What is official size of GW.dat file at the moment?

This fact is very intriguing.

If two persons (and rest mentioned above) are using build-in-game command to do the same and download all the data why there is so big difference?

A question to others: my file is still around 3640MB - did you notice any differences in your GW.dat file's size after this week period?

As of today, at 5 days of having GW installed on a new comp. GW.dat is 4.7GB

3.2gb here

This is on a brand new comp with the -image tag.

2.96GB on a dat from original Prophecies days. Always use -image before I play. I find it fluctuates depending on what you do in the game... the more you switch characters the bigger it gets. When I did that it grew by 300MB then when I played one character it dropped back to what it was before.

Weird.

I posted how big my GW.dat was already(3.31GB), but now it has changed. About a week ago I noticed it was now 3.04GB. It had gone down by 0.27GB. It since went up by 0.01GB to 3.05GB.

Could most likely be User Information and Character Information caches saved over time so that the game does not have to reload them from the server.

My dat as of now is 3.09GBs with two separate accounts played on one machine.

Double POST.

(I HATE this forum software, a lot of money for nothing.)

So, the conclusion is: there is no and never will be an official size.

Just ran an -image and mine is at 2.82GB.

I've read this thread Yesterday, noticed that my gw.dat was 7gb long, deleted and re-downloaded it today. Now it's 9.3gb, and I really think it's messing up my loadings, sometime they take 20 secs, sometimes 3 minutes. I can't really understand what is happening. I have 256mb RAM, but I don't think that's really the cause, since I've played in a machine with the same specs and the loads took like 20 segs (Like my machine does sometimes). And I've read about some people with bugged GW.dat who screws their load times.

Anyone knows anyway to fix that? I know I need more RAM, but it cannot be THAT difference from 512mb to 256mb, like 2m30s.

You'd be surprsied at how much difference more RAM would make. For instance, if you're using Windows XP then that alone can suck up nearly 200MB of your RAM.

But that much difference? I really can't believe.

Mine is setting at 2.76GB and this was a clean install that I did from the Nightfall DVD. It has all the updates as of Jan 6, 2007 and was reinstalled near the halloween event.

Make sure that you delete the gw folder in program files but move your screens or templates out before deleting the folder after the uninstall.
Then do your reinstall and redownload all the updates.

Did you try deleting the client program and downloading a copy from the Guild Wars website?

I always install using the most latest CD/DVD from Arena and then run the game with the -image straight after. Although when the setup program commences the update after installing the .dat from the CD/DVD I cancel that and then run the -image switch.

Regards

No I didn't, I just deleted the gw.dat and let it redownload again. I'll delete everything now.

It seems it is based on some extent on how fast you download? Or how many "sessions" you download it in. As I recently went to a friends house, brought my PC and downloaded all of the GW.dat in around 2 hours. Which was 3.6GB. Where on dial up, I was downloading it every night (switching the GW.dat file from my old one to a new one every night) and it was up to nearly 4GB and was only around half way done.

The size of the Gw.dat depends on your download speed.

We had a long thread on the german guild-wars.info forum months ago:
http://guildwars-forum.onlinewelten....d.php?t=102612


To get a clean Gw.dat do this:
(Make sure you have enouth hd space)

Run gw.exe -image to get all files.

Then copy this files from the GuildWars CD into an new folder on your hd:
Modify \Data\cdrom.ini to this:
Move your Gw.dat in the \Data\Gw folder

Deinstall Guild Wars

Reinstall Guild Wars from the copied files on your hd.

Thanks ObiWan07, reduced the file from 9gb to 2.6gb.

super dooper thanks obi!
my file size was 5+ gigs - now it shrank to the normal 2.7!
thanks again!