Author Topic: New notebook help... (Read 276 times)

etoh · « **on:** June 01, 2007, 02:11:09 PM »

Will be purchasing a new notebook computer shortly. Things have changed so much since my last purchase I'm completely lost. XP vs. Vist, Dual Core vs. AMD this or that, etc. Any advice what to look for and compatibility with AH would be greatly appreciated.

General use, wife plays SIMS and I play AH, that's it for games.

Thanks in advance

Irwink! · « **Reply #1 on:** June 01, 2007, 05:22:29 PM »

Any laptop's not going to be the first choice for gaming but - look for one that has some kind of dedicated video, XP instead of Vista and Intel Core 2 Duo's presently have the edge performance wise over AMD's current offerings. If you wind up getting something with Vista make sure it has at least 2GB of RAM. The Core 2 Duo will make a bigger difference with Vista as well.

Borsuk · « **Reply #2 on:** June 02, 2007, 10:24:52 AM »

Avoid Vista like the plague if you can. I am running Vista on a pretty high end Toshiba laptop and wish I had never heard of it.
If pos get a laptop with separate video ram on the graphics card (256MB or more recommended), don't get one that depends on system ram alone. If you do get Vista , there is a thread started by Skuzzy about shutting down resourse hogging services in Vista. It is resource intensive compared to XP. My graphics grind to slow mo if I am zooming in on a target near trees or in the middle of a furball.

They say you shoud never move to a new MS OS until at least service pack 1 is issued, Vista is no different.

Good luck.

etoh · « **Reply #3 on:** June 02, 2007, 06:17:48 PM »

Settled on a Dell as I can still order XP.

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5300 (2MB Cache/1.73GHz/533MHz FSB
1 Gig Ram
80 gig HD
256MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400 HyperMemory - shared
XP home
15.4" WS

This should do the trick. Shouldn't it?

Borsuk · « **Reply #4 on:** June 02, 2007, 10:58:12 PM »

As your running XP that should do but if you can afford it I would go for 2 GB RAM especially as you are using 1/4 of it for your video ram. XP can handle up to 3.5 GB Ram and increasing your ram is the biggest single performance improver you can do. Plus RAM is relatively cheap at the moment. I used to play on a 1300 Inspiron Celeron with 1.25GB RAM and it wasn't too bad. The dual cores should improve performance.

This is what I am using.

Toshiba Satellite P105 Laptop.
Processor Intel(R) Core Duo (TM)2 x T7200 @ 2.00GHz
2GB DDR2 667 FSB System Ram ( Increasing to 4GB next week)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS with 256.00 MB onboard RAM and using 285 MB system RAM (Total 541MB ) 17" Trubrite Screen.
200 MB HDD with 8MB level 1 Cache

And here comes the performance killer.
Windows Vista Home Premium (Sobbing in beer as I write). :-(