent versions?

In this case Windows Vista, but much of the same applies to Win7. A sample of stupid stuff that I have disabled:

• Search indexing (I know where I put my files and they are so numerous that trying to index them will cripple a machine)
• All nonsensical scheduled tasks (they are hidden by default, e.g.: I will defrag my drive when I want to, not when windows thinks it should, and there are many, many of these nonsensical scheduled tasks - though this is improved in Win7 over Vista but lots of the stupid stuff remains)
• UPnP - I know what I need to configure on my network and how it should be configured
• IPv6 and associated virtual adapters (When IPv6 actually happens here, if it ever does, I will enable it then)
• Services I do not need or desire (Readyboost, Superfetch, Windows Media Extender and Network, Windows Search, Microsoft Network Inspection, Network Access Protection Agent.... there is a long list of other services I have disabled or set to manual)
• System Restore

And there is more...

That's quite a lot to disable.

You're not kidding. It took weeks to teach windows how not to be so stupid.

Another major point: I do not consider windows "booted" until I am at the desktop and *all* cpu and disk activity has stopped. Only then is windows ready to execute my requests. Many new computers have no hard disk activity light, this is a major mistake. There should only be disk activity when I have asked the machine to do something. You may think your machine is "booted" but it may still be 5-10 minutes away from actually being usable.

Refuse all auto updaters. Disable automatic windows updates, check them yourself at regular intervals when you know the machine is not busy doing something you have actually asked it to do.

Steam, Google Chrome and many other softwares are absolute pigs on your network and system resources. (SRWare Iron is a good alternative to Chrome)

There is a lot to it. It is a philosophy. It comes from being introduced to computers on VAX/VMS and DOS5. It comes from spending many years on dial up modems and carefully managing every byte of data.

I decide what my computer does and when it does it. Nobody at Microsoft or Adobe or Oracle or anyone else gets control of my computer, it is mine! They do not know better then me.

Disclaimer: this approach is not for everyone and it may break things you have come to expect. If you want a machine filled with bloatware then you will have to have the most powerful processor and hardware on the market, and this is exactly what the major software houses want.

Oh and disk partitioning: data belongs on a data partition, the operating system and programs belong on a system partition. (I have five operating systems across 4 partitions on this single 500GB disk.)

[Ryiah]

Steam, Google Chrome and many other softwares are absolute pigs on your network and system resources. (SRWare Iron is a good alternative to Chrome)

System resources are never really an issue for me, but I did pick up NetLimiter to fine tune how much of the network these use.

[Knobull]

It is more a question of when these resources are used, it should in my view only be when I say so. I say no to software that thinks it knows better than me.

[Ryiah]

It is more a question of when these resources are used, it should in my view only be when I say so. I say no to software that thinks it knows better than me.

I suppose though I simply gave up caring at some point. It probably coincided with when Windows finally gained decent 64-bit support, memory at the 4GB per stick range became cheap, and a quad-core was normal. If I were still stuck on my previous system I would probably care more.

Only reason network still matters to me is because ISPs in my area are still limited largely to single-digit megabits.

[Knobull]

Only reason network still matters to me is because ISPs in my area are still limited largely to single-digit megabits.

Oh yes, while on that subject, I have been running DDO without Akamai Netsession for some time now and do not use a preloader.

[Ryiah]

do not use a preloader.

I knew I was forgetting to ask something.

[firemedium_jt]

Oh yes, while on that subject, I have been running DDO without Akamai Netsession for some time now and do not use a preloader.

I would like to know how to get rid of this.

What are your load times when moving around different maps and areas?

I bet if you got a SSD the system would boot in 15 seconds. The bios being about 10 seconds of that with all that stuff turned off and tweaked.

As for rebooting DDO there are huge gains and not just in time back to in game. With HD XP a freeze up required hard shutdown and sometimes rebooting had errors. It would be 5 to 10 minutes to get back to game if you did not have to error scan the drive. With SSD recovery is instant with no errors and no corruption for XP to Win8. You are back in game in about a minute. With SSD game freeze is less likely to freeze the computer itself or hang it up. You are more likely to cntrl alt delete to task manager and force DDO and reboot DDO quickly. So many gains for the average user.

Ok as for all that other stuff....
----- SSD 120gb is only $50-70 on a good sale. You may have to have another HD to move stuff to and back depending on use. You should have the OS on the SSD. Huge gains there.
----- 240gb is the sweet spot on sale for around $100. Good enough to stand alone without another drive and to leave stuff on it indefinitatly. A good laptop size.

