Best laptop for budget to play UOSA on?

[SighelmofWyrmgard]

Mens Rea,

you mentioned you might like to also play Starcraft2: be mindful that all of the "older" Blizzard publishes have serious issues running under Windows7, and Vista; I have no issues with UO under Windows7, so certainly you should be safe there.

I imagine you'd be able to effortlessly run UO on almost any machine, so you'd need to choose your system specs in accord with the graphics-rendering demands of any other games, modern or legacy, that you intend to play: assess the most-intensive game's graphics requirements, and proceed to satisfy it.

I've seen a lot of economically-priced laptops relying on the ATI Radeon 4XXX series of graphics support: most of these are "Video Adapters", rather than bona fide "Video Cards", as they possess no built-in VRAM; some laptop manufacturers, however, have upgraded these "Adapters" with RAM chips, to turn them into "real" video cards with integrated VRAM. This is a laptop-manufacturer upgrade to the basic adapter, so you'll need to see the specific specs that pertain to the specific model of laptop to determine if VRAM has been added.

Don't confuse this with "Shared Video Memory": all video support shares RAM when it exceeds its own onboard resources; generally speaking, you must have some dedicated VRAM if you want to play games that render 3D graphics.

Mind you, don't bankrupt yourself in pursuit of dedicated VRAM: my old laptop, a 2GHz single-core under XP and with only 1 GB RAM, had no troubles rendering games with mid-poly resolution 3D graphics (that machine did work hard, however, and my OS performance was extremely streamlined); the VRAM its card possessed was 128MB; my newer 3-Core with 4GB RAM has 256MB and, so, doesn't work nearly as hard.

Getting back to UO: my older machine had no troubles whatsoever simultaneously running 3 UO clients, plus a couple of web browsers running/downloading live-streaming video, plus whatever else I felt like doing at the time; however, whenever I played an online game with intensive 3D graphics, that was all I was doing.

I hope I've pointed out some pertinent considerations.

SS

[morganm]

I recently picked up a Dell D620 for $350 It was originally $250 but I had them max out the RAM, put in a bigger HDD, and change to a DVD RW +/- drive.

Specs:
Intel Core2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz)4MB L2 Cache 667MHz FSB
4GB DDR2 RAM
160 GB HDD
Intel GMA 950 graphics adapter (integrated... but what do you expect for the price? Some came with the 256MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M if you can find them but you're gonna pay extra for it!)

Going to this from my old CPX (PIII 500mhz, 128 MB RAM) was a big jump =) Plays UO fine with 3 clients, 3 razors, UOAM, web browser, IRC, Avast, plus other things running in the background all at the same time... doesn't slow it down. For the price I paid... I'm very happy. It's not a GREAT deal but it was a good deal.

[Brules]

I recently picked up a Dell D620 for $350 It was originally $250 but I had them max out the RAM, put in a bigger HDD, and change to a DVD RW +/- drive.

Specs:
Intel Core2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz)4MB L2 Cache 667MHz FSB
4GB DDR2 RAM
160 GB HDD
Intel GMA 950 graphics adapter (integrated... but what do you expect for the price? Some came with the 256MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M if you can find them but you're gonna pay extra for it!)

Going to this from my old CPX (PIII 500mhz, 128 MB RAM) was a big jump =) Plays UO fine with 3 clients, 3 razors, UOAM, web browser, IRC, Avast, plus other things running in the background all at the same time... doesn't slow it down. For the price I paid... I'm very happy. It's not a GREAT deal but it was a good deal.

Thats a great laptop for the $ outside of the graphics card.

[SJane3384]

Mens Rea,

you mentioned you might like to also play Starcraft2: be mindful that all of the "older" Blizzard publishes have serious issues running under Windows7, and Vista

There's a workaround for this, and I've actually found it in a nice little .exe file, if anyone's interested.