A good laptop for SL? (and WoW, hehheh)

So despite the State of the Economy, I'm tempted to buy myself a brand-new laptop for playing SL (which I currently play on a company-owned Lenovo laptop that really struggles sometimes) and also WoW (which I currently play on an aging desktop).

I'm very tempted to look at Name systems like say AlienWare, but I don't know if I'd end up paying a premium for just the fancy designer logo. On the other hand getting some random discount brand would worry me in terms of reliability and customer service.

So I'm looking for any and all suggestions and recommendations and experience reports and horror stories and pointers to comprehensive reviews, or other forum threads that my search didn't find, or anything else, on this subject.

Bring it on.

Both run perfectly smooth with HIGH settings on a simple off-the-shelf HP Compaq 6735s that cost me only 500 european dollars, so I don't think you'll find it hard to find something else that's good enough either.
Only problem I have with laprops is the stupid small keyboard really.

What's your budget?

For something old like WoW, a $500 laptop will probably deliver 30+ fps.

Second Life may be older, but its also been regularly upgraded. I'm on a $500 laptop, A Toshiba L305D-S5934. With that I get from 7-15 fps depending - assuming I'm not in some absurd Sim like the Hair Fair.

Alienware being mentioned makes me think you have a higher budget. At that point - start thinking usage. Will this thing be carried around much? Those big gaming laptops are -HEAVY-. Had a few people get them when I was in graduate school, and most of them complained a few months in about lugging all that weight around.

My attitude is to get a small laptop, and a big desktop. If you want it all in one machine - get a powerful and small laptop, and buy a 25"+ monitor for a desk at home...

What Pussycat said... But I would say dual monitors for home kicks some @ss... and for notebooks, smaller is better in my opinion... they make those tiny netbooks that can run SL now.

Also I would recommend getting a pet monkey and a big red button for playing WoW... (Sorry, couldn't resist )

wahaha thanks for the answers so far. What I actually want is a nice lightweight laptop with a 17" monitor for under US$1000. I miiiiight be willing to spend like US$2000 (I have a major birthday coming up!), but only if it was actually worth the money and I would love the thing and not need to replace it for a looong time. I tend to want to play (especially SL, but I'm guessing WoW also once I have the chance) when like lying in bed or lounging around the house randomly, so ideally it would have a good-enough display itself. But it will also be carried hither and yon somewhat, so yeah... Decisions decisions!!

P.S. don't underestimate WoW. It has, like, cooking, and fishing, and helicopter building, and even fashion!

so does Runescape

Just to add for those missing the sarcasm here:

Cooking and fishing.. Those two used to be extremely time consuming professions to learn. Cooking was made way easier in TBC (first expansion), fishing has been made nothing but a joke in WotLK (second expansion).

Dale mentioning helicopter building means he bailed out in time, since nowadays the skill is motorbike building. Which takes several weeks for the dedicated avarage joe. And then, you are the proud owner of a motorbike in which you can tour your PG honey in small circles around the city of Dalaran.

Fashion is a good one too! "OMG noob, why are you wearing lvl 57 cloth leggings? Those so totally suk for a warrior! You need lvl 80 plate or leather with lots of strength and AP, buy my stuff from AH!" (basically every warrior looks the same in wow, and so does every priest, rogue, warlock, deathknight and whatnot these days)

WoW used to be a pretty good game. But these days, aligning two cubes in SL to each other takes more skill than playing WoW, and gives you the freedom to try alligning a triangle to is as well, while in WoW you're stuck with the cubes and are given them completely alligned and finished.

I'm very happy with my Rock:

http://www.rockdirect.com/xtreme-sl8/

You could look at Alienware - they have been getting some good reviews.
Acer is also well thought of.

Dell is still a good choice too.

Another big vote for Rock.. I'm EXTREMELY happy with my

http://www.rockdirect.com/viewNotebook.php?pName=XTREME%20780

I bought an ASUS notebook that runs Old School pretty well. Only cost me about $250 US with max memory. Brought it on a cruise and it stopped working. Won't even start in safe mode. Maybe something I did wrong. Maybe virus, although I had protection on. Anyway, here I am trapped in "real life". /me sighs. At least the scenery is good.

I presume that the laptop starts but won't start Windows? Whenever I have had that sort of problem it has been the video driver.

Pep (I can never remember how I fix it - revert to a previous hardware config version or delete/overcopy the corrupted driver - but shouting at it helps. )

I've been using a Dell Lattitude D830 2GB and it was working fine until the most recent Viewer. But 1.23.4 crashes the entire computer (reboots and says that SL was doing something to a driver - video I guess - that could damage the hardware!) Perhaps newer laptops don't have this issue.

