Minimum specs for EQ on a laptop, 1 or 2 boxing (or more...)

[jdpatt]

Hi all,

I just tried dusting off my old laptop to run EQ, and it seems to be struggling with it. A few years back, it would run 2 instances with the settings on low without any problems...now it seems to lag horribly. The stats are as follows:

Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop

Pentium 4 2.4 processor

768mb RAM

ATI Radeon Mobility 7500, 64mb graphics card

Fresh install of Windows XP (tried Vista and it wasn't enough computer to run it)

I found out I can increase the RAM to 2gb on this model, which I am considering, but wonder if my graphics card is still going to be a bottleneck. I don't really want to buy a new laptop, since I mostly just use it for word processing at work and surfing the net, but the option to play EQ would certainly be nice. I also don't need to run EQ on the typical "gaming" laptop, since EQ isn't exactly Crysis, haha, and don't have $3-4k to spend, haha.

So...in your collective opinions, would my computer, with 2gb of RAM, do okay with 1 or 2 instances of EQ? If not, what are my minimum options (or economical upgrades) for running 1 or 2 EQ instances? There's some good prices on laptops with 128mb graphics cards, a little more money will get me a 256mb card. I know from past experience that RAM seems to be the biggest factor in getting EQ to run, graphics card seems to be less important, even when multiboxing, but how much do I really need to run 1 or 2 accounts with moderate settings and reasonably smooth performance? Are onboard graphics better now than they were a couple years back? What ARE good, middle of the road laptop graphic cards?

Any and all input would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave

[dlphelan]

For me, the bottleneck has always been ram. EQ eats ram for breakfast. More video ram will help too, but with that laptop, you should be able to run at least one instance of EQ if not two.

For comparison, I'm running at 1280x1024 w/about 5 new models on an old Sempron w/1.5GBs of ram and a Geforce FX5500 128MB. Runs just fine.

[Kumudil]

For travelling recently I got a netbook with Atom-processor 1.6GHz, Toshiba nb100. XP-home is installed. Runs better than expected. I got it with 1 GB RAM. Was laggy but still better than I aspeced. Then I changed to 2 GB. Runs almost smooth now. I disabeled XP-indexing and with 2 GB I could also completly disable Virtual memory. The Screen resolution ist still 1024 x 600 only, but when you are on travel its much better than nothing

Main bottlenec on laptops I think, are the slow harddisks. The relative poor videocards you can come by reducing the graphic quality on output. With 2 GB you can avoid swapping and disable virtual memory. This should be a big difference.

2-boxing, not shure if this would work, but one account should do. I don't think that 2 accounts will run with virtual memory switched off.

[Tolfu]

I bought this at bestbuy.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8043606827

Although mine is an older model and I it over a year ago. The one I got is lower end compared to that, but pricing is the same. The CPU I got was much slower and I upgraded the CPU to a T9300 the second day I got the laptop ( that was planned before i ever bought). I can 6 box with lag, 5 box with less lag, 4 box with ok lag and 3 box smooth...using WinEQ2....all split screened so all accounts show on the screen, except for 5/6 boxing. I would expect the one linked here to do better, as is. I ordered a DELL for much more $$ and far less performance 2 days before I saw this laptop. Luckily I was able to cancel the DELL. For $1150, you get a 9800GTS 1GB, a great mobile cpu, 4gb DDR3 ram, vista 64 and it runs fairly cool. Best deal going.

[Retron]

[Kollin]

I use a rather old laptop to run my box on (typically cleric). I did recently upgrade to 1 gig of ram (2x512 sticks). I have all model's on and horses and elemental's. I have had to tweak the settings some here and there on patch day's to get it to work better but other than that I can run 1 instance of EQ and be able to load up IE and browse the net or stream a video with relatively no lag in EQ. (also it doesn't note but it is using windows XP. Only notable issue I have found is the Mech guardian in Dragonscale I cannot see due to it's size I assume the video card does not render it correctly.

Product Name Presario 2100
US Product Number 2188CL
Microprocessor Mobile AMD Athlon XP-M Processor 2500+ (1.87GHz) with PowerNow! Technology
Microprocessor Cache 512KB (L2)
Memory 512MB DDR SDRAM (2 x 256MB) at 266MHz
Memory Max 1024MB DDR SDRAM (2 x 512MB)
Video Graphics ATI MOBILITY RADEON 4X AGP and 3D architecture
Video Memory 64MB DDR SDRAM (shared)
Hard Drive 40GB enhanced-IDE hard disk drive
Diskette Drive 3.5 inch, 1.44MB
Multimedia Drive DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo
Display 38 cm (15.0 inch) XGA TFT (1024 x 768) display
Fax/Modem Integrated v.90/v.92 56KB modem (RJ-11 connector)
Network Card Integrated 10/100BASE-T Ethernet LAN (RJ-45 connector)
Wireless Connectivity Integrated 54g wireless LAN
Sound Internal speakers, volume control button and mute button
Keyboard 88-key
Pointing Device Touch Pad with On/Off button and dedicated vertical Scroll Up/Down pad
PC Card Slots One Type I/II/III with support and 32-bit card bus

External Ports Two Universal Serial Bus (USB) 1.1
Parallel SPP/ECP standard interface
One Serial
One PS/2 keyboard/mouse
One headphone-out
One microphone-in
One VGA (15-pin)
One TV-Out (S-video)
One RJ-11 (modem)
One RJ -45 (LAN)
One PCI (port replicator)
One IEEE 1394 (firewire)

[jdpatt]

[Kollin]

A few notes about my laptop. The ONLY thing I have installed on it worth mentioning other than EQ is one other game (Navy Field 2). I keep the screen resolution set to the same resolution I have EQ running. Also I always run in windowed mode so there is no switching to and from which can cause lag. I'll check my settings when I get home and post what I have on or off in options to give you a bit more info on what to look at when trying to run it on your old machine. Another small thing use /particle low or /particle off and be sure to turn off all non essential chat, melee spam, spell spam, merc spam etc etc. Anything that you can turn off that doesn't hinder your playstyle the better. (I personally have a window just for spam that I keep minimized all the time where all of this goes for parsing purposes)