How to Spot a WoW Phishing Email in Gmail

An increasing number of phishing emails are getting sent out asking people to verify their World of Warcraft credentials. The sad thing is that more people are falling for this every day resulting in forum posts like this:

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How to Increase Performance in WoW and other Online Games

Because I’m located in New Zealand, I got used to playing World of Warcraft with a ping of around 350-450ms. This means that there is usually around a half a second lag between when I hit a key and when the server acknowledges the key press. The performance tends to deteriorate when I’m in larger encounters such as raids.

As I’ve now got to a point where I need to raid to get better equipment, this has caused me a lot of pain. Even though I’m on ADSL2, I used to get frequent disconnects when the WoW servers thought I was not responding.

This post is to help people who:

• Frequently disconnect on every large encounter.
• Suffer from significant frame loss on large encounters.
• Suffer from random disconnects even when doing nothing

There are various things that one can do to improve system performance. I’ll detail out the five main things I did to ensure that I remain connected and can respond in a timely fashion during my play sessions.

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DreamLinux no more.. bring on Linux Mint

Well, the experiment with DreamLinux didn’t last for very long. While the install went well, I found the following issues around getting it to work with my Dell 9300 laptop:

• The wireless network drivers didn’t work off the install – i had to use ndiswrapper to load up the windows version of the wireless adapter’s drivers.
• World of Warcraft didn’t work with Wine. That was pretty much the deal breaker for me. While others may have got WoW to work successfully with DreamLinux, I unfortunately couldn’t make it work – even after trying numerous suggested solutions.
• The XFCE windows manager, while being good and lite, was just a bit too different for my liking. I am just not used to the button placing and the windows elements seem to be floating in the windows.

In the end, i knew i had to go back to Gnome as my main environment. Back to Distrowatch and onto Linux Mint I went..

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Installing DreamLinux on my laptop

So, after months of Ubuntu on my Dell 9300, and running World of Warcraft under Wine, I finally decided that Ubuntu was a little to heavy on my cpu and started looking at alternatives.