WinEQ2:FAQ
WinEQ2 Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How can I get the Windows taskbar to appear {under,over} the game window?
Most users requested that the task bar be underneath the window because it interferes with gameplay, so it should be under the window by default. The trick is that when the game window is placed high enough on the screen, the task bar is actually placed over the game window. When the game window is placed a little lower, the task bar is placed under the EQ window. Play around with moving the window slightly up or down and the taskbar will reposition itself over or under the window.
With WinEQ Pro, you can skip playing with window positioning, and simply toggle Lock Size (found per window in the game window context menu, or can be set in the Normal preset to cause this to be default behavior).
Q: How can I turn on Picture-in-Picture?
Picture-in-Picture (PIP) must be enabled in two separate places -- the tray menu, and for each profile (or individual window). This is so PIP can be turned off entirely by changing a single setting, and so PIP can be disabled for specific profiles or windows. If you would like to enable PIP for all windows, first enable the global setting found in the tray menu's Options submenu. Then, for each profile you use, turn on "Allow Picture-in-Picture". If the change does not take effect immediately, simply restart each session and PIP will be used.
Q: Should I use the same folder for each session of my game, or separate folders?
Short answer: Same folder
Long answer: It is a common myth that game performance can be increased by using mulitple folders, possibly even on separate hard drives. The thinking goes that using separate copies of the files will allow them to be used independently and hopefully faster than trying to use the same files. However, this is not the case. A relatively simple concept in computer science says that hard drive accesses are slow, and memory accesses are fast -- about 10 milliseconds for hard drive access, and under 100 nanoseconds for memory access (as low as about 5ns depending on if the memory is stored on the CPU or if it is system RAM, etc), a ratio of 10 to 10,000,000. That's a pretty big difference. The point of explaining this is modern computer systems employ several "cache" systems to reduce the amount of file accesses as well as file access times by reusing unchanged data directly from memory, or by predicting the next data to be retrieved (for an easy to understand example, if you read the first half of a file, you can be expected to also read the second half). By using a separate folder, these cache systems cannot recognize that the data being read is actually the same. This means that instead of 10,000,010 nanoseconds for loading time for two sessions, it will probably be 20,000,000 nanoseconds because the entire data must be read twice. In terms of loading time, you have absolutely nothing to lose by using a single folder on a single hard drive, and can reasonably expect it to be faster than using multiple folders, regardless of whether it is on another physical hard drive. Note that it may be possible in some cases to see performance increases by using a separate hard drive, but the hard drives MUST be on a separate IDE channel, or they are competing for the same resources anyway (or use SATA, etc), and it is still unlikely that this will show improvement over a single folder.