SSD is the easiest fix for DDO and really your whole system.
Other things to consider are if you want to do a clean install of Windows7/8. If you want to migrate instead. And a biggie is if you want to use Windows XP. XP requires an SSD that supports XP. Intel and Samsung do. They have software that manually tells the drive to clean itself, so it does not fill up. XP/Vista do not do this. 7/8 do. Some drives come with migration software and other tools and some don't. Those are free to around $20. You can not clone to a SSD. You have to migrate with migration software. There are free migration software out there and you can do it manually for free too, but that is not easy and not for me. Windows XP can be done with a clean install to SSD, but you can not format an SSD using XP or Vista. Requires Windows 7/8. You should do a quick format after though during the install of XP. XP sees a huge performance gain from SSD. Mainly because Windows 7 Sleep is very stable.

XP boot times go from 1.5 Minutes to about 45 secs and

+++++ reliability of XP rebooting without errors from hard shutdown is the biggest gain amoung all the OSs. ++++

Win 7 HD 50-60 secs to SSD 25-35 secs. Win7/8 Sleep being the fatest for either SSD or HD and quite reliable.

Map loading and zoning 5 seconds max or even less.

_______________________

[firemedium_jt]

I do not like Hybrids. Their price does not justify it unless all you are running is the OS and looking at data. In desktops for sure you are better off with an SSD and a big old HD. The flash memory is only 4-8gb on Hybrids. Not enough for the OS and anything else. Heck I don't think the entire OS can fit on its flash. Better for you to decide what goes on flash than the hard drive deciding, and having the flash space to do it. You do that on an SSD by copying your favorite big space programs to it and removing old programs taking up a lot of space to a second HD not in much use. With 120gb size this was a method. With SSD prices falling and 240gb the sweet spot even less necessary.

Anyone out there running DDO on a Hybrid drive?
Curious about its performance. I know for OS boot times they are close to SSD.

[Rykka]

I do not like Hybrids. Their price does not justify it unless all you are running is the OS and looking at data. In desktops for sure you are better off with an SSD and a big old HD. The flash memory is only 4-8gb on Hybrids. Not enough for the OS and anything else. Heck I don't think the entire OS can fit on its flash. Better for you to decide what goes on flash than the hard drive deciding, and having the flash space to do it. You do that on an SSD by copying your favorite big space programs to it and removing old programs taking up a lot of space to a second HD not in much use. With 120gb size this was a method. With SSD prices falling and 240gb the sweet spot even less necessary.

Anyone out there running DDO on a Hybrid drive?
Curious about its performance. I know for OS boot times they are close to SSD.

Your lack of tech savvy not my problem. Please research your own tech savvy outside of the gaming forums, so I don't waste my time. Not my job.

[Sinene]

It's been three days I got a new computer and ddo hasn't crashed once since. In my previous computer every single trip to orchard or 3bc was an auto crash as were every 3-4 changes of toons.

New PC has 8 gigs of ram and an ssd hard drive. I hear those are all the rage for DDO.

I'm in Australia so auto lag just from location. I have an Intel I3 so fairly old and 8GB memory. My hard drive is nowhere near SSD, it's an old SATA. I don't ever have the double login thing, I don't crash, I don't generally suffer from huge lag, I don't use the login client that I've read about. Every now and then when logging out I have to use the task manager to kill my old session when logout doesn't work. It's really not about computer spec or location and definitely not about using a SSD.

[firemedium_jt]

Your lack of tech savvy not my problem. Please research your own tech savvy outside of the gaming forums, so I don't waste my time. Not my job.

I was n hoping you u could answer the questions. Instead I get a dodge and a troll post.

Big q was how u got rid of Akami?

The other one that must have annoyed you were your load times zoning???

[firemedium_jt]

I'm in Australia so auto lag just from location. I have an Intel I3 so fairly old and 8GB memory. My hard drive is nowhere near SSD, it's an old SATA. I don't ever have the double login thing, I don't crash, I don't generally suffer from huge lag, I don't use the login client that I've read about. Every now and then when logging out I have to use the task manager to kill my old session when logout doesn't work. It's really not about computer spec or location and definitely not about using a SSD.

I am glad the game works good for you. Just dont knock it till you tried it. Tons of stories on SSD solving DDO issues and even creating a few, but so far the votes favor its use. It seems to be a simple fix.

[goodspeed]

It's been three days I got a new computer and ddo hasn't crashed once since. In my previous computer every single trip to orchard or 3bc was an auto crash as were every 3-4 changes of toons.

New PC has 8 gigs of ram and an ssd hard drive. I hear those are all the rage for DDO.

**** skippy. Those 8 gigs shore up any memory leak ddo can throw at you. And unlike the HDD which will run like a hampster thats lost its mind trying like all hell to find the various files the game calls on to show some type of movement or spell or occurrence or anything.

The SSD will near instantly call up the request from the games program. So you don't get those freezes or holds or 6 minute load times when the HDD is like OH SWEET JESUS!! WHERES THE FLIPPN FILE FOR THE TWELVE!?!?!?!?!