Help me with buying a lap top pls!

I am looking at a laptop with the following graphics card:

ATI RADEON XPRESS 200M IGP with 128MB DDR (dedicated)

Will this do agood job on SL?

It only comes with 512 Memory, so i will be adding memory.

THanks for help!

Need to order today!

Talked to techie in welcome area, they say it will run with that Garret (not well though )

Whoa, stop now before you make a grave mistake. Save this as a very very last resort. The X200 will run Second Life, but it and OpenGL (the engine that renders SL) don't get along very well, so expect poor framerates even with all settings on low. I'd recommend going with Nvidia, as they seem to do better with OpenGL apps. If, however, you do decide to go with the X200, get at least 1.5-2 gigs of RAM and a very fast CPU. My friend has a lesser graphics card than me but a dual core processer and twice the RAM, and runs SL twice as well as I do. But just to sum my point, try to avoid the lesser X numbers for ATI. I hear the X600 and above are pretty good, with the X1000+s better suited for OpenGL. I hope I've been able to help, and good luck with your search

P.S. Oops, forgot to mention, the X200 is integrated and therefore shares memory with the rest of the PC, which is bad. Try to get a card that doesn't share memory, if possible.

We had a longer explanation about laptops recently. Refer to this thread: 101724.
It's good at least, that your chipset has it's own memory - I looked at the ati website and at this comparison mentioned below. This chipset *can* have it's own memory though only a few laptops provide that - as long as "dedicated" is no marketing speak for "reserving a fixed amount of memory from your main memory :-/ - you never know how they make up their minds with buzzwords.
Anyway. I found a performance comparison for it here: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=914&page=8&search=radeon%20xpress%20200%20igp
So your thing is somewhat better than the intel integrated graphics mentioned in the thread. Although the authors come to this point

So I think, better look for something like a real graphics chip than an addon. You may take the lacking official support of ll for this chipset into account (though it runs..., but they can't test all underpowered stuff on the market...).

Don't forget LOTS of video memory! Second Life is especially heavy when it comes to giant textures. If you don't have at least 256MB of video RAM expect sluggishness as you turn around in busy areas as textures are constantly being updated on the card.

-Z

I have never seen SL use more than 136MB of video memory and that was with 512m draw distance set in preference, all it does is eat up more system memory. If you could replicate a situation where is uses more and take a screen shot I would greatly appreciate it.

Hi

I decided to spend the extra $500 and get Nvidea 7 series (forgot the actual name, but have seen that people really think it works well) and got 1 gig memory and a 17 inch screen. Hopefully, this will do me for awhile.

Thanks all who helped save me from another bad SL experience!. I have had two pretty solid weeks of desktop troubles, so I am really hoping that the laptop will work until I can save up for yet another desktop--does it ever end??? LOL.