WUU! Wuuhuu!

Neither of my computers are exactly speed demons. A 4+ year old desktop and a nearly 2-year-old laptop. As such, I don't run a ton of mods in WoW.

That said, keeping them up-to-date and running -- on two systems -- even when Blizzard is not particularly speedy with updates and patches is a royal pain in the can. I tried several weeks ago to use WoWAceUpdater (WAU).

The first problem was that at the time, everyone was up in arms because they had added an advertising image linker to their updater. That... and I couldn't get the foolish thing to run. It would start, but not get out to the inner-tubes and just didn't work. So, I gave up, marked all my mods as "Load Out of Date" and moved on.

The second problem is that WAU only works with Ace mods. While I tend to gravitate towards the Ace mods in the hopes that they deliver what they advertise as being lightweight and generally less processor/memory "hoggy", I still have a couple of mods that I haven't found adequate replacements for through Ace.

The third was that their recent crash and downtime was problematic since that was the time period that I was looking to get my mods updated.

Enter WoW UI Updater! WUU!

This little baby seems to do what I need it to do. It updates from Ace, but also from all of the other major UI sites (Curse, UI @ World of War) and has some direct links to mods that aren't posted to the other sites. Auctioneer and a few others.

Last night I finally cleaned out my entire AddOns folder (including some really old stuff) and started the process anew. I quickly on WoWAce found replacements for the things that I feel are required or that are recommended by my guild for raiding (Karazhan only so far). I grabbed Omen. I grabbed Recount (to replace SWStats). I grabbed BigWigs. I had been using BigWigs for a couple of weeks and like it better than DeadlyBossMobs. I grabbed SCT, but I'm not sure I'm going to keep that. I grabbed a few other essentials. I'm not 100% of the way there yet, but my UI generally feels zippier. Omen I particularly like, although I only tried it with my pet and not in a group situation. Hopefully it continues to work as smoothly.

The best part -- for me -- was that WUU lets you export your mod listing to an XML file and import it back in on another computer. So I was able to get everything setup in one place, export the listing, and then move it to the other computer to keep them in sync. The only thing that's not happening right now, is that individual settings for each mods are saved on each machine. I think (99% sure) there's a way to fix this, too, but I need to dig a little further.

If anyone stumbles across this blog and hates managing and updating WoW AddOns, look no further than WUU. It's a SourceForge project, so I'm reasonably confident that it doesn't have adware, spyware, or keyloggers, but I also don't run it while WoW -- or anything else for that matter -- is running and I only give it access to the 'net when I'm doing updates. Great tool!