arrgghhh!!, This is frustrating!!!

Adromada - Raging Tide wrote: »

my comp is automatically De-fragged every week, i do disk clean up every 3 days.

Totally off-topic, but why on earth would anyone do this? It's a complete waste of time.

I defrag my hard drives once a year, and it still makes no noticeable difference after I do it. You're seriously wasting more time than you're saving, and thus unnecessarily adding wear and tear to your drives. I'd seriously recommend against doing that as often as you're doing it.

VenoMKII - Harshlands wrote: »

Considering you are the only person reporting this issue, it IS your problem and noone elses. So its your computer or something.

Actually, no, it's not just his problem. I've had exactly the same problem, and it's frustrating as heck.

I have no idea what causes it, but sometimes certain characters seem to get locked out of the game. As soon as you get to character selection, Bam!, you're marked as "DISCONNECTED FROM SERVER" for no apparent reason. No matter how many times you try to log-in again, same thing happens.

However, logging-in a different account works just fine. But then you try the first one again and, Bam!, out you go.

The work-around I found was to log-in the same account on a different machine. I have no idea why this works, but it does, and once I've logged in on the other machine I can go back to my main computer and it will log-in fine.

Go figure. *shrugs*

Adromada - Raging Tide wrote: »

ok im not being a D*** about this, but i will genuinely believe you if you can provide or at least find those facts along with 100% consistent records
[snip]
just want 100% accurate proof of what your saying. and if you are completely right i will apologize to you.

I'm not clear on exactly what parts of what I said that you aren't believing, but try reading "Disk defragmentation: Performance-sapping bogeyman, or best practice?" It details the ways that NTFS minimize the need for defragmentation (use BugMeNot to get past the login).

That article quotes Mike Kronenberg, author of a disk defragmentation tool, who says, "I challenge any defrag company to prove that, on a modern 2006 large drive about 50% full, defragmenting files will increase performance in any way that will be sensed by a user. [...] Basically, nowadays defragmenting files will only provide a moderate performance boost when a drive is relatively full. Modern computers come with 250GB and larger drives that most people will never fill up." (emphasis mine) He also noted that users will not notice the difference between a program that takes 6.2 seconds to load before defragmenting and 6 seconds after defragmenting.

Regarding the ways modern hard drives reduce the impact of fragmentation, see "New hard disk drives reduce need for disk defragmentation". It quotes Mark Patton, another defragmentation tool author, who says, "Larger and faster drives have minimized the impact of fragmentation. The Windows file system tends to fragment files all on its own to a small degree, but fragmentation starts for real when the drive starts to get full -- as in over 70%. [...] It is my opinion that a drive that is more than 80% full is not defragmentable. You can see that effect with huge hard disk drives, since they generally use smaller percentages of the drive's total free space. A side-effect is that the overall fragmentation is reduced, and the fact that these drives have faster seek times makes the effect even less noticeable. At the time I worked on Diskeeper, I always told people to 'defragment early and often' so that they could take advantage of the free space before their drive starts to fill up. This way, they could see a marginal improvement now, but, more importantly help, the defragmenter from getting log-jammed later on. With today's large drives, even this is not an issue." (emphasis mine)

If none of that convinces you, I could write a little application that would read a chunk of the files on your hard drive, and tell you exactly how long it takes to read all of them. You could run that before and after defragmenting your hard drive, and then see how little difference it makes. If you're interested, just tell me how much data you want it to read (somewhere in the 200 MB to 1 GB range seems reasonable) and I can write that up.

So do you computer guru's reckon i should run my clients as windowed mode to make them vanish / disconnect when being alt-tabbed for long periods of time or some other soliution to fix this problem ?

Both seem to DC if alt-tabbed for long periods in archo west and one vanishes occasionally if one of the clients is only active. Due to this im currently running everything on lowest settings only hoping that they dont dc/vanish when tabbed and biding my time till i get enough money to buy new computer.


EDIT:
So turning windowed mode helps a little, but is there a way to save client settings in a way that 2 clients when launched have different settings ?

OP: Sounds like a firewall/automatic port forwarding problem. Try power cycling your router. If that takes care of the problem, next time it happens try connecting your computer directly to your cable/DSL modem (or put it on DMZ if you know how) and see if the problem persists. Don't leave your computer in this state for too long as it'll be vulnerable to viruses and worms from the Internet at large. Just do it temporarily to diagnose the problem.

If these fix the problem, then you most likely need to tweak some settings on your router (or if it's an old router, replace it with a newer one). There's a lot of port forwarding magic which happens automatically with NAT. On older or badly programmed routers, it can break if you do stuff like P2P filesharing which makes a lot of connections.

Sangodoc wrote: »

If you're using a modern file system, like NTFS, it's already designed to reduce fragmentation. Besides that, modern hard drives also have more memory and read-ahead ability than they used to. All of this means that fragmentation is both rarer and has far less impact than it used to.

XP was pretty bad about fragmenting despite using NTFS. I agree Windows 7 is much better. But all the robustness you build into the filesystem and OS doesn't help when apps write files in stupid ways.

The biggest culprit in my experience is bittorrent. Most bittorrent clients I've used don't have a "write entire file at once" option. Consequently, as each piece of the files being torrented is downloaded, it gets written to the first sector of the disk to become available. By the time you finish downloading a Linux ISO distro, it might be in 2000+ fragments.

You can (mostly) defragment the file by copying it. But the problem is those 2000+ fragments scattered across your disk make it harder for the OS to find a continuous chunk of open disk space. So it's forced to write the copy in multiple fragments. The best solution I've found was to set aside a separate partition just for files you're downloading via torrent. Or use a client which will reserve space for the entire file at once at the start of the torrent.

The second biggest culprit is multitasking. If you're copying a bunch of big files (e.g. media/ISO files), and at the same time installing something onto the same drive, you're going to end up with a huge fragmented mess. Try not to multitask two or more activities which involve a lot of writing to disk. Newer drives lessen problem this with NCQ, but even that has its limits if you're writing big movie files.

Now, if you had a lot of fragmentation then that fragmentation itself could add more wear and tear. However if you're defragmenting your drive weekly, then you're wasting far more time defragmenting than you're saving, and adding to wear and tear rather than preventing it.

Weekly defrag is probably excessive. If you're doing it weekly and getting noticeable improvement every time, it probably means your HDD is almost full and you should be adding a second HDD (desktop) or upgrading to a larger HDD (laptop).

Do note that Windows 7 automatically defragments system files and puts them towards the beginning of the HDD (where the data density is highest and thus reads quickest). This was one of the strategies Microsoft used to decrease boot times. If you're on XP, you can do similar optimization with bootvis (which I won't link to because it's easy to **** up your system with it - you have been warned).

Michael_Dark - Lost City wrote: »

And for the guy who defrags his media drives... lol. Now that's just idiotic.

Without passing judgment on people's P2P activities, it's usually media files which suffer from the bittorrent problem I mentioned above. So if you're torrenting movies and music directly to your media drive, then defragging it actually does make sense. Though the separate download partition solution I mentioned works better. Torrent to that special partition or even the system drive, then copy the downloaded files to your media drive.

i have had this issue on my computer,well on my second pc.I would log in and everything is moving fast and u have the disconnect thing happening.So i would keep restarting game till it became normal to log into.Then after monnths of doing that my cable modem started randomly resetting alot.So i go buy a new modem and i thought the issue was fixed then it started again.So i called my provider they came down to fix my issue,i had noise in my line(bad splitter),now its all goodb:bye