Gameplay problems with laptop

[crutherford]

first ever post here so hi to everyone. Here's my problem.

I bought a new laptop to hopefully play my bb account on it and maybe play elsewhere in the house. Unfortunately it either crashes on loading my character or shortly after entering the game. I am using a wireless link so this may be the problem, but can anyone else tell me how I could get the wireless working? It is internal, not a usb adapter. I have checked and my graphics card is not supported but I used to play on an old dell laptop with half the spec of this one and an unsupported card. My onboard video is s3/via unichrome.

Hope someone out there can help. Otherwise the laptop is going back to the shop.

 

[Darzil]

I'd suggest letting us know what the laptop is, in case others have the same.

Is it possible for you to connect using network, rather than wireless, to see if the problem is graphics or wireless connection ?

Darzil

 

[crutherford]

tried it on a wire but just the same.

The laptop is a parkard bell easynote
1.4 celeron m
512 ram
60gb hard disk
64mb via/unichrome graphics

I have disabled all graphics features and all background services to no avail.

 

[DocWolfe]

your graphics card simply should not be able to run doac. It probably isn't even supported.

 

[crutherford]

used to run it on my old dell latitude with 32mb graphics. I am running the old toa client as well, so none of the new effects

 

[cjkace]

Huge difference between Dell and Packard Bell, mainly that PB are total sh*te.

My guess is the drivers for the graphics. I tried to play DAoC on an Acer laptop that had 64Mb dedicated Radeon 9600 but it crashed instantly. Acers website had no newer graphics drivers, but installing the Catalyst drivers cleared up all my problems.

Scanning the web I can't find anyone that has run DAoC on a S3/Unichrome graphics card so it looks like you are out of luck. If you have house insurance, chuck it down the stairs and claim your kid/sister/brother/mother etc dropped it and buy a decent laptop.

TIP: Research the various motherboard/graphics combos on the internet before you even think about putting any cash down.

Generally

ATI/nVidia = Good to Great
S3/Intel = Aahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh splat!

 

[Coolan]

s3/unichrome cards , best ive managed to get working on one of them was the original classic ui, but with the updated classic that went out the window, best bet is new laptop.

 

[Darzil]

On a laptop with a better graphics card, but you'll also find a huge hit on a laptop with 512Mb memory, as you'll be writing/reading to/from pagefile a lot, and laptop hard drives are slower than desktop ones.

The difference between my laptop with 2Gb and 512Mb memory is pretty much the difference between playable and unplayable.

Darzil

 

[crutherford]

Thanks for the advice guys, looks like this one is going back to the shop. I'll bite the bullet and spend a few more quid for a decent one.

 

[Svartmetall]

Onboard graphics = the suck. No ifs, ands, or buts. Your machine is trying to precache so much information, since it can't actually draw it, that it gives up the ghost half way through.

Wireless is pure evil, too, but this is going to be a graphics (or rather lack of graphics) issue.

 

[crutherford]

cjkace above sayes it all. Parkard bells suck monkey balls!!! I got it running on my mates Toshiba with onboard intel graphics...straight away, no tweaks. Had it running my BB account all evening with no crashes.

According to the shop it is basically the same pc....not!!! And it only has 512mb shared memory. And at only £50 more I'm off to buy one today.

I'll upgrade to 1Gb Right away tho, maybe more.

Thanks for all the help