Total Newcomer, All Help Appreciated.

[RobinJohns]

Basically, I shall keep this short. I have recently purchased a dell inspiron 1501 laptop with the following items (taken directly from the dell site)

http://www.2and2.net/files/466db572d27d9.jpg

Basically, Will this game run smoothly with those specs?

Also will vista be a problem?

I also plan on becoming a mage gnome with Mining and Skinning then moving up to enginerring when i get bored ( Jumper Cables FTW)

Also is WoW any good on a laptop?

Please can you answer my questions with good adult responses and not such things as "L0LZ NUb! I pwnT Ya NaNNZOR!"

Thanks

[Tanitha]

Disclaimer: Personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.

When mobile I play World of Warcraft on a HPnx9420 laptop. It's great and runs fairly well. The one addition I made to the system is to add an additional GB of RAM and to get myself a decent wireless mouse. (Logitech MX1000).

The laptop itself looks fairly reasonably, although I'm sure Kalos will be able to give you a fairly decent rundown on what really works or what does not really work with it. I'd guestimate and say that it looks as if it will run World of Warcraft reasonably well, but I'm not as knowledgeable as he is on the various ATI chipsets.

My one concern with it would be Vista. I'm not entirely trusting of it's capabilities yet and what I've read seems to indicate that it is fairly resource hungry. It would not be my first choice of OS for a laptop.

[IRPander]

It looks like it's specs are exactly the same as mine exept the OS, which I have XP. I'm not so secure with Vista's abilities to run smoothly though, as Tanitha has already stated. From what I've seen Vista can be a bit of a resource hog and that might cause your gameplay to freeze, jump, or completely shutdown. Who knows for sure, though.


Only thing I see different is the video card as I went for the Nvidia card.

[RobinJohns]

I have found how to disable aero on the vista laptop, so it should save me some space.

See you in game soon :D

P v P Night elf druid coming your way :P

[Drakkor]

I have a new HP laptop (sorry don't have specs ATM) w/Vista - and yes Vista is a memory hog to say the least. The major problem I have w/Vista is it likes to run updates whenever it feels like it and will even auto re-start my laptop w/out notice, which really stinks when in an instance or a group quest.
I think this can be controlled but I haven't figured that out yet.
As far as playing on a laptop goes, I now prefer it over my PC.
The HP was off the shelf w/decent internals and runs WoW perfectly well BTW, other than the update thing.
Hope that helps some.

[Valas Azuviir]

*moves thread to Tech Section*

*Ties goat to nearby tree to lure out the Kalos*

*Teleports away*

[Tanitha]

baaaaaaaahlos. Baaaaaaahlos. Wait. It's sheep that baah. Goats bleat. I think. I've never actually met a goat.

[Kalos]

Tasty goat, almost as good as swiss chocolate for getting my attention. I'm not sure if this is an adult response though, and as such I shall commence technical evaluation.

Once the laptop is purchased, consider a ram upgrade. 2x1 gig of DDR2 ram can be had for less than $150. For Vista and gaming, it is strongly recommended to have two gig or above, else WoW and Vista have to divide resources, and Vista is almost five times more hungry than XP is before even counting any other prorgrams you might be running. WoW needs one gig of ram ideally, which is what you have, but Vista eats up half off the bat. Not good for performance. The Graphics card eats up another quater, it needs system ram for it's own uses.

With that set up alone, you have 300 MB, or less, for a game which Blizzard's own recommended memory to be devoted to the game is over 500mb. It will most likely run choppy, possibly to the point of being unplayable. Vista+WoW+Intergrated graphics is too much for one gig of ram to do properly, once doubled to two gig it should cope much better. It might float without it, but it equally so probably won't be pretty.

Everything else is pretty up to snuff. Turion X2 isn't a bad design, and hold it's own against Intel's designs, barely underperforming Intel's top designs in most cases. The Xpress graphics are ok, and will do the job, however they are ram hungry by design. This is a very ram intensive build, and it shouldn't be starved of it if it is to perform properly.