Plantronics Voyager Pro - Freedom and Peace & Quiet

So I've been using a Logitech Desktop Microphone for some time now every since my son was born. This replaced my very chunky headphones that blocked out alot of noise. While I really liked them I cant afford to miss him waking up or if my wife needs me.

I've been thinking of getting a wireless headset for sometime now and I finally started investigating this. I also was keen to find something that would cancel out surrounding noise - as much as I have gotten used to the Lion King on repeat and going to bed dreaming of Hakuna Matata - my Guild Mates might not necessarily enjoy this as well.

So after looking at the Jawbone Prime Bluetooth Headset which I saw a blue poster talk about on the WoW Forums - I found a CNET Review. They commented that they still preferred the Plantronics Voyager Pro over any other bluetooth headset out there so I checked out the video review.

I was pretty impressed by what I saw so I ordered one from AusPCMarket. It arrived today and I charged it and hooked it up to my mobile phone. I called my wife and one of the first things she asked me was where I was because it was so quiet. I told her the headset had come and she was very impressed - alot of my work colleges where talking loudly and the general buzz of the office floor is usually quite loud and she couldn't hear any of it.

So I walked down the street - and I work on a major road - usually she wouldn't be able to hear anything but loud trucks going by or trams. She once again couldn't hear a thing but my voice. I was coming through nice and clear and I could also hear her very well.

I'm looking forward to going home tonight and giving it a try with Ventrilo - but so far it charged by micro-USB (note this is slightly smaller than mini-usb which is whatt 2.5" portable hard disks use) and it comes with a power adapter and a bunch of different ear pieces. The buttons and call answering are all easy to use and so far I'm very happy with it!

I'll be sure to update my post if I have any issues with my PC using it.

A new server and a new faction

So after having alot of my friends decide to try out Aion or simple just take a break from World Of Warcraft it was pretty clear that things where no longer going to work out all that well on the server I was on. After finding out who was still interested in playing and who was moving on, I decided it was time to find a new home.

After a bit of research on the WoW Realm Forums and some discussion in the multi-boxing community over at d-b I decided that the Guild Southern Armada and the server Caelestraez would be a good fit. The guild seemed very casual and relaxed and consisted of mature gamers. They still did 10 man and 25 man raiding but there was no pressure and after having a chat with a few people it definetly seemed like the right fit for me.

Two other boxers where also on the server - Ooga and Astrid/Simulacra. This was a huge bonus as well as playing with other boxers is always great fun, especially in PvP.

So a large amount of money later and I am now Slatters the Blood Elf Paladin, and Slatza - d Orc Shamans. I must say I have really missed horde and have loved revisting the capital citieis and the atmosphere that is the Horde faction.

To top it all off, my Nvidia GTX 280 started having pink screens upon booting which gradually got worse and worse. I ended up grabbing a Powercolor ATI Radeon 5870 which is a very impressive card and I have noticed a very large performance increase over the 280.

I steered clear of the 295 simple because its a dual-gpu solution on one card and this doesn't really give any performance boost in WoW.

Symlinks, SSD's and Windows 7

So while I had been testing out software solutions to multibox with, back on Windows Vista, I ran into a great thread on the d-b forums. The thread was talking about saving large amounts of hard drive space and making your hard drive thrash about less by using symlinks.

To do that you needed to install a product called powershell which is provided by microsoft and adds alot of features to the command prompt and lets you run scripts - similar to a unix enviroment.

One of the forums users, Chorizotarian, posted up a guide on how to get this working and true it worked great on my single 7200rpm WD hard disk - it saved me some space and made it do a lot less work.

This has come in even more handy since I moved to using Solid State Disks - as they have a much lower capacity than the huge drives we are seeing these days. I had purchased a 120GB SSD for my shiny new Windows 7 install and my other applications and a 60GB SSD just for my WoW folders.

I discovered after a little bit of searching that Windows 7 natively comes with Powershell which saved me a step or two in cloning my WoW folder. Frustratingly I discovered that a few of the steps in the thread no longer worked - Windows 7 is a bit more anal about script security.

So my main WoW folder was called WoWMain. I made a copy of this folder and called it Clone1. So now I had used 30GB of hard drive space. I then installed the 'new-wow' powershell script into my system32 directory under the windows folder and ran the command prompt and ran powershell by typing 'ps'.

To let me run the new-wow.ps script I had to turn of some security features that required the script to be signed. The command to do this under Windows 7 is:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass

This command assumes you are running the command prompt as administrator which you can by right clicking the icon and choosing 'run as administrator' or you can simple disable the ever annoying User Access Control in Control Panel - which stops all those annoying popup boxes everytime you do something and most likely protects you from evil internet villians.

So now that I had turned of script protection temporarily (for this ps session only) I could run is command:

new-wow d:\Clone1 -sourcePath "D:\WoWMain

"I repeated the command for Clone2, Clone 3 and finally Clone 4. The only folders and files that are not linked to Clone 1 are the WTF/WDB folders. Even the Interface\Addons folder points to Clone1 meaning that all I have to do is manage the patches and addons for two folders and this will update everything.

Since I am a Curse Premium member I loaded up my client and asked it to manage two copies of World of Warcraft - one called Main and one called Clones. I set the game directories to respectivly match the folders above and automatically update. Now I can easily add and remove addons for either my main or my clones.

Now all I have left to do is to setup keyclone and my in-game macros and interface and I'm good to go and on my journey to 80.

A new journey

So after hardware multiboxing for quite some time in TBC then taking a long break and dabbling in Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, I've come full circle.

A few things have changed however, I no longer have 5 PC's and look like I could command NASA in my study. This has appeased my fiance greatly. I also dont have an insane power bill - nor require the AC on in the middle of winter as my room got so warm.

After playing around with a few different software options like Innerspace and Keyclone - I have settled on using Keyclone. The support the author gives over at dual-boxing.com has always been excellent. So before I could seriously get started I needed to make a few upgrades to my machine and ended up picking up some solid state disks and another 4GB of RAM.

This puts my system at the following specs:
Intel Q9550
Asus P5Q Motherboard
8GB OCZ Reaper DDR2 8500
Asus GTX280 1GB
120GB OCZ Summit SSD (for OS/Applications)
60GB OCZ Summit SSD (for WoW)
320G WD HDD (For Movies/Music/Photos)
Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio PCI-Ex

I am using a Dell 27" Display as my main monitor and a Dell 24" Display as my secondary. Both have a native resolution of 1920x1200.

I reformatted my PC and loaded up Windows 7 RC 7100. I am extremely impressed. It is rock solid stable - all my drivers loaded correctly. Initially I had a few crashes but I worked out that I needed to load the X-Fi drivers and not just use the default MS ones and the crashing went away.

I also discovered that my sound defaulted to 7.1 Surround Sound which made for some interesting in-game sound at first as I only have a standard 2 speaker system.

So now I had a decent system, I had my software picked out and my OS installed with all my drivers up to date - I just needed to setup and get started.