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Vista & DX8/DX9 support on a notebook

I

imported_Com80787

Member
Hi all,

I am considering buying a notebook pretty soon and I'm looking to spend no more than $600 on it. I want to run the final version of Vista when it is out.

I've found some systems in that price range. Both of them have 512 RAM (I'll upgrade to 1gig at Vista launch), one a Sempron 3100 and the other a Celeron M 360.

The Celeron one has an Intel Media Accelerator 900 and the other a Sis Mirage 2 for video. Does it matter for Vista which of these I use?

Also - will Vista run with decent performance on these systems? I know they don't have the video cards needed to get all the pretty effects, but is that all that will be missing? (transparency and other such effects) Or will Vista default to some kind of "classic" windows look?

Would it be worth it to spend more and get a Mobility Radeon X200 notebook?

Thanks for any info!
 
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Vista will probably run like crap on a system with those specs. It runs "ok" on my Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop (specs are in my signature). I have 512MB of memory right now as well, but I'm going to upgrade to at least 1GB (probably 2GB by the end of summer). And then it'll probably run better. I'm not saying you can't run it, but I am saying that it won't run that great, especially not at it's current state. But, from what I've been reading about the latest build of Vista (5456), the performance is improving dramatically. So you might get good results by the time Vista is released.

As far as a mobility X200, if you want to use Aero, you just need a DX9 compliant GPU with Smart Shader 2.0 support. But definately don't go cheap on the memory, thats the one thing you'll definately need a lot of. If you want a system around your price range, I'd check out the Dell E1505 base model (it's $649 and comes with 1GB of memory). Check out that system and upgrade the video card on it to like the Radeon X1300 ($79 upgrade, it'll be worth it):

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/...aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=E1505MIR&s=dhs

This system should run Vista just fine.
 
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