My ex-wife has bought a laptop for my son for Christmas and is worried now that it won't run games!

I am not to sure about laptops so would anyone know whether this will run newish games ok? Not at high setting or resolutions just whether it will run MW2 for instance?

http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innovation/series/Satellite-P300D-series/149804/

This one says 4Gb RAM but she seems to think its 2Gb but I canot confirm, but CPU and GPU are the same.

Cheers

Mace,

Because the lappy uses a 32 bit OS it won't recognize all 4Gb of RAM. It will likely use between 3 and 3.5Gb of its RAM. The Athlon cpu and ATI gpu are last generation technology. This link will give you some idea on what to expect gaming wise from the gpu.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-3650.8839.0.html

As you can see, the lappy should run a shooter like Crysis at low settings and older games like Oblivion and Doom 3 quite well. Strategy games like Civ 4 and Gal Civ 2 should also run quite nicely. It will largely depend on your son's gaming tastes.

If you want more performance go for a pentium core 2 duo cpu like the p8700 and an ati 4650 or equivalent nvidia gpu with 4Gb RAM and Windows 7. You can purchase a 14" ASUS lappy with those spec for about $1150 Cdn.

Thanks that's great. He is never bothered about the graphics, I always have to set them higher. He plays lots of Gary's Mod and CSS and COD so he should be ok with this.

Buddy of mine works at a laptop repair, states the following:

Never buy an HP (I found it the hard way); after Carly Fiorina gutted the company, they have among the worst quality control. Think Compaq (which merged with HP). That's what they've become. Several thousand HP laptops have a known design fault in which the integrated graphics card burns out and forces the ($500) replacement of the entire motherboard. Conveniently for HP, this seems to happen at around 16 to 24 months after purpose, or conveniently after the warranty expires. By all ethical and good business standards, this should have been a recall. There is a likely class action suit in the works, which I signed up for---- always nice to make the trial lawyers rich. But if it costs HP a few million or so, more power to them. Meanwhile, that's $500 I'll never see again.

Anyway, my friend says they repair very few Sony or Lenovo laptops; and usually when they do, it's because the owner put an eggo waffle in the DVD drive or something. Don't remember hearing anything one way or the other about Toshiba, but that's probably a good sign for that make.

Asus also makes good notebooks I hear, but I don't have any verification.

And yes, I wish I'd talked to my buddy before buying that HP ($1500) laptop instead of relying on on-line reviews!

Best of luck on whatever you buy!

d.

The screen is 1440 x 900 or some other such resolution, so it's not exactly high res, which will help with gaming.

Toshiba Service here in Austria is okay, even though they don't run their own shops and rather have it outsourced. I imagine in the UK you have fully owned Toshiba Service points which should be at least as good.