Fortunately, we brought along our Western Digital Passport USB hard drive with our World of Warcraft folder. The great thing about WoW is that you can just copy the folder to another computer and it's ready to play - no messing around with weird registry settings are going through a lengthy install process. It took approximately 6 minutes to copy the 8.5 GB folder from the portable drive to the Fusion-io SSD. The desktop computer was powered by a 2.5 GHz quad-core AMD Phenom, 4 GB of RAM and an Nvidia 8800 series graphics card. After the folder copy, we doubled-clicked on WoW and it took two to three seconds to open. Impressive, but opening just one window of WoW is just so boring. Ever since the glorious days of text-based MUDs and Everquest, extreme gamers have been multi-boxing, that is playing multiple characters at the same time. Usually this takes multiple machines and several hard drives, but could a solid state drive change all that? You bet.

To prevent any file locking problems, we made four more copies (total of five) of the World of Warcraft folder on the Fusion-io card. Since this was an SSD, the rep said, "screw it" and ran all four copies at once. That's approximately 34 GB of copying from a single source folder back onto the same drive - and it all finished in less than two minutes. Since I multi-box five characters at once on my Skulltrail system, I was now placed in the driver seat to finish the set up. I downloaded a $20 program called Keyclone that would broadcast keystrokes to all the WoW windows. I also installed the Maximizer add-on which eliminates all the window borders from each WoW screen. After a few minutes, I clicked connect on Keyclone and logged into all five of my characters at once. It took less than 10 seconds to load all the windows and just a few more seconds to log in. Things could have gone a bit faster, but we were severely limited by the broadband wireless connection being pumped through a USB dongle. Don't laugh, we're told that the Los Angeles Convention Center wanted to charge $1500 for a wired Ethernet connection.

A quick peek at the task manager showed that the desktop wasn't maxed out on memory or processing power (was hovering at around 15% with 5 WoW windows open). So, we did the unthinkable and configured Keyclone to open up 13 windows at once. Furthermore, we didn't bother making 13 WoW folders and pointed those extra instances back to the five original WoW folders we copied a few minutes earlier. Essentially, all of our WoW folders were being simultaneously accessed by two or three instances. Ah the moment of truth, I fire up Keyclone, click connect and stare in awe as each WoW screen pops up. After 36 seconds, all 13 are up and I log into five of them. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough accounts to actually log into every window, but we might actually solve that problem later by calling up attendees to log into their accounts.