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I thought this would be about the most appropriate forum for this, even though I have no idea what this problem could possibly be related to.
So I just noticed this now that I started playing WoW again, since before that, all the games I really played were on Steam, and I didn't stopwatch the load times of every application on my computer.
The issue is this: Steam and also Trillian seem to make my computer run faster. The most drastic change, which I've been able to reproduce 100% of the time, is that without Steam and/or Trillian running - my WoW loads from the character screen to the ingame world in about 28 seconds. With Steam and/or Trillian running - it loads in 8(!) seconds. And it's not just WoW. CPUz startup time went from around 9 seconds to 7 seconds. I've tried reproducing it with some other commonly used programs of mine running in the background instead - Firefox, WinAMP, Teamspeak - no dice.
Ideally, I'd like to have my PC operating at maximum potential regardless of whether I have Steam/Trillian running. How to accomplish that is a complete mystery to me though.
I tried disabling EIST/C1E on my CPU, but that didn't change anything. Also updated my spyware/NOD32 definitions and ran full scans of both in safe mode, both were clean.
I'm running WinXP Pro SP2 32bit, MSI P6N SLI-Platinum, C2D E6600, eVGA 8800GTS 640mb, X-Fi XtremeGamer, 2 SATA HDDs, and 1 SATA DVD.
I'm pretty much out of ideas now, since this is just absolutely baffling and driving me insane. I was going to be doing a reformat next week anyway, so maybe I can just install things one at a time and carefully watch to see if maybe I can get the issue to recur. Still, if anyone has any ideas at all, I'd love to hear them.
Edit: Played around some more, Steam/Trillian don't seem to have a noticeable effect on Firefox, EVE Online, or Unreal Tournament 3 load times. So CPUz and WoW are the only two apps I've found thus far that have noticeable, reproduceable differences in load times. Also, my framerates seem to remain about the same regardless - so it seems to just be an issue with loading stuff.
Edit 2: After a reformat, the issue is still there. But while I was doing some other things, I noticed Internet Explorer (Steam uses IE for some things) and Windows Messenger (Trillian does have a MSN plugin) also caused the same effect. Since this doesn't seem to affect any other programs that I care about beyond WoW, I'm just going to chalk it up as a strange bug with the game.
So I just noticed this now that I started playing WoW again, since before that, all the games I really played were on Steam, and I didn't stopwatch the load times of every application on my computer.
The issue is this: Steam and also Trillian seem to make my computer run faster. The most drastic change, which I've been able to reproduce 100% of the time, is that without Steam and/or Trillian running - my WoW loads from the character screen to the ingame world in about 28 seconds. With Steam and/or Trillian running - it loads in 8(!) seconds. And it's not just WoW. CPUz startup time went from around 9 seconds to 7 seconds. I've tried reproducing it with some other commonly used programs of mine running in the background instead - Firefox, WinAMP, Teamspeak - no dice.
Ideally, I'd like to have my PC operating at maximum potential regardless of whether I have Steam/Trillian running. How to accomplish that is a complete mystery to me though.
I tried disabling EIST/C1E on my CPU, but that didn't change anything. Also updated my spyware/NOD32 definitions and ran full scans of both in safe mode, both were clean.
I'm running WinXP Pro SP2 32bit, MSI P6N SLI-Platinum, C2D E6600, eVGA 8800GTS 640mb, X-Fi XtremeGamer, 2 SATA HDDs, and 1 SATA DVD.
I'm pretty much out of ideas now, since this is just absolutely baffling and driving me insane. I was going to be doing a reformat next week anyway, so maybe I can just install things one at a time and carefully watch to see if maybe I can get the issue to recur. Still, if anyone has any ideas at all, I'd love to hear them.
Edit: Played around some more, Steam/Trillian don't seem to have a noticeable effect on Firefox, EVE Online, or Unreal Tournament 3 load times. So CPUz and WoW are the only two apps I've found thus far that have noticeable, reproduceable differences in load times. Also, my framerates seem to remain about the same regardless - so it seems to just be an issue with loading stuff.
Edit 2: After a reformat, the issue is still there. But while I was doing some other things, I noticed Internet Explorer (Steam uses IE for some things) and Windows Messenger (Trillian does have a MSN plugin) also caused the same effect. Since this doesn't seem to affect any other programs that I care about beyond WoW, I'm just going to chalk it up as a strange bug with the game.
