FS2004 on Laptops & 2 screens tips

[Ejector]

I am about to buy a new laptop, (logistically I need a laptop unfortunately).

Now the hypercritical bit, I don’t want a high end machine, but I want to run FS2004, with a CH yoke and two external Monitors.

Does any one know of any good ideas to achieve this at a decent price?

Thanks

[Conan the Librarian]

"Does any one know of any good ideas to achieve this at a decent price?"

I am afraid it is called a deasktop. FS2004 needs a substantial machine to get the best from it and you are obviously a serious sim freak. I honestly don't think you will get a "cooking" laptop to do it, unless the sliders are all down. I honestly would be surprised if you can get a positive experience from a lappy, unless it is extremely well specced and therefore pricey as well.

By the way, FS X is on the way later this year and that will probably make a lot of current desktops sweat.

Conan

[Dave Martin]

Originally Posted by Ejector

I am about to buy a new laptop, (logistically I need a laptop unfortunately).
Now the hypercritical bit, I don’t want a high end machine, but I want to run FS2004, with a CH yoke and two external Monitors.
Does any one know of any good ideas to achieve this at a decent price?
Thanks

A laptop is fine, but anything less than top end and you'll be unhappy. A fast graphics card is essential and these usually only come on high end machines (>£1500).

Check out the Dell XPS or Inspiron 9400 for good systems. You ahve to make a trade off between screen resolutions too. I go for the highest possible (1900x1200), but this taxes the graphics card even more.

All that said, I've been running FS9 on an Inspiron 8600 with a Nvidia 5650 GPU and it runs ok with no fancy scenery or AI traffic.

[5711N0205W]

Hmm, yes as said above a standard laptop will struggle to run FS2004 with any settings other than at the low end of the sliders. A quick Google found this below which may be quite decent (look at the price though). I'm not sure if I'm allowed to put in a link to the site with the prune advertising rules. Try the search "gaming laptop" in google.co.uk and go to the first of the sponsored links at the top.
Intel® Pentium M (2.26GHz)
Microsoft® Windows® XP Home
1Gb DDR2 533 RAM
17” WSXGA+ X-Glass TFT
256MB nVidia G0 7800 GTX or
ATI Mobility Radeon X800XT PE
Graphics
100Gb (7200 rpm) HDD
8 x Dual Layer DVD (-/+) Writer
Gigabit LAN & Bluetooth
Microsoft® Works 8
BullGuard Antivirus
Carry Case
+ 3yrs Collect & Return Warranty!
£1761.33 Incl VAT

[Conan the Librarian]

Looking at the orginal post, it mentions two screens - so I assume that you already have the second screen. Where am I going with this? Let's see...

Well specced desktop base unit for FS9 will cost £400-500. Connect to that second screen. Now, get a reasonable multi media laptop. Another £500 to £600

Likely total cost of both, is far less than a high end laptop. I know that your circumstnaces may dictate use of the laptop, but you will soon get cheesed off with plugging everything in.

Conan

[Ejector]

I am looking at my options of keeping my whiz bang machine for FS and getting a run around notebook, it was built for FS and have been offered 1100pounds for the box and guts of it alone 6 months old, it is meant to be an amazing machine for FS, yeah it does it good, but a computer is a computer to me. I have uit set up with two 21' trinitons and lots of bells and whistles, (peddles, yokes, MCP, Freznals, etc). All I know is that it has a top of the line processor, some good graphics card I forget the name of and a gig of RAM and it's in a black box with lots of fans in it. The other advantage of a new laptop would be I could network it appartently and connect a touch screen to it and put the FMS on to that screeen for a cheap fully functional FMS. (They are expensive little suckers those FMS keypads.)

Below is a low end IBM notebook, I would upgrade. If I keep my main machine and dedicate that to FS, Do you think this would be enough for run the usual Microsoft Office, email, and run FS smothly enough when I go away for 2-3 weeks trips? It is new and about 450 pounds. Thanks chaps.


Features
* Product Description: ThinkPad R50e 1834 - Celeron M 330 1.4 GHz
* Dimensions (WxDxH): 33.2 cm x 26.9 cm x 3.7 cm
* Weight: 2.7 kg
* Built-in Devices: Speaker, wireless LAN aerial (NO WiFi Card Included), ThinkLight
* Processor: Intel Celeron M 330 1.4 GHz
* Cache Memory: 512 KB - L2 Cache
* RAM: 512 MB (installed) / 2 GB (max) - DDR SDRAM - PC2700 - 333 MHz
* Hard Drive: 40 GB - 4200 rpm
* Optical Storage: CD Rom - integrated
* Display: 14.1" TFT active matrix XGA (1024 x 768) - 24-bit (16.7 million colours)
* Graphics Controller: Intel 855GM

[Ejector]

What Do you mean by a well spaced notebook

[shuttlebus]

Huh!

