walletss Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 I am thinking about getting a new laptop at Pantip Plaza. The Aussie dollar is high against the Thai baht and the prices are good. In my leisure time I enjoy viseo games. I want to know if a Compaq laptop with an Athlon processor and a 64 meg ram video card will allow me to play any game as well as a pentium 4. Is it powerful enough? Any advice is greatly appreciated Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlton68 Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 Hi, I'm not a gamefreak but I guess the new laptops all are good for the newer games. No difference if you have a AMD or Intel CPU. Here at work we have lots of laptops from various manufacturers. We always buy a three year warranty for the laptops and over the time it has proofed to be a real bargain. Parts that break down most are displays, keyboards and batteries. And I don't talk cracked displays but just not working properly anymore. For a Dell to change a 14 inch TFT display is over 800? plus fee for the technician (here in good old germany). So what I want to say is unless the price difference for the laptop between Thailand and where you spend most your time (down under?) is very high you rather should by it at home and buy a warranty if it doesn't have one. Some manufacturers also sell worldwide warranties, so it doesn't matter where you bought your laptop and where you are when it breaks down. Carlton Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adikgede Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 With 64Mb of video ram I hope it can handle games. What I wonder is how well it can manage heat as laptops are packed in pretty tight. I have a Compaq Evo with a mere 1ghz and to call it a laptop is a little misleading unless your in the habit of wearing kevlar trousers. I have to say that C68 makes an important point if the price of the laptop plus a service call is all your talking about it hardly seems worth the saving especially if there is a chance you may have to pay customs when returning home. Nonetheless it should come with a one year international warranty. ag Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
check_bin_krap Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 " Some manufacturers also sell worldwide warranties, so it doesn't matter where you bought your laptop and where you are when it breaks down." ................................................................... That is correct, Compaq does have a world wide warranty on their laptops. The one I am sitting with now has 3 years warranty, that might differ from product to product. Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whosyourdaddy Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 Not sure if it will be.. My laptop ( although not top of the line) is only 6 months old and it will not play some of the games since it does not have a few special attributes ( open glide etc) With a built in graphics card you may not be able to play some games. I am sure the new doom game will be above all laptops and most desktops. WYD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALHOLK Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 Hi! The size of the video memory alone is not enough to determine if it will work with most newer games. How much hardware support there is for 3D operations is just as important. Another thing about Compaq that is insignificant to most but not to all is that it is more difficult to install Linux on it. I have a reletively new Compaq Presario and the Linux installation program hangs on the partition check. There is apparently a work around for this but I haven't had time to pursue them. regards ALHOLK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adikgede Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 The size of the video memory alone is not enough to determine if it will work Yes thats true but it doesn't have 64Mb of video ram to run MS Office. There is always going to be a newest game that doesn't work on anything but the newest hardware so unless he says it has a ATI Radeon 9000 and he wants to play Doom vX people can only supply general answers. As far as Linux being incompatable with Compaqs it impossible to say with a sample of 1. I have used SuSE 8, MDK 9, and currentl RH 8 on my Compaq without any problems. Although I have had problems with Mandrake and Red Hat installers seg faulting on other hardware. Red Hat's Anaconda is notorious in this regard. If the problem is with the kernel and not with your distros installer try turning off acpi with the kernel parameter noacpi or acpi=no. Another thing that can cause problems is legacy usb support, which should be turned off in the bios. If its the installer itself than doing a text based installation might be less problamatic or using a distro that doesn't have a linear installatin routine like debian and SuSE might yield better results. Another aproach would be to boot from a rescue floppy or CD and partition the hard drive manually before begininng the installation. If your using RedHat there is a good chance that the problem has been reported at bugzilla.redhat.com and if the laptop is more than 6 months old a succesfull installation has probably already been documented at www.linux-laptop.net . The main reason not to use Linux on a laptop is that acpi is not working very well at the moment in the 2.4 kernel and even if you get 2.4 patched correctly or use 2.5 with working acpi there is no guarantee that acpi is working properly in hardware. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALHOLK Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 Hi! I have a relatively new Compaq Presario 1500 (2GHz). I have tried to install both RH8.0 and RH7.3. In both cases anaconda hangs on the initial partition check. I did a usenet search and found that quite a few people have had this problem with Compag computers and also found a number of suggestions of what to do. Unfortunately my current workload and personal situation doesn't alow me to spend much time on solving it. This is most unfortunate really as I'm currently working on a project to port an application from a propritary high speed link to USB2.0. The notebook has USB2 ports which neither my office or home computer has. So now I have to switch to a lab computer for testing. As soon as I get time I will get on the ball and install a Linux system. Btw I used Partition Magic 8.0 prior to installing and it seems to work fine. MicroShaft seems to have dropped the 'fdisk' program in the preinstalled XP Home edition. I suppose that they will go to any length to stop people from installing other operating systems on a Windoze computer. regards ALHOLK P.S. Thanks for the link to www.linux-laptop.net, I didn't know about that one since I have only had a laptop for a couple of months. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adikgede Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 Well if its Red Hat the first thing to do is try the text based install by just typing text at the boot prompt, its faster too. Once you get it running you will probably want to go here if you need to access windows xp partitions formatted with NTFS: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html And you may want to use apt as it takes alot of manual labour out of updates and satisfying dependencies www.freshrpms.net . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALHOLK Posted February 25, 2003 Report Share Posted February 25, 2003 Hi! Again, thanks for the links although I won't have time to do much in the upcoming weeks. regards ALHOLK P.S. I hate deadlines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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