Spent 11 hours yesterday (whilst doing other things like baking cherry and vanilla cookies and catching up on housework) fixing WoW on the Vista box. XP downloaded and installed fine, but the patch got corrupted on the (manual) download to vista and I had to roll-back the files to 3.0.1 ...This after an hour updating Windows, office, manual additional virus update, firefox (twice, as later in the day they issued a hot fixed to a re-introduced error) and noscript.
Support website not much use. Could not even find the Basesignature message on search, though I did locate it later through reading the patch issue pages. Even then, their suggestion that it was due to a system restore was not applicable in my case. The WoW Europe forums showed this had also occurred in 2007 and 2008, and that led me to the patch issue page that suggested deleting the patch files in the /data sub-directory and re-installing the patches. Not knowing which one was corrupt, I redownloaded and re-installed every one of the nine patches since November. I finally got online at 10om (the XP box having blown its monitor connection in the meantime, when I had to do a hard re-boot after WoW froze when logging onto my paladin with her Journeyman riding training money). Long enough to report to the guild & some friends that I was having problems before I vanished.
Not a happy owlkin - by the time I completed Dawn's training and finished off the Searing Gorge quest left in my log (ever the completionist) I was ready for bed.
Woke up dreaming of a new 5 man instance with 13 disciples, each of whom teleported a random member of the party to the next disciple, leaving the party to chose whether to fight the boss or wait until the party member worked their way back with some information about the next boss... easy for rogues, druids and those with invisibility potions, otherwise rather nasty! Setting was an upward spiral with pocket, stepped rooms, nice for the larger players but hard on a dwarf's short legs! Too late, time to get up and get the kids off to school (though surprisingly the youngest even had made his own sandwiches this morning!).
Spent 2 hours trimming and shaping the hedges in the front garden, to make up for missing it in the beautiful weather we had yesterday, before heavy rain forced me back inside.
Quite liking the speed from a "naked" WoW with no add-ons, but some like Deadly Boss Mods, Ora2, Squawk and Awe (though I may try out quatz instead), decursive and grid (for my resto and holy specs) are essential for raids and instances. Auction helper with Enchantrix for my bankers - though I'm not going to enable it for the rest of my characters now.
Despite paying a donation, I'm going to see if I can manage without Carbonnite Quest - it's got far too complicated in the latest version and the map transparency is too much for my eyes to cope with. As my latency drops considerably when I relog with it turned off for raids, I suspect its not doing my DPS good on other characters too.
I may try out XPerl unit frames - I could not cope with PitBull and both Bartender and one other I looked at, though they gave a nice clean look to the interface the comments show far too many post-patch errors with each. This is one drawback of coming to rely on amateur add-ons, even the professionals don't have enough times to do thorough testing - yes, Blizzard, I am talking about you - so what chance do people doing this for love have in their limited spare time?
