I told Mom about what Drac and someone else (at Adventure Point) said keeping the Acer with Win 7 for running the latest games and looking for an older model laptop that runs XP and use both lsptops (but on different days) for adventure gaming, and Mom told me she'd allow me to keep the Acer and get a laptop that runs XP, Mom told me she'd advance me the money, and that I'm allowed to start looking for an XP laptop now, either on ebay or Amazon.com. And if you guys can find me an older model XP laptop, please post.


wanted specs in this XP laptop:

*15-inch screen;

*512 MB NVidia GeForce 9600M 3D graphics card only (no ATI Radeon/GMA/Intel HD graphics wanted);

*Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.xx (2.xx's in the upper range preferred);

*any name brand;

*must have XP (32-bit) drivers readily available for it;

*if laptop comes with Vista/Win 7, I'll wipe the HDD & install XP (32-bit) on it from a XP install CD I have;

*please, no optimus technology wanted, as there's no XP drivers for it.

*2009 model preferred;

*my budget is around $500.

As I said in the other forum, I will not post any suggestions again.

Maybe you should do your own searching this time cruise02, I don't think the tech helpers in here want to be shopping assistants.

The 9600M really cuts down on your options -- especially along with XP compatibility.
Here's an example of what you might find
***HP Pavilion DV5T with Vista***

Note that not all DV5T's have a Geforce 9600M in them. Most will have Intel graphics. All the DV5T's I checked on eBay came with Intel graphics.

There are no official drivers for XP on the DV5T on HP's website, but there is ***this thread at Notebookreview*** that tells how some people managed to get XP drivers for it.


HA! You won't get one for that unless it's broken. Not with a video card as good as a 9600.

Whatever 15" laptop you find with a 9600M in it, the result is going to be similar.

Here's an old Alienware on eBay that is 15"
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190516322456
and is (currently) in your price range at $111.11.
It does have an XP sticker on the bottom, which means it will run with XP, but currently has Ubuntu installed.
But they don't say what video card it has. You'll have to email the seller for that. It probably has something like a Geforce 7600 in it, but I can't be sure. If it does have a Geforce 7600 or other 7000 or 8000 series card, that explains why the starting bid is low.

If you can find a tech shop in your area that takes in broken machines to recycle, maybe you can find one there. I know the shop by us has piles of them, the owner just hasn't had the time to go through them. He has two of my old desktops, but I still have the old Dell 98SE laptop in my closet.

Shop eBay or Amazon for something along these lines -

Acer Aspire 6930G-6723

As I recall it was a pretty good laptop with a 9600M and core 2 Duo. You Should be able to find one used for a reasonable price. It shipped as Vista ready, so you should be able to find one with XP installed.

What about Craigslist for your area, you might find something. With the recession a lot of people are selling stuff.

Thanks, Hawka, I took your advice and scoured my local Craig's list for a XP laptop I want, and I found 1 potential seller that has a bunch of laptops for sale, and I'm waiting for him to get back to me on what he has to offer. He will consider trades of computers (incl. old/broken PC's, desktops) and I still have that Practice PC # 2 that I got from the thrift store this past Nov. that I replaced the floppy drive in (but the floppy's eject button is missing) just tested that PC yesterday, found it already had its win 98 installed in it, it's an HP Pavilion 4530, and if the seller has a laptop that I want, I'm going to ask him if he would be willing to trade that HP Pavilion 4530 for the XP laptop. He sounds like a tech who has older computers for sale and he plays games as a hobby.

@Jenny100: Yes, I did go to notebookreview.com and I told them what specs I wanted in a XP laptop, about Craig's list, and one of the folks there advised me to avoid HP's and Dells from the 2007 -08 era as they have defective NVidia cards, and another person advised to stay away from the Thinkpad T42 b/c it has a defective mobo.


Since this laptop has to be an older PC, I believe I'll have to lower my specs a bit.

wanted specs in this XP laptop:

*15-inch screen;

*256 MB NVidia GeForce 3/4 3D graphics card only (no ATI Radeon/GMA/Intel HD graphics wanted);

*Intel Pentium @ 2.xx (2.xx's in the upper range preferred, actually 3 GHz preferred);

*any name brand (no HP/Dell/Thinkpad T42 wanted b/c of defective internal hardware;

*must have XP (32-bit) drivers readily available for it or must come with the XP OS install/driver CD/DVD;

*my budget is around $500.

Maybe something like this would do - ASUS G1S-X2 15.4" Notebook PC

That one's got the Geforce 8600 card in it, Inland. That's one of the cards that gave the HP's and Dell's Cruise02 mentioned such a bad name.


You're not going to find that combination in a laptop card. The most video RAM you'll find in a Geforce 3 Go or Geforce 4 Go is 64 MB, and you often see less. Even the desktop versions of the Geforce 4 didn't have more than 128 MB VRAM.


