How to instantly install World of Warcraft

We all know how annoying it is to reinstall WoW after reinstalling our OS. Unfortunately if you installed Windows XP and chose to erase everything on your hard drive you might as well just reinstall the long way. However if you are reading this before you erased your data, you are in luck. For Windows Vista or Windows 7 users, as long as you did not erase files the files out of your Windows.old folder, you are in luck.

One of the greatest things about this is that you keep ALL of your addons as well as your addon settings. Your game settings, and you also keep your macros.

Things You'll Need

• World of Warcraft game folder.
• Windows Operating System [XP/Vista/Win7]

Instructions

1. Ultimately, the first thing you'd have needed done is to have installed a new windows operating system and no longer have World of Warcraft installed but still have the data.

   The first thing you need to do is make sure your World of Warcraft game folder is secure. If you are planning to install Windows XP again, you *must* back up the World of Warcraft folder in your Program Files before you continue. The easiest way to do this is to copy it to a secondary hard drive or copy it to an external storage device like a USB stick. If you have already reinstalled XP and lost your data, you are stuck reinstalling the slow way.

2. If you installed to Windows Vista or Windows 7 you must make sure the World of Warcraft game folder is secure. To do this, navigate to your Computer in the Start menu and go to C:\. From there go to Windows.Old and go to the program files in there (Note, for Windows Vista or sometimes Windows 7 users the wow folder *may* have been moved to C:\Users\Public\) If your World of Warcraft folder is intact, great, move to step 3.

3. Now in this step the magic. I'm going to link a registry file which I have backed up from my own registry but it will work for anyone on a Windows Operating System.

   The registry key: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/21764/wow.zip

   I don't blame you if you don't trust me, but after you extract it you can right click the file yourself and open it with notepad and see for yourself that it is just a harmless registry key that tells your computer World of Warcraft is installed.

4. Once you extract the file from the link I provided double click it. After this, add your World of Warcraft folder to your C:\Program Files. Once that is done go into your World of Warcraft folder create a shortcut and put it on your desktop. Once that is complete you are good to go.

Tips & Warnings

• Here is what the wow registry key looks like upon right clicking it and opening it with Notepad: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/21764/wowkeynotepad.jpg

• Throughout this article I wholly assume your root directory is C:\. If you have installed your operating system to a different directory, change it as such.

• I have been doing this for several years now and I have yet to encounter any issues. If you have, please respond in a comment and I will look into it.