Decompression (AGAIN!)

Well while I don't have my drive imaged yet, I can still go through a reformat/reinstall when necessary.

AND I also know about Norton buying Sygate. I was really mad at that one. But the hardest has been trying to find another one with as much simplicity and small footprint as Sygate had.

BTW, I also tried redownloading the Dat and it seems to be working a bit faster for now. BUT as I said before. I did it once the last time and it happened again. SO its only a matter of time.

simply glanced through the responses here, and didn't see a solution posted.

here's my solution, I was taking an hour and 45 minutes to decompress the Marketplace during the factions preview.. with like 600 files left.. i exited out of guild wars, ran it in a window with Task Manager running (start -> run -> taskmgr) after zoning into the marketplace i changed the Priority of gw.exe from low to high. and finished the last 600 files in about 2 minutes.

did the same thing to all the PvP areas and other cities. kinda annoying, but i'm planing on doing a system format sometime soon anyways.

There was a workaround posted earlier in the thread. That glance must have been mighty quick.

wow u must have a slow ass connection took me 3-5mins to d/l and decromprees everything from factions preview

He has cable.

That he does. Downloading 500+MBs 3-5 mins is no small feat.

@Omega X, the response of "He has cable" was directed at Malice who was replying to me..... lol.
I saw the "workaround" of changing the size of the window, but that will not change the speed of decompression, since it's still doing the same exact thing but in a smaller window. no matter if the size of the window is the size of a postage stamp or the size of the desktop. it may ease up off the video card, but thats probably the only thing.

Noun 1. Decompression - restoring compressed information to its normal form for use or display
Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/decompression

uhm... I don't see Internet Speed mentioned in that anywhere....... We downloaded the content for Factions a couple weeks ago if you remember back, so the data is already on your computer.. and yes I know the diffrence between Decompressing and Downloading. The problem is not in downloading speeds, as seen in the below picture. My Cable speed is more then capable of downloading.

as Tarun has said, I have Cable, so the problem is not in Download Speed.

Wrong.

When reducing the window size, it reduces the amount of CPU GW uses. Therefore it gives the Decompression action more headroom to operate. Which results in faster decompression of the files.

I've done it. Another tried it and confirmed that it works.

Please read next time instead of just scanning.

It's fast and almost almost never lag with mine. it took a little time to download the updates. It wasn't too bad. Cable helps and my pc is under a year old.

omega did you see the guild wars update last night? did it impact your load times at all?

alright, you are correct to a certain degree, The game doesn't have to tell the video card to draw as in detail or as much, then while its in full screen.. you may slim off a couple minutes at most my changing the size. try it yourself, check how much CPU Usage gw.exe takes in average over a couple minutes in the smallest possible size.. compare that to gw.exe at desktop size, i had pretty much the same usage on average over 2 minutes.

next time you go into an area where you hav eto decompress, change the priority from Low to Normal.. i've gone from 130+ files to complete in about 20 seconds by doing my method.

My load times are never impacted. ITs always decompression sequences when the game is at full speed. Because the game runs full speed during the load screens, the CPU is always maxed out and leaves no room for extra processes. No other game does this, not even WoW.

And Anet won't fix it since tech support keeps dodging having to report the issue to the dev team. All I get is copy and paste responses.

but have you tried since the update? it looks like it's now limiting the rendering speed while decompressing.

Now that you point it out, it seems likely. Decompression has seemed to increase a little in speed, but the game still isn't letting enough of the CPU go to make a real difference.

I would call it marginal, and I think that they fixed something DX9 or sound related. I don't think that it was intentional.

So Tech support decided to blow me off instead of reporting my problem like they were supposed to.

Does anyone have Gaile Grey's email address?

I refuse to give up.

I've the same problem with the decompression. Going into windowed mode works for me. Usually by the time the game goes from fullscreen to a window the decompressoin's done. Something's just buggy with GW and fullscreen.
I asked techsupport and they just say to delete GW.dat, which of course means you have to redownload and decompress everything. Not real helpful.

Short story: reducing to windowed mode works for me!

Hi,

I have had the same problem, where decompression is extremely slow, doing close to 1 file per 2-4 seconds, and when you have 200 files to do, it adds up. I once left my computer to do 7000 files, which took 6 hours and only did 4000 of it which is a load of crap. I read on another forum who had the same issue, and he said to fix the issue was to disable the sound drivers, and it should bring it back to normal. I followed the advice and it works. But that kinda defeats the purpose of buying my Audigy 2 ZS. Seems like Omega X has the same card as I. Try modifying your shortcut to guildwars to have -nosound. This will stop the soundcard from working, as I have figured it to be a directSound problem. Anet are being rude and throwing everything at me, putting the blame on my computer, when the actual fact that I formatted it twice because of this issue. This issue only started to happen after a patch sometime last month.

Give these a try:

1- Boot up your PC in safe mode by hitting F8 at WinXP logo screen
2- Choose XP safe mode
3- When system comes up, go to start->run and type in %temp% <Enter>
4- Go to tools->Folder options->View Tab, and uncheck "hide protected operating system files (recommended)". Also click "Show hidden files and folders"
5- Select and delete all files in %temp%
6- Go to Start->run, type "Prefetch" <Enter>
7- Also erase this folder's contents
8- Empty your recycling bin
9- Reboot in normal mode

If the above doesn't work, you can also try creating a new administrator account on your XP system, then try running GW.exe from that new login.

Please tell us what happens.

That is a LOT of hoops to jump for nothing. Prefetch and the temp folder are not critical and can easily be dumped by the Disk Cleanup utility that comes with windows.

Creating a new profile can solve some things but it won't solve decompression in GW.

There are three steps to "try" and get pass it.

1. Before Zoning into a new area, put the game into Windowed Mode and reduce the size by half or more. This lets up off of the CPU so that the Load screen can perform Decompression.

2. Turn off as many processes as you can before playing since it will free up a little head room for GW to saturate. It won't be as fast as #1 but it will speed things up a bit.

3. Complain like hell to Anet so that they can fix the load screen to NOT saturate the CPU when performing those functions. This will mostlikely fix the problem. But at the current state, Anet is not getting the issue from Tech Support. They will not see it as a real issue. You will have to bypass them and talk to someone that talks to programmers like Gaile or others that work directly for Anet and not NC Soft. You can also try submitting it as a bug in game via the /bug emote.

Takes a few minutes tops, and I've encountered a few wierd failed software installations that could not be corrected via disk clean-up since some of the files in question are being actively accessed by the XP OS. Manually cleaning the two directories is also a lot faster than XP's disk clean up.

I had the compression error hit my PC once. Recreating the profile fixed it. Just sharing my own experiences... you don't have to believe any of it.