Microsoft recently released what they call the “Release Candidate” of their latest desktop operating system, Windows 7, via their website. It’s a free download and can be used until the summer of 2010 completely free of charge. We won’t explain here all the many new features of Windows 7 because there are plenty of reviews already published to great effect on that subject but we will give some thoughts on why it might be a good choice for the WoW player to consider.

Here at ‘BW HQ’ we’ve been using the “Release Candidate” or ‘RC’ on our main machines for about one month now and thus far it has behaved itself impeccably. It’s definitely an improvement over its Windows Vista predecessor although when we say that, it is worth adding the qualification that our experiences with Windows Vista over the past two years have been quite excellent. Despite the many voices that jumped onto the “we hate Vista” train with claims of preference for the earlier Windows XP, we’ve preferred Vista as our desktop OS of choice at all times. We get plenty of exposure to XP in our corporate offices and with our business clients but when it comes to what we rock with on our own kit at home, it’s been Vista every time. If you understood the few basic changes between XP and Vista and could cope with that, it was no problem.

In fact, the only problem we ever truly had with Vista came towards the end of our time with it (we’re confirmed Windows 7 converts now for reasons that will become immediately clear) after we replaced the main workstation in the office with a bigger more powerful machine. As part of the upgrade, we kitted it out with a fancy 30″ screen with a 2560×1600 resolution display and it was here that some problems were encountered. Essentially, during day-to-day operation the machine worked flawlessly however it would quite regularly trip-over when running WoW (the only game we have installed onto the machine bar those that come supplied with Vista) and cause us to have to either restart the game or restart the machine. It didn’t happen often but it happened enough for us to recognise that it only happened during game-play and thus, it was never a welcome occurrance.

Since switching to Windows 7, this problem has simply disappeared. It’s not possible to tell if it’s the new OS, the ATI driver for the graphics card under Windows 7, the fact we’ve gone from running 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7 or some other factor that is to thank for the improvement but any improvement shall be considered a good thing, whatever its cause. Unsurprisingly therefore, we’re firmly attached to Windows 7 now and with our experiences from Vista in hand, there are some very useful tips to be passed on to anyone considering trying the new Windows OS.

Installing WoW on Windows 7:

The first important decision to make after installing Windows 7 on your PC and before installing WoW on top of that is where you are going to install WoW. On a traditional Windows XP machine, all standard program installations went into the “C:\Program Files\” directory which thus meant that WoW generally ended up in “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\” if you simply followed normal convention. There was no problem with this under Windows XP but come Windows Vista, this way of doing things could have a subtle but significant effect.

Windows Vista introduced some new and more stringent security settings and one of these was the increased protection of what it termed ‘Important System Folders’ and of course, the “C:\Program Files\” directory was one of these. Thus, if you first installed WoW into the normal “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\” location and then attempted to make changes to WoW folders that used to be stored inside there such as your “Interface\Addons” folder or your “Screenshots” or “WTF” folders you’d find they no were longer located inside there. Instead, to preserve the protection for the ‘important system folders’, Vista had moved the folders you might need to change to a location inside your personal profile, typically under…

C:\Users\<name>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\World of Warcraft\

…where <name> is your Windows Vista username. Handy huh? And easy to find… we think not!

Thus, our personal solution to this ‘problem’ was to install WoW to a different location where this separation would not occur so that we could more easily keep all of WoW’s data in one place. On our machines, we would create a single directory called…

C:\Program Files Public\

…into which we installed WoW. This ensured that all WoW’s folders stayed in the same place and kept things tidily organised. Remember that a good Windows Nerd seeks to minimise the number of directories directly under “C:\” so things don’t get cluttered.

Moving to Windows 7, we have exactly the same matter to address so we were all ready to create our “Program Files Public” folder under “C:\” when we noticed something new to consider. We’d chosen the 64-bit version of Windows 7 given that we have a modern PC and almost all the modern Intel chips in desktop PCs these days are essentially 64-bit chips. They’ll still run quite happily if you only install the 32-bit version of Windows but there are limitations on things like how much memory you can access with a 32-bit operating system thus we’d elected to go 64-bit this time around.

