Cassini gets a laptop
 

Laptop, notebook, I don't know what the difference is. Behold:

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f1...125/Laptop.jpg

The Toshiba Satellite A215-S4697, complete with Windows Vista, DVD player/burner, 120 GB hard drive, and wireless internet, among other things. Purchased on the 12th of this month from Office Depot because I'm not going to the Con without my Sims. :)

Now if I can just figure out how it works... 8D

Wow! Such a neat laptop you got there.

Way to go, dude. It looks nice! :yeah:

We'll help you figure it out! Yay! Also, I was gonna remove Sims from my laptop (and move it to my desktop) but I guess I'll wait till after the Con so you can see what I've got. :terrsmile: How big's the screen?

The screen is about 8.25" x 13", 15.5" diagonally, give or take a bit, and thanks, I'll need all the help I can get. :)

Yeah, I definitely want to see your Sims stuff. :D

I installed the first four (of 18) disks for the Sims 2 earlier today, and found out something I'd expected; the game is a power hog. It sucks the life out of the battery as fast as a vampire sucks the life out of an innocent victim. I think I won't be playing the game in the park. On the bright side the graphics are very nice and it runs smoothly, so I'm pretty happy about that. :)

I'm really glad your graphics are working well (so far! who knows, with upcoming expansion packs), as you know mine doesn't work at optimum level with my notebook which is why I'm going to migrate it to my desktop.

And as for me I really have no intention of even using my notebook outside the hotel room, plugged into the wall.

Niiiiice:) I just got a laptop a couple of months ago as well, and it's almost the same as yours! I like Toshiba laptops; I haven't had a complaint yet.

Neat laptop there Cassini! I have an HP Pavilion laptop! Have fun with it!

~Little Baby IceCream~

That's one slick looking piece of technology you got there, Cass. Congrats.:D

thats a right purdy calculatin' device y'all done got there.

Nicely put, dude. 8D

Got a graphics glitch in the Nightlife expansion pack. I'm installing a patch even as we speak. If it doesn't work, I'll try something else.

I'm running two computers and an air conditioner. Maybe I should turn on the third computer, the TV & DVR, and the bathroon fan and go for broke (literally). :D

If anyone else here has a laptop and is thinking about installing the Sims 2 on it, my advice is simple; don't bother. The game is not laptop-friendly. It's difficult (although not impossible) to control the game with the touch pad, the graphics are not as smooth as they would be on a desktop unit of comparable power, and the number of performance and graphics glitches I get per game session is ridiculous. Some of this may be the fault of the Seasons expansion pack, which seems to be the cause of similar problems on my other two systems, and the game itself is notorious for bugs anyway, but on the laptop the situation is much worse. The loading time is okay, and I can play the game, but it isn't the enjoyable experience that it should be. Bottom line: If you have the game, don't install it on your laptop. It isn't worth the effort. :(

I'm definitely moving the game back to my desktop before that Vacation pack comes out.

I may eventually move the game to my old system. I considered trying to run Foster's Valley on the laptop but I think it would take all day to load and the House itself would run abysmally slow. Either way I'm taking another crack at fixing my main system game tonight; wish me luck. The laptop game is playable, but it has a high frustration level. I've read about this, the game being difficult to work with on portable computers, but why this happens I don't have a clue. :terrconf:

Well other than not being able to see like, the sky at high resolution, I've had zero issues playing Sims 2 on my laptop. *shrug*

I never bother trying to install games on laptops. I just assume that they would be too much for it and stick to the smaller ones. But I never really use laptops for gaming in general. I'm sure that there are laptops that can be made into gaming machines but I'm just not a big PC gamer to be interested in them.
I've never played the Sims so I don't know what could help you, Cas. The only thing I can think of would be that there may be a patch to fix those problems. But being the big Sims fan that you are, I'm sure that you would already be on top of anything like that.;)

Nice Cass! I am fixing to buy a Dell (not sure what color yet) laptop, and since Dell has their accounts with Schwab, and I work for "Uncle Chucky," I get the employee discount!:D

If I had to pick, it would be either black or silver. :D

Just to clarify something; the machine I purchased is a fine machine in every way and will serve me well in many different ways over the next few years. It's fast, efficient, and easy to use, once you master the touch pad. It's just that laptops in general are not good platforms for the Sims 2 game. They're good for everything else, however.

Thanks for the heads up on games on laptops, Cass. Although I'm not much into the gaming scene myself, I do find myself looking at computer games at the store and *thinking* about it sometimes. I am somewhat familiar with Sims, though, and they're fun. I might have considered getting a game at some point.

Have you been able to fix that bug you found when trying to play? I know what it's like to miss something that helped "complete" your life in some way or other. It's tough. So hope everything works out. :frankiesmile:

It depends on which bug and which system you're talking about. The situation on the laptop is pretty much as I described it above. I have it on now as a matter of fact; I'm in the process of decorating a house. The graphics problems are confined mostly to actual game play involving Sims, so I'm not having any problems at the moment. On my main system the game will load up to a point but if I try to enter one of the neighborhoods my entire system freezes up, shows me the Blue Screen of Death, and I have to kill the power to get out of it. The problem appears to be with the driver for my videocard, which I ironically purchased several months ago because the old card was doing the same thing. The driver is refusing to uninstall completely so I can't install the updated driver (overwriting doesn't work). It's frustrating and at times heartbreaking. It will eventually get fixed and restarted somehow, I just don't currently know how or when. :(

Actually, it's not impossible to be able to play games that have pretty high requirements with a notebook. However, you'd have to spend more for a gaming notebook than you do for a gaming desktop. I recently tried out a first-person shooter demo, just to see how it would do on my notebook. Obviously, playing it on my maximum resolution (which is WSXGA+, or 1680x1050) wouldn't play all that great, but a step or two below would be more than sufficient. To say that one shouldn't game on a notebook (or specifically The Sims 2), it depends on one's computer, to be honest. I can't say anything about The Sims 2, though.

Sounds like you got a good deal with that laptop there. As far as my own experience with trying to play The Sims/Sims 2 on a computer, it's never seemed to run very well on either a laptop or a PC.