Experimenting with the laptop

[malikrthr]

Hello everyone, I know I have brought up this topic many times before but I think I made my final decision. The money that I was going to use to buy a budget gaming pc with, I think I may save it for college instead when the time comes. College is only a year and a half away so it probably wouldn't make sense to buy a gaming pc now at this stage. Though when college time arrives of course I am going to want a new laptop that is up to date and has a dedicated graphics card that can run trainz well and also perform every day tasks. That is way down the road though. I took a look in Best Buy the other day and it seems that most laptops surpass the specs of my 2009 Dell laptop in some cases. Even netbooks are getting better. I will just keep using my Dell Inspiron 1545 with GM45 chip or Mobile Intel 4 series express chipset family. Right now, I am using Trainz 2009 WBE patched to sp3. I am working on a DEM by Fishlipsatwork called Port Jervis as part of my Major Tri State area project. My main goal is to build a great route that looks pretty close to the real thing with just enough scenery details and track work but I want to build this in a way were I won't experience much lagging or stuttering. I don't really know if any of this would be possible with any type of Integrated Graphics chip. Before I run into any lagging or stuttering problems, does anyone know how I can configure the intel graphics or trainz settings in a way where I can get the best performance out of trainz. I was going to post this in another thread about dealing with laptops but the last post in that thread was from 2010 or 2011 and I didn't want to bump it. But from what I understand, it is possible to run trainz quite well on a laptop with integrated graphics on high settings according to some trainzers that use trainz on a laptop. I tried modifying the trainzoptions file and I think I may have messed something up in trainz. About every 45 minutes, trainz will shrink to a smaller black window and Windows will report that trainz has stopped working. To me, this is like a fatal error.

 

[JCitron]

Hello everyone, I know I have brought up this topic many times before but I think I made my final decision. The money that I was going to use to buy a budget gaming pc with, I think I may save it for college instead when the time comes. College is only a year and a half away so it probably wouldn't make sense to buy a gaming pc now at this stage. Though when college time arrives of course I am going to want a new laptop that is up to date and has a dedicated graphics card that can run trainz well and also perform every day tasks. That is way down the road though. I took a look in Best Buy the other day and it seems that most laptops surpass the specs of my 2009 Dell laptop in some cases. Even netbooks are getting better. I will just keep using my Dell Inspiron 1545 with GM45 chip or Mobile Intel 4 series express chipset family. Right now, I am using Trainz 2009 WBE patched to sp3. I am working on a DEM by Fishlipsatwork called Port Jervis as part of my Major Tri State area project. My main goal is to build a great route that looks pretty close to the real thing with just enough scenery details and track work but I want to build this in a way were I won't experience much lagging or stuttering. I don't really know if any of this would be possible with any type of Integrated Graphics chip. Before I run into any lagging or stuttering problems, does anyone know how I can configure the intel graphics or trainz settings in a way where I can get the best performance out of trainz. I was going to post this in another thread about dealing with laptops but the last post in that thread was from 2010 or 2011 and I didn't want to bump it. But from what I understand, it is possible to run trainz quite well on a laptop with integrated graphics on high settings according to some trainzers that use trainz on a laptop. I tried modifying the trainzoptions file and I think I may have messed something up in trainz. About every 45 minutes, trainz will shrink to a smaller black window and Windows will report that trainz has stopped working. To me, this is like a fatal error.

Integrated graphics will never cut it for large routes. If you ever upgrade to 2010 or 2012, the program definitely will not run or will run very poorly. There has been luck using DirectX, so go back and ensure that your settings are for DirectX and not Open/GL which the Intel chip doesn't really like with the sliders turned way down.

If you're ever interested in a laptop with discrete graphics, check out some of the the gaming laptops by HP and Dell. These have the horsepower to drive Trainz quite will and have the graphics chipset to do it as well.

HP: Starts at $549.00


http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s.../psg/notebooks/High_performance/dv6zqe_series

Dell: Starts around the same price
http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-17r-n7110/pd


John