Laptop for FS9

Archived from groups: alt.games.microsoft.flight-sim (More info?)

"Richard Hardiman" <Richard.Hardiman@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news3jhc6$qmr$1@titan.btinternet.com...
>I wish to buy a laptop, as ancilliary to my desktop, but wish to also use
>it for FS9. I shan't bore you with the details, but will need to buy from
>PC World. I know I want a seperate graphics card, but am unsure on the
>variety of laptop processors, etc. Does anyone have a recommendation from
>the currently available range at PCW?
>

Any current Centrino (Pentium-M processor) notebook will do quite well.
These processors benchmark out way higher than their actual clock rate, due
to a very efficient core architecture. Pentium-4 notebooks are hot, nasty,
comparatively slow power hogs. Put 1 Gb of memory in the notebook (cheap)
and look for the latest ATI Mobile Radeon graphics chipset (9700 or x300 I
think) with 128Mb of RAM. Do *not* buy any notebook with an integrated
graphics solution using shared system memory. My year old ThinkPad T40P
with a 1.6MHz Pentium-M, 1 Gb, Radeon 9000 (64Mb) runs full detail,
1024x768x32, 25fps locked and rarely drops below the target framerate,
except in cities like New York where it is around 20. Note, I am not runing
AA or anisotropic filtering. As a bonus, the battery runs for about 3.5
hours of flight simming (normally 6.5 hours of office work).

Stephen