Please take a look at this and let me know what you think of these specs...

Hi all,

Please let me know how you think SL will run on these specs. I just posted the important stuff.

This is a laptop

The Pavilion dv9810us offers:

Vista Home Premium w/SP 1

17"-diagonal widescreen WXGA+ (1440 x 900) BrightView LCD screen

AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TL-60 operating at 2.0GHz
1MB (512KB+512KB) L2 cache
Up to 1600MHz frontside bus
3GB of DDR2 SDRAM memory (2 DIMMs)

Maximum memory capacity: 4GB (Available system memory will be considerably less than this amount and will vary by model and system configuration. This is due to the use of shared video memory and operating system limits.)

160GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive

802.11b/g wireless LAN

4 USB 2.0 ports
1 FireWire (IEEE 1394) port

nVidia GeForce Go 7150M graphics with up to 1071MB shared memory


I can get this for $810 US. I think the price is good, but my main concern is the Nvidia 7150.

Dunno vid cards - haven't needed to pay attention lately - but if you're using SL a lot, I'd definitely start with 2GB of RAM.

If there's a possibilty that you can use a wired internet connection instead of wireless, you should check that it's got a connector for that. Almost all do but you didn't mention it and SL is notorious for having problems with wireless connections.

That would be adequate for a notebook at that price. The nVida 7150 is a descent card and should allow you to run windlight set to medium without any problems. The next card up for the notebooks would be the 8400m and that puts you in the $950+ range. At that price I say “in for a penny in for a pound” and go to the HP website and customize a dv9700t with the 8600m graphics card. IMO

I agree. Look at a better video chip and add moar RAM the first chance you get. (^_^)y

More than 3GB?

It's running Vista. I say yea. I use 8GB on Ubuntu for AMD64 and love the performance I get from it. (^_^)

You're never aware of how much big RAM spoils you until you try it. I've been a RAM hog for as long as I remember. I even upgraded my work computer behind my IT department's back because I just got tired of waiting... and waiting... and waiting for things to load. (=_=)y

I think I can only max out at 4 gigs on the laptop, right?

Personally, I think 3GB is plenty and 2GB is enough, unless you're going to be doing serious graphic/video work on it.

Windlight = serious graphic work. (^_^)

You can custom order the business line HP 8710w with 8 gig of ram. Now you talking about a $4000 notebook

4 gigs of RAM is maximum Vista Home Premium can use......must be Vista 32 bit and not 64 bit. Anything over that is wasted with that operating system.

And, that 5400 rpm hard drive will slow the cache reading down somewhat.

But, it should run SL quite well as is.

I will never buy an HP laptop ever again because they NEVER updated the video card driver for the model I had. Thinking about just getting reference drivers from Nvidia? Forget it. They only support a limited number of laptop makers and for the latest mobile gfx cards. So you will be forced to search the net for hacked video drivers to try and stay current.

As far as the graphics card is concerned I would try to get the best I could afford for a laptop and make sure it has dedicated video memory. If you go to the page with the system requirements for SL you will see that for vista the 7600 GeForce Go series is the minimum supported for SL on the 'recommended' list.