Haven’t played for a while. I have an elderly laptop that will run retail, but it’s nearly unusable. However, Classic was meant to have lower system requirements. I played briefly in the Classic beta and that was fine. So my questions are,
Does Wrath Classic also have significantly lower requirements than retail?
If I try it and it is unplayable, is it likely I could get a refund on the subscription?
I did look up the system requirements, but the trouble is that if (like me) it’s been 20 years since you had reason to pay attention to PC hardware details, it’s not obvious how to compare processors from different series, and ultimately the answer is probably that this old computer is borderline, so it’s going to come down to needing to try it anyway. Thus the question about refunds.
I don’t know honestly, because technically speaking, you are not paying to play the Classic iterations. Your subscription is for retail, with the Classics as an added bonus of the subscription. Soo I do not know if that has any bearing at face value. That being said, refunds are time sensitive. I recall seeing somewhere that refunds can be requested within 14 days of purchase, but I welcome anyone to correct me on that. I’ll try and dredge up where I saw that.
Game time is typically nonrefrundable, and it is a virtual certainty that you won’t get a refund on a 30-day subscription halfway through the billing cycle.
Best case, if you want to actually play the game to see if your 20-year old laptop can handle it, would be to set up a recurring 30-day subscription and wait a few days for it to process before cancelling it. It’ll only cost you $15, and you’ll have 30 days to determine if your hardware is capable of handling the game.
Personally, I think the better option is to ask a computer-literate friend/relative to compare your specs to the game’s minimum/recommended specs. Or you could post your computer specs over in the Tech Support forum and ask the knowledgeable posters there.
if you make a post over in technical support you could get an idea of if and how well your computer should run it. If you know your computer hardware you can list it there, otherwise you can include your dxdiag - https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/12988 - copy paste the whole thing in there and then highlight it and hit the </> button at the top of the reply box
I wouldn’t need 30 days - I’d be able to tell in 30 minutes. That’s how long it took me to try retail again and decide that sometime during Shadowlands, it went from “bad but okay to mess around a bit and see the new stuff” to “not usable enough to be worth spending $15.” Classic Wrath by itself would absolutely be worth $15 to me if it’s playable. Not at home so I can’t post specs right now, but this laptop is about 10 years old. (For the record, I’m pretty computer literate, I’m just not up on current processors. I’m more a Mac person, but sadly my Apple hardware is even older.)
You can always install Linux on your old system. It brings new life to older machines. You can then use Lutris to run WOW. I run WOW on Linux with zero issues.
look into it if you really want to improve your performance.
Thanks, I might try that. Didn’t know that was possible - last time I had a Linux install, running Windows programs on it was pretty wobbly. That laptop is full of old Windows crud and probably needs a good clear out and reformat anyway. It’s also low on free disk space which is probably not helping WoW performance at all.
Older zones and the Classic client itself put lower requirements on the GPU side. If the problem is low power and a very old CPU both versions will struggle.
The question is what’s your hardware? What laptop do you have?
I doubt it will improve any performance. At best it could help if it would be a weak dual core CPU and Windows would be eating bit to much on the CPU side.
I will have to disagree. Depending on the distro he choses will determine the performance gains. Linux uses way less recourses than Windows. So there will be a performance increase.
I use windows daily, just not for gaming really. The thing is for old weak laptop if you remove Windows and put lightest Linux then you pretty much removed some CPU load. GPU part for desktop can be ignored in this. If the game is GPU limited then Linux won’t have clear benefits. If it was the CPU then it can have.
You can do links via preformatted text option. Only green and blue posters can post clickable links for non whitelisted domains though
It’s AMD A6-4400M APU with Radeon HD Graphics. 2.7 GHz. 4 GB RAM. I am guessing the graphics processing is on the CPU or otherwise integrated and that’s why it doesn’t have a separate GPU designation.
Windows probably is eating too much CPU as recently the fan runs all the time even when I’m not using it. Normally fan running = CPU working hard, though I never find anything in task manager. It will probably help to rebuild with either Windows or Linux, but it’s still gonna be a ten* year old computer, so may be borderline even for classic.
Google says this model is from 2015 but based on when it was loaned to me and how long the previous owner had it, I think it’s older.
Unfortunately there’s not much you could do to that system that would gain useful performance. The APU is way below minimum recommended for both CPU and GPU. Had they been able to use the old game clients for the classic versions your laptop would actually be above recommended.
The fan running all the time on an old laptop can point to the cooler being clogged with dust and needing to be cleaned.
