I'm seeing a lot of confusion on other posts about running GW with -image appended, so I thought i'd be helpful and clear things up.
I created another shortcut to gw.exe from my desktop for this, but all you have to do is right-click on your shortcut to gw.exe, and select "properties". On the second tab, where it says "shortcut," it will have a path to your gw.exe file. at the end of that path, outside of the quotation marks, simply add "-image" with no quotes.
The next time this shortcut is run, it will download ALL the files related to Guild Wars. All the areas, all the newest updates, everything. if this is your first time running the -image, this will be a HUGE download. Don't panic, after the first time, most of the updates are small.
Once it has finished downloading all the files, it will decompress them and add them to your gw.dat file. Again, if this is the first time running this, it could take quite a bit of time.
If the shortcut is run with -image, guildwars WILL NOT load up. Once it's done downloading and decompressing, the process will end. To play guildwars, you need to edit the properties of your shortcut again, and remove the "-image" at the end. (This is why I have 2 shortcuts- 1 for playing, one for imaging.) Once you've returned the shortcut to normal, you should be able to play Guild Wars without loading every new area that you haven't been to- it's already sitting on your hard drive.
O
