World of Warcraft, two instances on one computer?

[WhoKnowsWho]

My roommate has been playing WoW on his desktop and laptop at the same time lately. Of course, he has two accounts so both can be on at the same time, he uses the laptop character as a priest to heal his desktop character. But he would like to consolidate and run two instances on the desktop. Hardware wise, it might work, 3.4 Ghz P4 and a 7800 GT. But software wise, will it work? He wants me to order him another Dell 2005FPW anyways, if he can't display two instances of the games, at least he can have one for the game and another open for lists and descriptions of items and such.

Did a little Google searching and didn't really find anything.

 

[oogabooga]

i think you can for a bit, but whenever i do it on my rig (3gig amd64 + 6800) i find that after some time it just starts to kill my rig.

 

[WhoKnowsWho]

Kill? How so? Like overheating? Or too much memory use?
He is going to check it out tomorrow with his old CRT and LCD screen at the same time, though it won't be the same since the CRT doesn't have the same resolution, it may not be as hard on the computer.

 

[Lonyo]

I'd guess you'd want a fair amount of RAM to have to running at the same time more than anything else.

 

[Cheetah8799]

I've read about people running multiple instances of WoW on the same PC and controlling two, and sometimes more, characters that follow eachother around. There are some articles about it on the web. Very powerful if you are able to keep track of that many things at once. I think one article talked about a guy who could actually control 4 characters at once.

As for if that PC can handle it, well, ya, it should. Maybe would have some trouble in high-pop server towns like Ironforge, but I doubt it. Just turn down the resolution a little bit and it will be fine I think.

 

[Malladine]

WoW doesn't generally use beyond 500mb, ime. I'd say 2gb of ram and you should be ok, but the settings will not be the highest.

Sounds like a good idea actually, being able to look maps up, etc while playing.

 

[CKent]

I can run two, and my PC is far from top of the line; p4 2.6 with a gb of ram and a 9800pro. Turn all sound & music off for one instance.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Originally posted by: RBachman
I can run two, and my PC is far from top of the line; p4 2.6 with a gb of ram and a 9800pro. Turn all sound & music off for one instance.

Do you have 2 separate installations, or run from the same installation and log onto 2 separate characters?

 

[n0tdan]

all you need is to have wow set to windowed mode, 1 installation works fine. just open one up in windowed, log on, open second one up in windowed mode, log on etc.

 

[EvanB]

Works pretty well, there are a couple guys on my server who honor farm with a priest + warrior and play em both. Supposedly they have some sexy macro's cooked up for it though. Anyway, yeah, sometimes I play two accounts at once when a friend cant make it to an MC raid or whatever.

3800+
7800GT
2gb

Works fine, gets angry occaisionally but never for very long.

 

[WhoKnowsWho]

Cool, thanks for the replies! I'll let him know and set it up.

 

[secretanchitman]

ask leroy jenkins. im sure HE'LL have the answer.

lol, that guy is hilarious!

 

[NeoV]

you guys sound like wanna-be gold farmers...

 

[WhoKnowsWho]

Originally posted by: NeoV
you guys sound like wanna-be gold farmers...

No, he has a level 60 Ranger and they always have a lack of Priest support in their raids. So he wants to run his Priest along with his Ranger so he can get stuff done faster and easier.

 

[lagvoid]

Originally posted by: WhoKnowsWho

Originally posted by: NeoV
you guys sound like wanna-be gold farmers...

No, he has a level 60 Ranger and they always have a lack of Priest support in their raids. So he wants to run his Priest along with his Ranger so he can get stuff done faster and easier.

Ranger? reminds me of ffxi!