So, you gonna probably leave your gw open today(some tech stuff)

Given the type of weekend we are facing i wanted to share this.

While we can say that GW client is pretty light on requirement it still eat a lot of CPU power even when its on backgroud

While its hard to notice on a desktop pc i assure you on a notebook you will hear the fan keep going on the max, even if its new and far more powerful to run guild wars.

Plus, worse then the noise this will prevent your CPU doing those cool stuff it normally do to save power (downclocking etc).

Here a quick fix i came up using windows 7.

1) open power option
2) on the left click on create a new plan
3) pick power saver as the base, call the plan something like "GW idle Plan", click next
4) on the next screen make sure you tell windows to never put the pc on the sleep
5) push Create Plan
6) now select your newly created plan and click on "change plan setting"
7) click on change advanced power setting
8) in the new windows navigate the tree "Processor power management" -> maximum state -> change "on battery" to 50% (now, this value work with my processor but i have a stinky feeling that might change from model to model)
9) make sure you select the plan you created when leaving GW on the background
Voila!

(make sure to switch back to the normal plan or you are likely to experience some slowdown durining normal use)
Here what changed for me



Max processor clock(high temperature and power consumption)



Minimum processor clock

Now, this will probably work on vista since from what i see it share the same power save system.
For the xp folks you can use utility like RMClock and SpeedSwitchXP. The first one is quite hard to use and i never tried the second one.
K10Stat is another alternative for those who have a AMD CPU, but for those you will need probably to find some other online tutorial (or wait another geeky Guildwars player to write one for you)


Also, while i never heard of someone cooking the cpu with an utility microsoft included (still use at your risk) some of the alternative program i mentioned are also used to for overclocks and change stuff who could damage your PC is misused(still, modern CPU have many failsave and you probably have to go out of way to do some damage)

Basicly if you are not sure of what you are doing, waiting a bit wont damage your wallet or green user pride too much

Wana make one for XP? ^^

If you're talking about CNY 2010,

I idle TWO clients on my system.

Running, Windows XP SP2

2.33 GHz (Core 2 Duo)
RAM: 2 Gigs
Graphics: Radeon x1600 (Although, not important for running idle minimized, obviously)

Minimize both and have Windows shut off the "display" which basically shuts off the graphics card (drastically cooling the overall system) when nothing is running in fullscreen. System is literally cool to the touch after a bit, still running both clients...no sign of any load whatsoever.

Done without any methods for reducing power, I didn't even know there were methods, until now.

That's just my system though... I guess.

Very nice method though,

Sorry, i don't have XP anymore.

Im pretty sure that don't happen, at least dont happen on my notebook, and on a 8800GT (i tested it some time ago with a game, with the display off it still made the noise it would have made in a normal game session) but could be different for a ATI card.
Still, remember you have 2 power hog in a PC, the cpu and the vga.

I have an i7 920 with 6gb of memory and a quad core 64bit processor. GW runs in the background and you'd never know it and doesn't slow my system down at all while I play X3:Terran Conflict. )

It does happen. Windows has a setting, and has had it since Windows 95, to shut off the display when not in use. Generically, it means to shut off the "Display". In reality, it shuts the graphics card off or idles it, it does this on every PC.. Don't get me wrong, the fan will still be going, your GPU IS resting though. I'm much more worried about temperatures and than power consumption, though. If I told you I was using a Mac... it would make more sense that I'm not worried about power consumption because Macs have sissy little PSU's and known to be "green" Machines (Before anyone says anything, I like that it's "green" thats great, I'm in no way a tree hugger or some environmentalist though, lol) In and out, its the same as a plugged in laptop, same power usage, same hardware setup. Just under a big brand name.

I'm almost positive, if you do what I do.. you'll be fine, you'll run very cool after a bit of time. Only thing now is your "noise" (fans, of course) and that I can understand for some people = really bad power consumption, but its only a couple 6 volt fans am I right?

oh wow those awful "features" intel has that i turned off in my bios those are definitely not cool....

Thats what i did, only i didnt run 2 clients, got the tokens, got in the rings, min'd GW to taskbar turned off monitor and went out all day, came back turned on wow still had 3 stacks left LOL.

I'm running Guildwars in a VMWare virtual machine so I can play Mass Effect 2 relatively undisturbed.

I can play ME2 and GW at the same time without having to resort to VMWare or any virtualization stuff. In fact this is exactly what I did during the in-between finale time for the past few hours.

Another option is to use "Battle Encoder Shirase" (google it). It's a program that lets you limit CPU usage by program, so you don't have to switch power states if you want to use your computer while you AFK nine rings.

Oh nice', my little notebook can cope with GW quite well and i left it on last night. Wish i knew this sooner, however its a good plan for future afkin'. Thanks!