Deep Fried Dell

Like any good love-hate relationship, I keep coming back to Dell, and they keep beating me down.  Last year, I had an Inspiron that kept giving me problems.  A few months ago, I was able to wrestle away a screaming fast XPS 1530 from a college student for DIRT cheap.  At the price I was able to talk him down to, I couldn’t pass it up.

About a week ago, I turned it on, and got this friendly little message on a blue background: “No hard drive found.” That’s it.  No goodbye.  No “I’ll call you.”  One minute it worked, and the next, it was deep fried. Last night, I went to Best Buy and bought a replacement hard drive.  After re-installing Vista and all the Dell drivers, I reached for my Warcraft discs, and then I remembered a post from good ole Gweedo.

One of the truly great things about the Windows and Mac versions of World of Warcraft is that the game is completely self-contained.  There are no “hidden” files or registry entries.  You can just copy the folder and be done.  This is a good thing because it makes backups really easy and makes moving it from computer to computer really easy.

Could it really be that easy?  I’ve spent hours installing the game from discs and from the Warcraft website before.  This sounded too good to be true, especially with a Windows machine.  It actually was that easy.

All in all, it took 45 minutes to copy the 12.5 GB World of Warcraft folder over our wireless network from one Windows box to another. I put the launcher shortcut on my XPS’s desktop, clicked on it, and VOILA! I was up and running.  All of my add-ons were intact, too. Amazing. If you don’t have multiple machines with WoW installations, I recommend backing up that folder to an external hard drive, or a massive flash drive to save yourself tons of time in the future.

May Elune be with you and your Dell,

-Borley