GuildWars.dat File Problems?

Good morning everyone.

I was hoping maybe someone here could set my mind at ease. I have the 3 Guild Wars titles installed on my PC, and have noticed some strange behavior on the PC since installing the game.

1. I cannot fully defrag the hard drive any longer. It looks like the GuildWars.dat file is over 5 Mb in size, and I know Windows XP has a hard time defragmenting files over 2 GB in size. Could this be an issue?

2. Since installing Guild Wars on my machine, I have noticed an increasing number of errors in the event log as follows:

Event ID - 51 - An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation

When these errors happen, Windows takes an exceptionally long time to boot. Scandisk shows no errors on the drive.

I'm wondering if these problems could be caused by the size of the GuildWars.dat file?

This is on my old PC. I have been reluctant to install on my new PC for fear that the problems would manifest themselves again.

Anyone able to set my mind at ease?

That dat file size of over 5Gb sounds funny. I'm sure that they updated Guild Wars so that the maximum size of it was 4Gb (for people using FAT32). Anyway, if defragging is a problem you'll want Contig (don't worry, thats a link to Microsoft's website btw)

This is a command line tool, but it is easy to use and is designed to defrag a single large file (e.g. your gw.dat)

First of all, download the file, and extract the program to your C:\Windows directory. Then press Windows + R and type 'cmd' then hit Enter. This will give you the XP Command Prompt. Input the command below:

This will tell you how many fragments your Gw.dat file is stored in - it could be less than 10, or it could be (especially given the problems you mention) hundreds or even thousands. Either way, unless the 'number of fragments' is 1, you will want to enter this next command:

This will then defragment your Gw.dat file for you - it might take a while, but it doesn't take anywhere near as long as a full system defrag. This should hopefully have drastically reduced the fragmentation of your Gw.dat, resulting in easier system defragging (as well as increasing Guild Wars performance to boot).