Crossover games 9.0.0

My windows vista machine has recently developed a hard disc fault, their is a clicking noise and the machine keeps freezing. This machine is mainly used for playing games and syncing my iphone. I've got a new hard disc on order, but it occured to my I might not need to run windows on the machine any longer. Since stopping Neverwinter Nights development, I've been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) and Guild wars. I've notice that both of these run in crossover games now so though I'd give things ago.

So I've got crossover games 9.0.0 installed on my laptop, the laptop is less powerful than my windows machine so I won't be comparing performance. All I'm looking for is the games run correctly and they are playable.

First thing I need to do is install WoW, this is quite a painfull process as it's a huge game. It was painful on windows too. Rather than install from the CD's I though I'd use the Internet installer, so I downloaded it and used crossover games to install it. The install process then took 2 days....... 6GiG download. Wish I'd used the DVD now :-) Anyway, a couple of days later and it's all installed, but now it needs patching!!! This is really anoying thing about wow, you think it would just have installed the latest version. So anther day and a half later and it's patched to the latest version.

I can now run wow and see the initial screen. Crossover games has added a icon to my KDE desktop and start menu which is great. I now try to log into my WoW account, it's at this point things go really wrong. Turns out I downloaded the wrong version. I have the enUS and not the enGB, so I can't log into my account. This means another 4 days of downloading...........

Ok time to try something different, I move the Wow install on my hard disc and mounted my windows machines hard disc via samba. I now copy the installed version on their to the place where crossover games installed things before. There is a config file at the path "World of Warcraft\WTF\Config.Config.WTF". With the help of a crossover games WoW page I edit the settings in their to add the following:

SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "232"
SET gxApi "opengl"
SET ffxDeath "1"
SET gxMultisampleQuality "0.000000"
SET gxFixLag "0"
SET fullAlpha "1"
SET lodDist "100.000000"
SET SmallCull "0.070000"
SET DistCull "500.000000"
SET farclip "477"
SET particleDensity "1.000000"
SET unitDrawDist "300.000000"
SET gxCursor "0" SET baseMip "1"
SET spellEffectLevel "0"
SET weatherDensity "0"
SET pixelShaders "0"
SET ffxGlow "0"

After all of this, I fired up WoW again and successfully logged in. I've been playing the game most of the day and it's all working really well. It's a little sluggish in places, like for example when it displays a tool tip. That is probably down to my laptop been a bit underpowered. All in all, crossover games is really impressive.

I think I'm going to be checking out VMWare next for running iTunes and iPhone syncing. If that works I'll be able to ditch windows for Linux.