Thread: Dell laptop player contemplations/queries...

Gent's

About a year ago my P.O.S. 02 compaq tower went tit's up on me so I had to stop playing PR. I've been stuck in vanilla-land for too long and desperately want to get my PR fix going on. I had PR running for a while on the fold-over but ran into the whole load and crash thing. After reading the forum's I'm thinking I might be able to get past that. Btw, I'd play TTP server more but had the PB handshake issue...got past that...cool. Anyway, my Dell Latitude D820 seems to crash whenever I get near a heli or in an APC...sound card? I got the drivers for the sound card/chipset from Dell but I don't know if I'm loading/unloading them correctly. Think: Chicken looking at a card trick

Any insight would be very much appreciated.

Gentlemen,

Until I can find a way to get a new hot rod gaming PC to past Mr's Dogfart I'm stuck with my company supplied fold-over. Perhaps some of you married guys can sympathize. Anyway, how 'bout I start from the beginning and work out from there:

Here's what I got

Dell Latitude D820 windows XP Svc Pk 3
80 GB / 1 GB Ram
Intel Centrino Duo T2400/1.83 Ghz
Direct X 9.0c

Nvidia Quadro NVS 110m
Forceware Ver. 101.19 (I think I've updated to latest drivers)
256MB
Bios Ver: 5.72.22.21.fe (I know what a Bios is...the rest of it looks like an I.P...and I know it's not)
IRQ: 16
Bus: PCI express x16 (something about dual SLI capable?)

Sound: Symtex? (or some such brand) which I updated drivers for today...I think.

I play Vanilla fine (almost daily, check my stats) on this laptop and even played PR for a while (last year?) on ver. 0.75/mod 0.61/PR 0.6.0.9

Started getting crashes to desktop whenever (seemingly) too much sound came pouring through. I.E. Heli's, APC's, or in game voip/chat...not sure about the voip, etc.

I run my vid rez at lowest settings (which sux but it's all I know anyway) and I think the in-game audio options are set properly.

I've dwnld'd the latest PR files/map packs. I have not deleted the old ver's of PR yet as suggested in forum's as I'm accustomed to laying patches/fix's over existing updates...not sure what to do here.


1st Q: Is the above system too lame for PR?
2nd Q: Does anyone else play on a laptop? Some of us travel extensively and it sure is nice to take your gaming with you to the hotel room.

The above system isn't all that bad, but the nVidia Quadro series of video cards isn't made for gaming; it's a workstation card. Unlike ATI's FireGL cards that are based on the Radeon chips, the Quadro isn't based on the GeForce chips, so gaming performance is likely to be spotty at best. That being said, BF2 is a pretty old game, and you should be able to run it on at least medium to low settings. Random crashes don't usually indicate that your hardware is not sufficient; I would keep playing around with your drivers, especially your video drivers.

That makes sense...never would've thought about a vid card being designed for work or play. I do have to look at a fair amount of CAD drawings/prints, etc. so I guess that's why the company IT folks gave me this one. So, onward with the PR...thanks for your help.

The other choice they could have made for your video card is the intel integrated video so you have a better card. I'm actually picking out laptops at work from Dell and have the same choice, the quadro or intel. I'd prefer the gaming line but they aren't available in the line of laptops we get and it's for work not play

If it's audio related, see if you have any USB headsets around. This is usually (always?) a separate soundcard and won't use the internal audio card if that's what's causing the issue. There are a number of surround sound one's out there too but I don't know if they are any good. I think Creative has an add on card for laptops for sound but once again, I don't know if it's any good.