In the same way that your PC with a 64-bit chip can run both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, so too can your 64-bit Windows run both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows applications, no doubt to ensure compatibility for business users and the like. What this generally means though is that if you install a 64-bit application on 64-bit Windows (XP/Vista or 7) then it will default to the normal “C:\Program Files\” location. However, if you install an older 32-bit application on 64-bit Windows, it will instead default to the alternate “C:\Program Files (x86)\” location in order to help it (and us!) identify the 32-bit apps from the 64-bit ones.

Thus, with Windows 7 we created our new directory as…

C:\Program Files Public (x86)\

…before installing WoW since we knew, after doing a bit of research via Google, that WoW’s client is only available in a 32-bit version. We then installed WoW to this location giving us an install-location of…

C:\Program Files Public (x86)\World of Warcraft\

…and once again were forever more blessed with being able to find all our ‘Interface\Addons’, ‘Screenshots’ and ‘WTF’ files under the same basic location. Everyday geeks have a word for such things as this… bliss!

Thus, if you choose a 32-bit version of Windows 7 then we’d recommend installing WoW into the normal ‘Public’ folder whilst under a 64-bit version of Windows 7 we’d recommend installing WoW into the ‘Public (x86)’ folder instead. Either way, it’ll make your life simpler in the long run.

Running WoW on Windows 7:

In general, the experience of running WoW on Windows 7 should not differ from the experience you’d have received when running it on Windows XP or Vista before it. Former users of Windows XP will probably find the performance of WoW under Windows 7 to be about the same whilst former Vista users should see a minor performance improvement due to the refinements that have been made to the core Windows systems between Vista and 7.

We’ve noticed a few other areas where WoW seems to perform better under Windows 7 than under Vista although again, it’s not clear for us whether the performance improvements are coming from being under the new version of Windows or from our step-up to a 64-bit version of the OS from the former 32-bit version we used before. However, running Fraps alongside WoW under Windows 7 is notably smoother than it was under Vista previously. Fraps, for those that don’t know, is a small utility program that allows you to record the game-graphics as you play for the purposes of making game-related movies afterwards.

We’re running WoW in a 1920×1080 window to mirror the default resolution of modern ‘High Definition’ or ‘HD’ television sets and Fraps will comfortably grab the game graphics at 30 or 60 FPS as we prefer without causing the game to become in any way laggy, choppy or notably affected. At approximately just under 4GB per minute of footage captured in the raw ‘avi’ format that Fraps saves, handling the large files produced is a problem/joy of its own when we later attempt to stitch our movies together. However, this should clearly bode well for those wanting to capture their own gameplay via Fraps-like tools. Again, we’re guessing, whatever performance you managed under XP will likely be the level you’ll get with Windows 7 and Vista users should find performance slightly better than before.

In Conclusion:

Windows 7 is a truly excellent continuation of the Windows desktop operating system line. It has proven itself to be both rock-solid stable and a pleasure to use over the past month and furthermore, WoW runs very nicely on Windows 7 offering perhaps the most enjoyable WoW experience due to the combination of all the modern Windows finery with no notable performance penalties over the more basic XP versions of Windows.

We’d certainly recommend all Vista users to strongly consider it a good option to explore since it is basically “more of the same but just plain better.” To XP users we’d also recommend it highly however we’ll happily pull our punches with the recommendation here because we know many XP users have tried and disliked Vista in the past and really don’t want to move forwards beyond XP. That’s cool – WoW certainly works just as well on XP as it does on Windows 7 and if you’re not itching to try the newest version of Windows then why make needless ‘upgrade’ work for yourselves. However, we will say that one day you’ll probably be in a position of having to make the step forwards to a new version of Windows and if that version happens to be Windows 7, we think you’ll be really quite okay.

As for us here at the BW-HQ, we’re all for Windows 7 now and won’t be going back to Vista or XP where we have the choice. Windows 7 and WoW is a very satisfying combination.

-B-