Slow laptop

[m_ladbrooke]

Hi everyone,

I have a Pentium M 1.6GHz laptop, 512mb ram, 64mb X300 graphics and a 5400RPM hard drive.
A fairly good system, why then on Dawn of War on lowest resolution, on a small map is it slowing down from the very beginning - not enough graphics, or its not accepting the graphics card. there some ideas I have-what should I do to improve this laptop as it is a massive drop when playing on it from my home desktop system

Many Thanks,

[saphalline]

Probably just a driver issue. Have you tried any other games on that laptop? What is the manufacturer and model number of your laptop?

[m_ladbrooke]

Hi, its an Inspiron 6000 by Dell. It can run Age of Empires 3 pratically perfectly aswell games like Rome Total war and Fable.
So as you can see even with every up on as high as I can get and its still slowing down dramatically Im really stumped.

Many Thanks,

[ski]

Also, make sure that antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are disabled in the game.

If that does not help, then note that the minimum requirements for that game specifies a 1.4 GHz CPU, but the recommended is 2.2 GHz. This means that the game will struggle with anything less than 2.2 GHz, even at the lowest resolution.
And if you're playing Dawn of War-Winter Assault, then it requires 1.8 GHz min., and 2.4 GHz recommended.

[saphalline]

Pentium M's are immune to those CPU speed requirements. They're like AMD CPU's - much more power per clock than your average P4. Your CPU speed is fine.

If other games play perfectly fine, then Dawn of War is the problem. See if the game has a patch, or check the readme file for troubleshooting advice. It might have a specific driver issue or a problem with a specific configuration. And some games I've found just don't want to play on laptops (I suspect it's an issue with mobile chipsets).

[ski]

In order to maximize their market share potential, gaming software manuf's specify CPU power(minimum and recommended) that's grossly insufficient to properly run their games.
For example, I play a flight simulation game that specifies minimum and recommended AMD CPU speeds of 700 MHz and 1 GHz, respectively, and my system's Athlon 1800+(1.53 MHz) is barely able to run it without studdering even with reduced settings.

[saphalline]

A 1.6GHz Pentium M is about equivalent to a 2.8-3.0GHz P4, especially when it comes to gaming. It's because of the vastly different architectures they use. This is what I'm basing my opinion on that the CPU speed is fine.

[ski]

saphalline,
I stand corrected. That CPU is indeed a potent little gamer.


m_ladbrooke,
Some other things to check-
Make sure that the video card's acceleration is set to 'Full'.
If that's ok or does not help, then check the CPU's usage when the system is idle. If it's high, then do a spyware removal with Ad-aware and Spybot. Also, check for viruses.
If the usage is still high, then shut down unnecessary programs running in background(especially an antivirus program).
If still no luck, then run Hijack This, and post its findings.