Reinstalling WOW

Hey peeps,
Just a quick post to help out anyone who gets into that horrible situation where you have to wipe your machine and start again. If you have WOW on more than one comp in your house you can save yourself a day of patching by simply copying the WOW folder from the untouched comp. (Worth running a quick virus scan on the untouched machine to make sure your not copying a virus over tho).

Firstly you need to make sure you are actually connected to your network. If you have internet access it doesn't mean your connected to the network just the router which is not the same thing. Go to your network places or just network if your a Vista victim and make sure you can see the other persons computer and access their public folder. If not, chances are good you just haven't run the network setup wizard which can also be accessed from the network area. You won't need to change any settings to get it running, just keep clicking on next. (Quick note the automatic network name is MSHOME, changing this can improve security as some trojan's require it to be this so they can spread to other comps on the network. However you'll have to go to every machine on the network and run the wizard changing the name so it's a big hassle and many trojans no longer care so it's up to you) Okay so now (hopefully) you have two comps that can see each other.

Now for the sharing part, go to the untouched comp and you can make the wow folder available one of two ways. You can either make a copy of the folder in the network places public folder or you can right click on the wow folder (XP users: select sharing and security and under the network sharing and security section click the box to share this folder on the network.) (Vista users right click on the folder, click sharing, advanced sharing and click the share this folder box) Now go to my network places from the start menu and you'll see the wow folder under local network. Go back to the fresh comp and go to start, my computer, C:, program files. Then open a second window and open your network places. Right click and hold the wow folder and drag it into the first window.

The transfer will take roughly 30 mins on your average router. Once it's complete find the wow.exe file (its the one that looks like your normal launcher icon) right click on it and click send to and then desktop. Your all set. Hope this was helpful, and the sentences aren't too poorly constructed (yes i'm a little sleepy...)

Wow, cheers Kaiman! Had to do this several times now, and the sinking feeling of "oh good god, the seventeen patches...why?!"

But yesterday we had the issue that dragging and dropping the entire 12.3 Gb WoW folder was going to take longer than patching it; are there any files that can be cut out of the process to streamline it? Which are the actual core patch files?

Hey there,
There are a couple of things you can do to speed it up. If your installing it without having installed wow first you can skip the patch and uploader files as they have already been introduced to the core and if you've installed lots of patches many of them are irrelevant at this point.

However if you want to install wow yourself you can just transfer over from the last complete patch which I think was 3.0.1 onwards which is only a couple of hundred meg.

I would recommend doing it blank though to save time because by the time you have messed around with the 6 disks needed it would have pretty much transferred anyway. I can't see it taking more than an hour in total for any router to transfer over the files. If it does then there is something wrong with your settings which is a story for another thread