Useful tips to help prevent patching issues.
As you may know we patch World of Warcraft quite regularly. Every time we patch, Technical Support receives customer calls and emails about issues they encounter when downloading and applying the patches. Here are a few steps to take prior to patching that will make the process run smoother and potentially prevent errors.
- Ensure you have adequate hard drive space. Patching requires enough space for the patched files to be re-written to your hard drive.These files can be more than 1 gigabyte in size.
- Defragment your hard drive. Running a Defrag and ScanDisk will help minimize patching errors. You can find more information on our
Running Scandisk & Defrag support page.
- If you are using a home network, you may want to double-check to see if your network is properly set up to use the Blizzard Downloader. You can find more information on our
Networking help for the Blizzard Downloader support page.
- If you are using a software firewall, you may have difficulties connecting after the game is patched because the game files have been changed by the patching process. You may need to reconfigure your firewall to allow the game's executables (wow.exe and launcher.exe) to access the internet. Simply disabling a firewall will not allow these programs access if they have already been blocked. Allowing the game to connect again can be as simple as removing the allowances for the wow.exe and launcher.exe within the firewall and re-adding them once the patch has been installed. More information on firewall configuration can be found on our
Firewall support page.
- If you are experiencing further issues while patching the game please refer to our
Patching Issues support page listing.
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