So I finally finished my World of Warcraft “experiment”. Final balance: 100k gold, 4 level 80 characters but not a single one at cap (85). Since I’m not planning on returning to the game within the next couple of years I took about 90% of that gold and invested it in various vanity items (elementium geodes for example) and Cataclysm trade goods. Basically I didn’t want to worry about in-game inflation urging me to come back any time soon.
The next step was to purge my gaming rig of all the WoW stuff like update clients, dual-boxing tools, backup scripts and some such. I wanted to make absolutely sure to get rid of every piece of WoW-ware that was now possibly on my system. A clean reinstall of the operating system was in order.
For the first step, reformatting the drives, I used GParted from a Linux live-CD. Erasing the system drive and formatting the data drive in NTFS was quick and painless. A restart and short visit to the bios later – to change the boot order – and Windows 7 was happily installing only prompting me for input once ore twice.
I was, of course, completely offline at that time having literally pulled the ethernet plug. You really don’t want to go online with an un-patched system. But you only get your updates online you say? Although that may in essence be the case you can download them on a second machine and feed them to your freshly installed system via USB flash drive or CD/DVD-R. Since downloading and installing every update manually is not fun at all let’s use a tool called WSUS Offline Update. It features a GUI for downloading and installing security updates and other downloadable tools from Microsoft.
The next thing I did was installing new drivers for the mainboard/chipset, audio (on-board) and graphics. I was careful not to install any unnecessary tools or driver components (like 3D-display support). Finally I flashed the DVD drive’s firmware. It had blue-something (Bluefish, Bluebird?) on it that always tried to auto-start when there was no disk in the drive.
I also talk about this topic in a less detailed but more energetic way – and in German – on my podcast. Head over to the Podcast section and grab a copy of episode #111 if you want to give it a listen.
