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Balasarius
09-30-2008, 09:01 PM
Where does the Blizzard Background Downloader store the patch? I can't find it for the life of me. It's not in the WoW directory. Clicking File -> Show Containing Folder does nothing for me.

This is driving me nuts.

Thanks.
Balasarius
09-30-2008, 09:03 PM
Found it. They couldn't have hid it better if they tried.

C:\Users\Public\Documents\Blizzard Entertainment\World of Warcraft\Updates\WoW-2.4.3-to-3.0.1-TBC-USMX-Update
Athryn
09-30-2008, 09:03 PM
Its in a very unlikely place, at least for Vista. It's in the Public Documents folder.
Derek French
09-30-2008, 09:59 PM
Wow, it actually works and downloads files for you? Man, that thing has rarely worked for me, either at home or at work. It says No Problems and sits there for hours at 0%. I have always just gone for the downloads from mirrors or from co-workers.
z22
10-01-2008, 07:57 AM
Same for me Derek. If there's one item that Blizzard completely messed up in WoW is their patcher/installer system. 30+ years in computing and software engineering and I still don't understand how to properly patch WoW. I must be dumm.
André Costa
10-01-2008, 08:03 AM
There's 2 things i hate about Blizzard's patch system.

One is having to download all those smaller individual patches between a major release and CURRENT_VERSION instead of just a single larger one. Good thing i remembered to backup the old patches before removing WoW when i took my break.

The other is that their Torrent system doesn't allow you to change your upload bandwith so i have to track down the torrent for each release/patch and use it on a proper torrent client.
Balasarius
10-01-2008, 08:08 AM
Yeah, the downloader has always worked for me. Through multiple computers and couple different LinkSYS routers.

On my old custom-built computer, it would come up and say that my NIC driver was out of date (it wasn't -- as if IT would fucking know!) and that it had disabled bi-directional communication and was also therefore reducing my download bandwidth. But there was an advanced option to force it to go bi-directional anyway, and that always worked for me.

I think the root cause of my OP is Vista. I'm really starting to hate it. Why did they have to move all the directories around? Grrr.
AndrewM
10-01-2008, 08:43 AM
Wow, it actually works and downloads files for you? Man, that thing has rarely worked for me, either at home or at work. It says No Problems and sits there for hours at 0%.

For the latest patch, I had this problem, too. For days it sat at couple of megabytes downloaded. But one time I left it running and came back a few hours later and it decided that it would actually download at a reasonable speed. Why? No idea.
Derek French
10-01-2008, 11:08 AM
Well, semi good news. I have left the downloader running for about 14 hours now at home. It has downloaded 10 Meg of the 800 Meg patch in that time and is currently getting data at about 2 k/second.
Tankero
10-01-2008, 11:15 AM
You can select to de-throttle the download. It'll be done in a few hours.
Spasticon
10-01-2008, 11:28 AM
You can select to de-throttle the download. It'll be done in a few hours.

This is what I do too. It's usually done in a couple hours.
z22
10-01-2008, 02:06 PM
Last night I downloaded some installer stub from the PTR area of worldofwarcraft.com. Launching this started some 800m download that took a typical amount of time for the size, ~3 hours. I have no idea if this 800m of PTR helps me for the next patch. I assume it does? *shrug*
Derek French
10-01-2008, 04:58 PM
You can select to de-throttle the download. It'll be done in a few hours.

That was what I set on the outset. It is still proceeding that slowly.

That being said, its currently at 100 Meg done and is up to 20k/second.

Its just always been faster for me to download from FileShack than to do anything else.

(I get downloads from FileShack and other sites at between 400-1000 k/second)
dannimal
10-01-2008, 06:22 PM
It's not like it's terribly hard (once you've identified the place it stores the download) to just copy the torrent into your torrent client of choice and get it at "normal" speeds.

I mean, I'm kind of a torrent idiot and I managed to figure it out. How hard could it be?
Tankero
10-01-2008, 06:53 PM
I think there's further throttling occurring down the line, Derek. Even here in South America, I was able to clock 150 k/s for the patch.
Derek French
10-01-2008, 07:38 PM
It's not like it's terribly hard (once you've identified the place it stores the download) to just copy the torrent into your torrent client of choice and get it at "normal" speeds.

I mean, I'm kind of a torrent idiot and I managed to figure it out. How hard could it be?
I tried many places but ended up finding the file in "\World of Warcraft\Cache\BackgroundDownload.torrent" I will give that a try tonight.
I think there's further throttling occurring down the line, Derek. Even here in South America, I was able to clock 150 k/s for the patch.

Yeah, its really whacky. The downloader is using 606 Meg of RAM on my system right now and its still chugging along at 20k/sec. For fun, I just downloaded the latest Slackware CD ISOs with uTorrent, and they came down at 600 k/second.
Derek French
10-01-2008, 07:44 PM
Um, holy hell...

uTorrent is currently downloading the file at 560 k/sec using 20 Meg of RAM.

This is compared to the Blizzard downloader running at 20 k/sec using 606 Meg of RAM.

That is the weirdest reversal of numbers I have ever seen.
rei
10-01-2008, 07:51 PM
i always use the official torrents and get em via utorrent: http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors

(marked by green wave icon)