teacher222

I have a question about laptop graphics performance, or expected performance anyway, and the way that it might effect the computer as a whole. But first I think it might help if I give you a a little background....
I had never been much of a gamer before, playing only Tiger Woods PGA '04 golf on occasion and toying a little bit with an older version of "Call to Duty" just to check out what sort of graphics my computer actually had (when it came to games anyway). A little bit before Christmas, December (06), I was given a game to try from a friend, Half Life 2, because he thought that it might look cool on my 17 inch screen. The game ran fine for a while, and then hung up or began to stutter as it tried to play. I solved this only temporarily by stopping, closing down and restarting the program. But in general, the game ran fine about 95-98% of the time. I wasnt sure if I was just short on RAM or the computer was to hot to run.
The specs were as follows:
Toshiba Satellite P25 (Model P25-S676)
Pentium 4 CPU 3.4 GHz
800 FSB with Hyper Threading
Speed 3390 MHz
Current RAM 512MB
DVD Super MultiDrive CD/DVD Burner
Video Processor NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700; 128mb dedicated video RAM
80 gig Hard Drive
Operating System Microsoft MediaCenter ’04 Windows XP Professional Service Pack2
and of course the 17" widescreen.

The first question I have is this....
I had been playing the Half-life 2 game for approximately 3 hours one evening....really enjoying the game, even if I suck as a gamer. Anyway, the game suddenly started to stutter, then completely froze or hung, and gave me an error message to shut down and restart, and if the problem occurred again, contact the vendor.
I never got the chance.....My computer would not reboot from that point on, except only in safe mode, and the support help that I received from Toshiba (thank God for extended warranties) unfortunately couldn’t solve the problem, and basically told me that I would probably have to use the start-up disks and reconfigure everything from that point. Long story short, I had to send in the lap-top, and a month later, they told me that the mother board was fried.
**QUESTION ONE...can playing a game for extended periods of time actually fry a mother board?

My computer problem was somewhat solved by Toshiba, in the way that they replaced my computer with what they called a like for like or better than what I had, type of policies. And even though the replacement computer has some better specifications in many areas and I have listed as follows;
P105-S6064
Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005, Intel® Core™ Duo Processor
T2400, 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM, 160GB HDD (4200RPM), 17” WXGA+ TruBrite™, DVD
SuperMulti Double Layer, 802.11 a/b/g, Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950, Express
Media Player,

I was a bit skeptical about the graphics processor and overall performance. The new computer that I have as a replacement, will not play the same games, or at least in the same way.
Example...Half-life 2, has to be restarted more often when the scene changes or loads from section to section, giving an error of can not read info. Games like Dark Messiah run with jumps/stutters and has to be restarted, but has never run a full section smoothly, and has a very irritating white diagonal line running the full length of the screen. Tiger Woods PGA tour '04 looks and runs differently, with some similar types of jumps and some just plain unexplainable actions, and the game BloodRayne2 wont even load giving and error of cnanot load or create hardware vertex processing device.
**QUESTION TWO....why won’t the newer (presumably better) computer play games in the same way or better than my old one?

Thank you for taking the time to read the above situation and for any of your comments/feedback.
Sincerely,
JS Pierce

dai

try something under the laptop to allow air to circulate underneath,if it improves it get a laptop cooler

TheMatt

Hi,

Your older computer actually had better graphics than the new computer. While the newer computer does have a better processor and more RAM, it has an integrated graphics processor (IGP) with no dedicated video RAM. This basically means that the graphics card will have to use the system RAM, which is already bogged down with a lot of memory accesses from the processor. In short, your old graphics card was better than your new one, which makes a huge difference in gaming.

If the graphics on the old laptop, while being dedicated with dedicated video RAM, were not actually removable from the motherboard, the motherboard would have to be replaced if the graphics card overheated and was damaged as a result.

I would contact Toshiba, explain what specs of the old one were (and how it had a dedicated card), and ask for a new laptop with a dedicated card such as a GeForce Go 6600, 7400, or 7600, or a Mobility Radeon X700, X1400, or X1600. These are all dedicated cards and will accommodate HL2 fine.

BTW, when you are gaming, it is always a good idea to monitor the temperatures of your processor and your graphics card (if it is dedicated). Use MobileMeter for processor temps and either ATI Tray Tools or RivaTuner for ATI or nVidia graphics cards respectively. Links can be found in my sig below.