Sims 2 and a laptop with a Geforce Go 7300.......?

[Braveheart]

I have been looking at a laptop recently and hope to play Sims 2 with all EPs on it. Tell me what you guys think of the specs. My biggest concern is the Geforce card, is it good enough for TS2? Thanks

Acer Aspire 5630
Intel Centrino Core Duo 1.66 GHZ
120 GB Hard Drive
2 GB of dual-channel DDR2 RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce Go 7300 256 MB

[BlueSoup]

I dunno about the rest of it, but that card isn't bad, it's better than mine and I get high settings on everything.

[KatEnigma]

Sims doesn't need the current cutting edge technology anymore.  It's a good processor, enough RAM, and a really decent card. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to run TS2.

[J. M. Pescado]

Your computer should be within spec to run the game, provided you have less than 1 GB of downloads.

[Elven Ranger]

how do you figure that JM?

[J. M. Pescado]

Simple:

In order for your game not to constantly thrash to disk, all your crap has to fit in RAM. Since Windoze takes up half your RAM, the amount of RAM you thus have available to the game is half of what you have in your computer. For reference purposes, a naked TS2 install with no downloads attached runs around 300-400 MB usage. The rest of your RAM is how much crap you can get away with downloading. Exceeding this causes massive disk thrashing and lag. Macs may get better mileage depending on how much of a hog MacOS is.

[Elven Ranger]

Hmm, id best go check! lol
Thanks

[ElviraGoth]

I have a GeForce 6800 with 256 MB RAM and with OFB, they finally made the game take advantage of the things I got the card for.  I have noticed that with Pets, the lighting and detail have improved even more.

The 7300 is newer than mine, so the card is better than what the game has been able to display up til now.  I had to tweak settings to get the best textures, detail and lighting before OFB, but I think I had to cut back on some of those settings and let the game use its own after OFB came out.

In fact, since I got Pets, I have been spending a lot of time looking at stuff in my sims' houses from the base game that look so much better than they ever had before! 

[dizzy]

MacOS has always had notoriously bad memory handling, so double the figures if you use a Mac.

[Paperbladder]

Wasn't it the PPC processors in the old Macs that caused them to be slow and not the RAM?

Anyway, you'll have no problems running TS2 on that thing, I've got an Intel Core Solo of the same speed with an integrated card and even though it's under spec (No T&L on the card) it runs the game great.

[Braveheart]

Thanks for all the input people. Much appreciated. I figure I will purchase it and the price at $1100 canadian is probably the best I am going to find at this point. Merry Christmas everyone!!

[seelindarun]

MacOS has always had notoriously bad memory handling, so double the figures if you use a Mac.

You are probably thinking of the old MacOS.  It did have poor memory handling, and ran on PPC processors.  The current MacOS X, based on a Unix core, is the only one available now and has been for about 6 years.  This OS also runs on PPC and Intel Core Duo processors. 

I am almost completely ignorant about OS architectures, so I cannot speak further on what a unix-flavoured core may do for memory management.  From practical use, my 2-year old laptop with the old processor has very robust memory handling and runs TS2 well on 1.2 GB RAM and a 700 MB DL folder.

[dizzy]

You are probably thinking of the old MacOS.  It did have poor memory handling, and ran on PPC processors.  The current MacOS X, based on a Unix core, is the only one available now and has been for about 6 years.  This OS also runs on PPC and Intel Core Duo processors. 

I've programmed Macs for over 10 years. I have some idea how they work. 

Mac OS has *always* (and still does) had severe problems with memory performance whether we're talking PPC or 68K or Intel. It's not because of the hardware, it because of their crappy software. And, IMHO the PPC is better for performance if you actually use it properly than any x86 chip.

[Paperbladder]

If PPC was better than why did Apple switch?  To run Windoze?

Then again there must be something good about that architecture since all of the "next-gen" gaming systems have a PPC processor of some sort in them.

[dizzy]

Intel has a far better supply chain than Motorola and IBM. I think Apple anticipated a big surge in sales.

[Bain]

I play Sims 2 on my laptop without any problems

3.2 ghz Intel M processor, 2 gigs DDR2 ram, gForce 5600 go 128 ram vid card.

I think the computer you're looking at will run fine.

[Gwill]

That's quite impressive stats for a laptop...