Wednesday, October 01, 2014

How To Move EVE to new Solid State Drive

My computer is about four years old but it was pretty decent when I bought it and upgrades to RAM and video card have kept it pretty good for the gaming I do. Except the hard drive. The old IDE drive was so slow with the IO that some games took forever to load and I was beginning to suspect some of my mystery 2-3 second freezes in EVE were a symptom of this as well.

With SSD prices dropping lately and my wallet flush with cash from selling my soul, I decided to purchase one and add it to my computer to store my games. Here are my steps to how I moved my EVE client and kept the settings on my Windows 7 computer.

1) Install Solid State Drive - This means get it in the box with power and data connected, and formatted in Windows. If you don't know how to do this get someone to help you. On my computer my SSD is the E: drive

2) Copy your EVE client files to the SSD. For me, this was copying the folder C:\program files (x86)\CCP to E:\CCP so I could get both the Tranquility and Singularity clients.

3) Start EVE launcher from new location. Notice how it works but has lost all your settings, overview tabs, shortcuts, etc. It's OK, we'll fix that.

4) Go to your Appdata\Local\CCP folder, for me that was C:\Users\\AppData\Local\CCP. You may need to tell Windows Explorer to show hidden files in order to see the AppData folder. Under there you will see a number of folders like this image:



See how each client instance creates its own folder? The new one for my SSD client instance is e_ccp_eve_tranquility. Copy everything from your old Tranquility instance folder to the new one. For me this was from c_program_files_(x86)_ccp_eve_tranquility ro e_ccp_eve_tranquility.

All Done! Start up EVE on your Solid State Drive and see all your settings like you expect.

BONUS: I decided to move my AppData\Local folder to the SSD as well since most games make use of this folder for storing local settings and saves and such. In Windows 7 if you look at the properties of AppData\Local folder there is a Location tab, and in there you can select a new location. I suggest manually copying everything to the new location first and then just changing the location without windows copying them for you, but your mileage may vary.

2 comments:

  1. I was hoping for some performance advantage discussion, based on your change.

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    Replies
    1. I've noticed that objects in space load faster on grid now, haven't experienced the mini-freeze, and generally runs smoother.

      Its more noticeable in Civ 5 and Call of Duty loading times.

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