Laptop suggestions?

[johnz5150]

I'm looking into purchasing a laptop within the next couple of months; I'll have a budget of $1,500. I would like the ability to run Orbiter on it at a decent frame rate and on a screen no less than 15”. Any suggestions on such a laptop would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Lunar_Lander]

Just as a first suggestion: Try to avoid machines with the "smallest" Mobile graphics accelerator. I have a Nvidia GeForce Go 6150 in my laptop and there isn't even a new driver available! For the 7000 and 8000 series there are drivers, but none for the 6150.

I can run Orbiter (AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 1.6 GHz, 2GB RAM, Vista Home Premium 32bit), but only at framerates up to 17 or something like that.

Craziliy enough, the stationary Vista PC next door (Core 2 Duo 1,98 GHz, ATI Radeon X1150, 2GB RAM) runs Orbiter with framerates as low as 4 when I set the resolution to 1440x1440 (I have a widescreen TFT monitor). The XP PC (P4 3GHz, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800XL, WinXP SP3) runs Orbiter with 40 FPS at 1600x1200 !!!

Maybe you want to make a multiboot system with the default Vista SP1 and XP SP3.

 

[TSPenguin]

Just as a first suggestion: Try to avoid machines with the "smallest" Mobile graphics accelerator. I have a Nvidia GeForce Go 6150 in my laptop and there isn't even a new driver available! For the 7000 and 8000 series there are drivers, but none for the 6150.

You have to be very cautious with mobile graphic chips in general, nVidia is known to simply rename old chips. Also extensions like GT or GTS can mean completely different things for different chips!