Bizzare Bug Boosts WoW Speeds When Using WMP

Back in my World of Warcraft days, I mainly played the game on a laptop with a 16MB GeForce Go card. I don't remember the model or series number, but yes that is 16MB of video memory for a game whose box says it requires 32MB at the minimum. To say the game was a slideshow in Ironforge would be an overstatement--it was a still shot.

Because I despised the music in World of Warcraft (Nick tells me the music in The Burning Crusade is better, but I haven't played since early 2006), I would listen to my own music through Windows Media Player while playing the game, performance concerns be damned. The thing already ran like crap, right?

Remarkably, I could have been giving myself a boost. According to reports springing up on WoW forums and now being more widely reported, running Windows Media Player when playing the game actually noticeably speeds up loading times. WoW Insider claims you can add the following line to your config.wtf for a boost as well, but it is less significant than the WMP boost and does not stack:

SET timingMethod "1" or SET timingMethod "2"

Maarten hypothesizes that WoW's sound engine uses some kind of module WMP already uses, so having WMP open needs WoW doesn't have to load it when going to new areas, which seems reasonable. According to Game|Life, Blizzard is looking into it.