View Full Version : Got a new laptop
Bought a new laptop (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/nl/nl/sm/WF06b/22797-283797-283797-283797-12434482-12397330-77974419.html)
Extended it to 2GB RAM, so now I;m hoping to finally be able to play Civ4 at a decent speed. Will have to do some serious business installation before civ is installed but will keep you posted on performance.
Great move but are you sure Civ IV will run with the ATI?
Lt. Killer M
26-04-2007, 23:36
I have no trouble with CivIV and ATIs - neither here, nor on the (now stolen) laptop, nor at work.
Good one, ProPain! :) I hope to get a new laptop, too, once my new job in Berlin starts. So please do give feedback here how yours performs!
I've always had ATI cards on my laptops (they appear to be the MicroSoft of mobile graphics :)) and I've always been quite pleased with them. I ran Civ on someone elses laptop that I used for a while. Also an HP with ATI, about 1.5 years old machine, and it ran surprisingly well so I expect it to do better on this one.
I would be seriously disappointed if CivIV wouldnt run on this one cause I counted on it when entering the pitboss earth game. I need to be able to play at work as well cause I dont always have time in the evening.
Get it up and running soon then and keep us posted!
ATI X1600 is supposed to have shader 3.0, so Civ4 should be running well on this one. I've just upgraded my 9200 Radeon to X1550 to be able to play Neverwinter Nights 2 and other less ancient games (like MTW 2 at reasonable graphic settings) and it is working well so far and is completely compatible with everything. Just don't forget to download new drivers from ATI website and may be even uninstall the Catalyst software. The only thing needed are the drivers, that other crap coming with them is not required and it just slows everything down.
digger760
27-04-2007, 10:39
you'll be fine
My laptop has the far older single core Pentium M and Nvidia 5650go graphics (the the equivalent at the time as the mobile radeon 9600 and it was supposed to be far better for graphics peformance).
Your only bottle neck is the 5400rpm drive, which will slowdown huge maps, you only have 1 gig ram, so the game will probably start using virtual mem (hard disk) when there are lots of cities and units for the AI to handle. I never tried large maps, standard is ok. Huge maps is a no no for me.
quote:Originally posted by digger760
you only have 1 gig ram,
I have 2 GB RAM, extended it right away (it's even in my 1st post [:p])
Needed that for Civ4 and Wow mainly as word usually runs fine with 1 GB. Now all I need is more time toplay so I can really use those 2GB to the max :)
grahamiam
27-04-2007, 14:25
I've run civ on an ATI9600 and an X800GTO. You should not have any problems whatsoever. Not sure even why you'd think ATI would do a worse job than nV. The real showstopper are the integrated Intel graphix chips. If you get those, then you're pretty much limited to PopCap games (go Peggle!)
Darkness
27-04-2007, 15:23
quote:Originally posted by grahamiam
The real showstopper are the integrated Intel graphix chips. If you get those, then you're pretty much limited to PopCap games (go Peggle!)
I've got one of those and CIV works just fine for me. Only the wonder movies and opening and victory movies are stuttering like hell, but I never watch these anymore...
My supplier offered me a laptop with integrated intel card at first. I read some tests on it and decided against it and started looking for better models.
ON the whole I've been pleasantly surprised by most graphics cards I;ve had on my laptops. My last one had shared memory but it ran most games fine on only 512MB RAM. I even played WoW on it, worked fine unless you entered a very populated zone cause that would cause some freeze ups when both graph card and CPU were claiming memory.
Just finished making recovery discs (cheap bastards at HP stopped including those, Dell at least has an option to buy some), makes me long to the days when laptops came with decent service :)
Installing office now, games after that.
Installed vanilla Civ4 and it works like a charm, fast even and this is the out of the box unpatched version as well. I remember that being slow as hell when i 1st played it on my old laptop. Somehow I lost my Warlords CD, got the case but CD isnt in there, so I havent been able to install that.
I'm running the game on 1680*1050 and though its still fast all text is rather small :)
Lt. Killer M
28-04-2007, 10:31
quote:Originally posted by ProPain
Somehow I lost my Warlords CD, got the case but CD isnt in there, so I havent been able to install that.
Well, that's good news about the speed, but losing a CD sucks. I have lost the vanilla DVD - even worse. BLEH!
I;m not too worried about it. Saw Warlords for 5 euros in a local store so if I dont find it quickly I'll get a new one this afternoon.
That's the proside when a game doesnt achieve sales goals, you can replace your copy cheaply. :)
Lt. Killer M
28-04-2007, 12:30
quote:Originally posted by ProPain
I;m not too worried about it. Saw Warlords for 5 euros in a local store so if I dont find it quickly I'll get a new one this afternoon.
That's the proside when a game doesnt achieve sales goals, you can replace your copy cheaply. :)
True - but vanilla did achieve, and is still 40 Euro here [eek]
Well, this laptop is just a year old and suddenly suffering from weird freezes after log on. At first every other log on would results in a freeze and then friday all log ons would result in a freeze. So today I finally had to time to figure out what would cause this. MOst probably windows automated updated service. I disabled wireless lan and BINGO, normal log on. So now I can copy my files and start a new install.
I wanna kick Bill G in the nads for causing all this crap.
Shabbaman
11-05-2008, 23:02
I've read about that crap, apparently it's SP3 causing problems.
for now I just disabled the associated service and hopeflly that will get thru the next week. Man, do I hate this.
Uhoh, I saw the SP3-update flash by a couple of days ago, but haven't restarted since. Perhaps I shouldn't do so at all. [satan]
digger760
12-05-2008, 12:49
There is a problem with XP-SP3 and AMD PC's, this link summarises it pretty well:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-XP-SP3,5334.html
HP was mentioned specifically for doing this, but other OEM's have most likely done it as well.
Mine is an Intel machine and SP3 hasnt been installed. Pretty sure its related to automated update cause after stopping the service and setting it on manual start up things have been peachy. I've read more people who had this problem, best guess is the asociated executable is corrupted. I'll just copy all my file to the server (hardly any, most are on the server anyway) and do a clean install to solve this. Worst thing is I have to reinstall my games, prolly that will be most time consuming part..
grahamiam
12-05-2008, 14:40
This happened to my wife's laptop. I'm pretty sure it was a corrupted file but can't remember the name of it. We didn't reformat as the problem seemed to self-correct after about 2-3 weeks. However, reformating is probably best.
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