As you are all aware, or at least most of you are, lolAemora has a lolConnection on his lolComputer, and Thursday lolWindower stopped working due to lolCorruptRegistryFiles.

So I followed all the necessary steps to try to get it working again, following the Windower help thingy, and I couldn't fix it. So I reinstalled FFXI. However, I only required 56 new downloaded files. lolOmghow?

Safer's nice concept of moving the whole programme files and altering the registries is beyond me, so I came up with a very rudamentory way of transfering files. Just copy and paste it. All FFXI info is in .dat format, so all you need to do is copy the .dat files, and replace them once you've re-installed it all.



ROM and Sound are the main FFXI directory files. These contain all the important and lengthy .dats like equipment, sound effects and original stuff.
ROM2 and Sound2 is RoZ, so all zones and RoZ mobs and music are in here.
ROM3 and Sound3 is CoP, so all zones and CoP mobs and music are in here.
ROM4 and Sound4 is ToAU related and blah blah blah.

If you just copy these 8 files and all the data included in them, if you are up to date, you will only need to download the files outside of these .dats, like the .dll and .txt files so that the game and it's updates can communicate between the then dormant unused files (Say, Chocobo Racing last update), and what the game can do now. That's a total of 56 files, and it sure hell beats downloading all 12k files of .dat modification again, reducing FFXI Update from 4hrs+ to 5 minutes. ^^

Just copy the files to a different directory or CDs or a DVDs. It's 7 GBs worth of data to copy, and took me about 30 minutes to just shift the files last night to reinstall FFXI, then another 30 to transfer the files across and overwrite the fresh clean old installation. Took an hour, but it sure as hell beats waiting for the download of each individual file.

'USER' is where your macros are kept. Copy that too. Lawl. The file won't be created until you log onto your character though. So Log on > Log Off > Transfer Files > ??? > Profit.

I tried to do the same with POL, but it crashes the .exe file if you do it so you're gonna have to bear with 15 minutes of downloading from POL :<

After I did all this though, Windower still said that my registry files were corrupt. LOL@ME! I blame McAfee and me playing around with it the other night. If only I can remember what I did to undo it :<

_________________

So I bought Vista and installed FFXI, downloaded the new POL.exe that PlayOnline released so that FFXI works with Vista, and to my horror, even though the POL was the latest version, I had to download all the 150 Mbs of data to go with it, because they just give you the basic shit. Lawl.

Had to fiddle with Windower a little to get it to work, but it works! Works on Aero and that other fiddly one, where you can rotate screens... Anyway, I so plan on abusing this! And Vista's all swish. Lawl.

_________________

Lol@you
When I bought my laptop it came with vista... sooo without knowing I had to dl vista compatible version of POL. I installed everything with my CDs.. FFXI + expansions and all. THEN... I tried to start POL and it didn't work! I quickly logged onto POL site as I remembered there was an update for vista users.

I ended up having to reinstall everything.