Need to buy a laptop ... must have portable SL! Need Laptop users advice!

Hey there everyone! I have found out that I'll be taking a couple of longer trips this summer of close to a week each, and I'd like to take SL with me so I don't miss my friends and my special someone for those lengths of time. Unfortunately, I don't think packing up my desktop, monitor, keyboard and mouse is really an option. So, I'm looking to purchase a laptop hopefully no more than the $1200 price range (though if one of the $800 ones will run it too, that would be great). The question I have for you all, is what graphics card should I be looking for on a laptop to run SL well? I know there are the x200 and x300 radeons that seem to be in alot of laptops now days, but seeing how SL and ATi don't play nice some times, I would prefer to look into the nVidia go series types of cards. I know I need at least 512 MB and probably 1 GB of ram to function and probably a Pentium or Athalon as opposed to a Celeron or Sempron ... but I'm not for sure! Help! Laptop users of SL, what do you have an how does it function for you? Let me know! Thank you in advance for all of your advice!

Im not sure what is best in terms of gpu, but be prepared for it to get quite warm very quickly not to mention guzzle the battery at a tremendous rate.

I run on an old Acer laptop, 1.7Ghz, 1Gb ram and an ATI radeon GPU, it runs SL ok with graphics adjusted accordingly, but only takes 15 mins before the gpu fan is spinning frantically to try and keep it cool, ends up functioning as a pretty effective hair dryer I've only tried it once on the battery and i got about 15 mins out of it, but then this laptop is getting on for 18 months old now.

Ok, after looking on pricewatch and newegg, I think I have it narrowed down to two models. They have the same processor, the same ram, the same screen, the same hard drive. The only diff is that the Acer one uses an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 and is $200 cheeper than the Asus which uses a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300. Which do you all think I should lean towards?

Acer: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16834115223

Asus: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16834220024

**EDIT** Wow, I just noticed that buy.com has the acer one for $999. That's $300 cheaper than the Asus one on newegg (which buy.com doesn't have). Anyone play with a 128 MB Mobility Radeon X1400? I'm leaning heavily towards this one if it will work with SL.

Guaranteed to run better in SL . . .

Does it run$300 dollars + tax better, though?

I have had two ATI Video cards in SL, and from my perspective, the amount of trouble I had with crashes, lag, etc, I would definitely say yes

the first was a 9550, and the second an X800GTO. The NV 6600 in my wife's system ran rings around the GTO. So I finally went to a 7 series NV, and now I have no problems. Good luck with the 1400, I sincerily hope it works well for you.

I use a Toshiba Satellite M30x 1.8ghz Centrino.

To Get decent use out of it I had to do the following..

Upgrade Ram to 1Gig (makes a BIG difference)
Use a faster external Hardrive ( and use internal disk for client , ext disk for cache)

ATI 9700 mobility (OK - but use tweaked Omega Drivers)

And after all that messing about get a very decent SL experience
However its not very portable now ^^
Which kinda defeats the object if you really need mobilty and performance a powerful desktop replacement system with an nvidia solution is the only way to go... boing!

Yes, and if I had the money I would be getting one of the new sli laptops from Alienware. Alas, though, that is not the case. I just really wissh I knew if someone has used this mobile radeon 1400 in SL well. I am not as concerned with the hard drive, since it is SATA anyway. It comes with 1 GB of ram too so that is not an issue. This is just too tempting to pass up at $999!

I HAVE the Acer Aspire 5672 with the ATI x1400 Mobility. I've never changed the drivers from the default Acer install.

SecondLife works FINE for me. My FPS is very close to the 'Agent Updates/sec' number in laggy sims.

I played probably 16 hours out of 24 both days this weekend.....

So, go ahead, spring for the Acer.

Thank you SO much! You just made my decision much much easier. Mind if I ask you how you like the laptop besides playing SL on it (looks, feel, durability, perfomance, etc)?

I bought the Acer Aspire 5672WLMi with the Duo Core processor, 250GB SATA HD, 2GB DDR RAM, ATI Mobility X1400 w/512MB RAM, DVD-DL+RW, builtin webcam, bluetooth and wireless.

I paid $1499.

I don't regret it at all. Performance is great. I use it disconnected on my wireless network at home for up to an hour or more (haven't really measured).

I take it to work, I use it for a variety of things, and I love the widescreen aspect ratio.

I've used it for Everquest, Visual Studio 2005, Virtual Machine(s), NeverWinter Nights, etc..

You'll love this model if you buy it.

With the Core Duo processor, occasionally you run into a process which is not really multi-threaded safe, but is compiled multi-threaded. Make sure you look up how to turn off one of the CPUs on a running process to save yourself some aggravation later on.

(It's CPU Affinity in the Process's Properties from Task Manager).

Duke

Thank you for all of your advice. My desktop gaming computer is currently a dual core 2.8 but I have not run into any issues with it as of yet. What happens when youhave the apps that are not multi-threaded safe? drops in performance? Random crashes? My net puter is a 3.0 with hyperthreading, but I disabled the HT because it was crashing frequently. As soon as I turned it off in the BIOS it's much more stable.

For example, I know of a .NET application that saves and re-opens XML documents. Because the App is multi-threaded, sometimes it tries to open the XML document before it is done closing it (two separate processing threads). This is known as a race condition.

To fix the problem with this application crashing, I have to set the CPU Affinity to just one of the two CPUs on the process when I run the application. It has to be done each time I run that particular application.

I don't know of any other problems besides just a few specific instances of this, but once I figured it out, I was happy from then on.

Duke I appreciate all the information you have given me thus far, but unfortunately I have one more teensy little favor to ask of you. Can you please try out the new 1.10 when it is released today and let me know if it works well on the 5672. I actually had one bought and ordered based on your advice, but buy.com really messed up and I have basically lost all faith in them now so I canceled my order through them (I won't go into what happened right now, but suffice to say the customer service was horrible. If you want to know more, ask me.). So now I'm going to go back and order it through my tried and trusted NewEgg. However, I figured it would be good for me to see if it the new release works before ordering it. Thank you so much! You can also e-mail me directly since it might be better than clogging the forum with my own personal requests. morriganlefay (at) gmail (dot) com

Got your email. The new version works just fine and dandy for me! The new hardware lighting works like a champ as well, and I've started playing with lighted prims already. The flexible prims work as well.

The new version is as fast or faster than previous versions so far, and I played for a good 7 hours yesterday (most of those at a casino

Duke

Thank you again!