Currently on a 2.0Ghz Centrino wth 1Gb of ram and a 64Mb Radeon X600 graphics card. (1680*1050 on a 15.4" widescreen)

Superb picture and runs FS2004 a treat....

What else can I say.... oh yes, it is a HP nx8220 business notebook, so WinXP Pro as well! Was about £1200 when I bought it. (Now £1219 + VAT)

You can order a docking station, monitor stand etc as well, so you can easliy have a desktop set-up and just pull the laptop of the docking station when you need to be mobile.... works a treat.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en...-12115178.html

Regards,

Shuttlebus

[Conan the Librarian]

If that laptop is cheap, then it will do all of the things laptops usually do, but I would prefer a more organic wireless capability and a larger screen.

Biggest bugbear with laptops is battery life, which devolves to what you really want it for. My own Acer and many other laptops are meant to be "Desktop replacements" which usually means a horsing great processor and a battery life of maybe less than one hour. These things are very good - if you can use mains power, or the central heating is on the blink. (When you see the heat they throw out, you will understand that short battery life a lot better) They are hopeless if you need a PC that runs away from base on batteries. On the other hand, a notebook that is optimised for true mobile use away from power, a slower processor that chucks out less heat, will get you doing laptop things for hours on end. Get this wrong and without wishing to over dramatise, but you have wasted a large wad of the folding stuff.

Looking over the specs is easy, but you will get the most bang per buck, in writing down your requirements and working from them.

Let us know if we can help.

Conan

[terrain safe]

sorry to be stupid but I don't know of any laptops that will connect to 2 monitors. Most just have 1 output to a monitor.

TS

[Conan the Librarian]

Under normal terms, you would use the laptop monitor as no 2. though there are external whizzbang cards or even splitters that will enable two monitors to run together. I am told that they do tend to be slow though, which in the application above, will be erm... unhelpful.

Conan

[Ejector]

Thanks Conan, Firstly can you please explain, "What Do you mean by a well spaced notebook" ?

Yeah, I have some card that runs the two screens and they are not slowed down, I can put you in touch with the chap who made it if you want the specs of the system. I have come to the conclusion of keep that system going and keep it at my base city as a FS machine only and all other stuff on the new notebook low end notebook, I will conceed only having one screen with that and will just be doing approaches off line etc. I spose the only question now is, what can I get away with that will still run FS2004 without stops etc. ?
Do you think that a 1.5GHz with 512ram and a basic graphics would be enough?
This is basicly to check emails and FlightPlan on the run and be capible of running FS in "simply" mode.

[AaronBaird]

I think he meant well Spec-ed (specifications)



From my experience dell has the cheapest, most graphic capable laptops. They don’t offer it on the website anymore (because they just came out with a new duel core version) but the inspiron 9300 is just about the most powerful, most upgradeable (rare with laptops), and well priced notebook around.

It has the same parts as their overpriced XPS line except a "weaker" graphics card which comes in two versions; the x300 and the 6800go. The x300 is slower and will run older games like FS2004 but probably not at high settings. The 6800go will smoke some desktops, and both are upgradeable. (I have a 6800go and can play every game on the market with max settings, while my girlfriend has the x300 and can play exery game on medium-low settings). It’s kind of big (17in screen) but a larger laptop is probably the only way you will be able to run graphically intense games.
Plus the mother board is both processor upgradeable, and GPU (graphics) upgradeable. That means if you really wanted, when flight sim X comes out, you could run it at maxed settings if you upgraded to the 7800go graphics card (about $260 us, which is cheaper than it would be to put in a desktop). You probably wouldnt, but its nice to know that you can. The 6800go will still be able to run it almost maxed.

Dell just stopped selling this specific model retail, so you would have to look online at eBay or elsewhere. I’m sure electronics stores still have plenty of stock. You can probably find one for around 1400 US, Just make sure you get the version with a 6800go graphics card and you should be good.

Dell still does however offer the 6000d model online which is smaller and comes with the x300 graphics card, but it is not upgradible.
Alienware and Sager also offer similar machines for about twice the price.



Some general advice on purchasing a laptop:

The processor and graphics speed are most likely non upgradeable (they will become less useful in the future) so go for a more powerful processor over a big hard drive or memory.

Buy the least amount of system memory from the retailer: it’s over priced, you can find it cheaper at places like www.crucial.com and it’s very easy to install yourself.

Same goes for the hard drive: if you buy it separately its MUCHH cheaper (also not too hard to install)



Hope that helps, Aaron