SL runs (albeit at 1 to 4 fps, as it always has) on my Mac PowerBook 17" G4/1.67Ghz,2GB. I've seen it run rather more nicely on a brand new fully decked out MacBook Pro 15" laptop.

I use to use a Toshiba Satellite a135 2GB of mem. It ran Wow okay,SL kind of sucky. Though SL runs kind of sucky on anything I seem to notice...



Anyway-don't get that one.:/

Thanks for all the good feedback! I did some poking around on the web, and am now finding interesting the Sager NP8662, as in:

http://www.factorgaming.com/sager_np8662_customize.php

It's a more obscure brand, but sounds high quality from the stuff I've been able to find about it. And it seems to be cheaper for the same speed / size as the Alienwares I was looking at. So hmmmmmm...

Anyone tried one of these?

There is no such thing as a lightweight laptop with a 17" screen. Anything with a screen that big is going to be at least 7 pounds, which isn't light in my book, and some edge up to 8 or 9.

Basically, your tradeoffs in getting a good laptop for SL are size (physical and screen), GPU power, weight, and cost. (CPU power is pretty much irrelevant; aside from netbooks, the GPU is going to be the SL bottleneck on most laptops.) GPU power and size are somewhat linked, because you don't find high-end GPUs in small laptops.

Down in the small light end of the spectrum (12-13" screens and weights under 5 pounds) systems with an NVidia 9400 are probably the go-to platforms right now. Yes, it's integrated graphics but it's actually pretty good for SL you won't want to run at Ultra settings but you'll get decent at more moderate settings. If you've got money to burn the Sony VAIO Z series is as good as this class gets, but there are also systems for people with more moderate budgets, including the Apple MacBook and 13" MacBook Pro.

The old middle ground of 14-15" systems is shrinking but there are still some out there. These will range from 5-7 pounds, with more money getting you lower weight. You can probably find a bump up the graphics ladder to an NVidia 9600 here.

Once you get up to 16" and bigger screens you start to see the serious gaming notebooks (and as mentioned earlier, the serious poundage). Here you will find NVidia 9800 graphics, faster dual-core CPUs, and 1080p LCDs on some systems. The sky can be the limit for these but I've actually seen some in the $1000 class that look promising.

NVidia has been rebranding some of its GPUs with new model numbers in the GTX 100 and GTX 200 series, so you'll see those as well. I currently don't recommend any ATI graphics for any purpose whatsoever since their recent move of dropping support of rather recent hardware - some of which you can STILL BUY!

haha thanks; yeah I was kidding about "a nice lightweight laptop with a 17" monitor for under US$1000"; I mean, that's what I want, but I know it doesn't exist.

This hour I'm really liking the Sager 8662, which is a pretty obscure brand but seems to have good reviews on the web. A 15" one with 4GB of memory and an nVidia GeForce GTX 260M and 500GB of hard disk comes in nicely under US$2000. But no weird alien faces!

I'm about to buy a new laptop 'optimized for gaming' (read: SL) myself from a small settlement I just got. I looked into Alienware, talked to an SL friend who has one and she said the Dell XPS is far better (and Dell owns Alienware now too). With AW, you pay for the looks and extras (leather user manual or some such thing). I read the user reviews and I'm going for the Dell XPS m1730...which I'm totally maxing to the gills as far as RAM and processor speed. I'm not a techie, so I have to go by user reviews and that did it for me. Good luck!

careful, dale is a IBM wiki something or other I hear. (lol )

I love my ASUS G70Sg Notebook. It wasn't cheap but it handles SL on ultra settings well.

Can't find that one on the US ASUS site; odd. Their website's pretty awful in general, but in other places there are some good reviews. Sound like nice machines, roughly comparable to the Sager one(s). And with decorative side-lights! Are those fun?

Gateway P-7805u fx

Works for me.

Its a very decent machine. Just be sure to get the "in home service" agreement.

I've noticed a trend in all the Dells I've had to fix: The ones with the higher end video chips or cards all end up needing something replaced at least once. Usually due to over-heating.

But then what do you expect when you pack all that higher-end stuff into a tiny lil' case?

Thanks! Is it heavy and/or cumbersome? Do you carry it around much / can you actually use it in your lap, laptop-wise? I'm thinking I might be better off with a 15" than a 17" for portability...

A good lap dance in my opinion is one which is slutty enough to raise a keen interest in man and keep his attention but also allow woman to feel she has room for expression later on. In other words, its gotta be subtle.