Remember you also said

The defective thing about HP's and Dell's from that era was the Nvidia cards -- but those video cards were put in other brands other than HP and Dell. It's just that since HP and Dell were top selling laptops, they got most of the publicity. The Nvidia 8600 in the Asus had the same problems as those put in the Dell's and HP's. It's the 7000 and 8000 series Nvidias you should be avoiding (especially in a 15"), not the Dell or HP brands.
***One of the Notebookreview threads about the problem in Asus G1S***.

It is known to have issues, but there were updates to throttle the core down as I recall. Unfortunately for the money she can afford, she's probably going to have to make a compromise.

So Cruise, what's your issue with ATI graphics? There were a few ATI HD types available.

Ok, let's bump the video card up a bit from a 3/4 series to a Nvidia Geforce 7/8 (preferably an 8 series).

Found a chart comparing NVidia cards, I'm looking at the GeForce 8600 GTS, it has the GDDR3, it's probably old enough to have gotten put into one of there older laptops I'm looking for. Now to refine my wanted specs further -

Yes, but they were essentially putting a band aid on the problem. And even if the update worked, the laptop came with Vista, not XP, and the updates would have been for Vista. Or are you talking about flashing the GPU?


Especially if she wants one with 256 MB of VRAM. She's not going to find that in earlier Nvidia models.


I was wondering that too. Maybe it's because she wants the selection of drivers at laptopvideo2go.

Have you had a laptop with an ATI card that you gamed on, Inland?


All I can do is warn you, same as the guy at Notebookreview did. But it's your money.
***Engadget -- Figuring out which NVIDIA GPUs are defective -- it's a lot***

Ok - I had a HP Compaq Presario X6000 laptop with a P4 3 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, 64 MB ATI Radeon X300 GPU and I tried to play 80 Days in it but this game crashed after start up. This game is meant to play with NVidia cards, but if I can somehow make games like 80 Days run ok on an ATI, ok, then I'd take an ATI graphics.

and there was another game (in fact, a couple of games) that either crashed at game launch or locked up, and at the time, I thought this was b/c of the ATI graphics, thus, this became an issue for me.

But if these games that crashed/locked up on that old laptop (it was a 2005 model - ordered it brand new from HP in July 2005) can be made to run in this new laptop I'm after, then there'll be no more problem with not liking the ATI graphics.

That laptop had XP (32-bit)

I see that - the "XP" filter must not have been constructed as well as it could have been

The updates I recall were in the video drivers, not the BIOS. But, there's probably a BIOS flash somewhere.



Sure did - there's nothing wrong with ATI at all.

Here's an example of one configured with ATI -

Dell Studio 1555 15.6-INCH Notebook / Windows XP MCE & Radeon HD 4570

Don't know if the GeForce 8800 series were affected - that site Jenny linked to only mentioned problems with the 7000, 8400 and 8600 series cards, it didn't mention the 8800's. Did the 8800 NVidia cards also have a problem?

Ok, if I go with ATI, do you know if I could get an ATI with 256 MB VRAM?

Got to ask you a question, Inland - did you ever play 80 Days and Jazz and Faust on a laptop with ATI graphics?

The one I linked to in the prior post had an ATI Mobility Radeon HD4570 graphics card featuring 512 MB of dedicated VRAM... So, yes.



As much as I've wanted to play both - I have not. I'll pick up a copy of them someday

Edit - I don't know what's up with these XP filters, but the item I linked to doesn't appear to be configured with XP MCE. If you look at the Specifications it says XP MCE, but the seller claims it's running Windows 7 (maybe they upgraded it when the referb'd it).

Found this laptop on Craig's list - it has a P4 2.8 GHz (RUMA),

512 RAM,

Win XP,

but the HDD looks a little too small - only 80 gig,

what size hdd should I go for in an older XP laptop?

Got to go now see ya later

Hi Cruise
512 mb ram with XP is not very good. You should have at least 1 gig of ram or XP will be extremely slow. I have 2 40 gig HD's in my desktop. It's managable with a lot of cleaning up in between game installs.

Cathy

Video card?


How much space are you planning to use on that laptop? It's unlikely that you'll fill up an 80 GB drive with installations of older games.


That depends on what games you're playing. This laptop would be for older games -- especially those that have issues with Windows 7, not current games. I had an old desktop with 512 MB RAM and XP and it was not slow. I played Secret Files: Tunguska on it because of a copy "protection" problem with the DVD drive in my newer computer. Tunguska worked fine with 512 MB of RAM. I was surprised at how well it worked. Current games are going to be run on Cruise's Acer, which has Windows 7.

Here's another alternative Cruise - it ships with Vista (But Dell has all the XP drivers).

Dell XPS M1730 -nVidia 8700GT 256MB VRAM

Inland, I'm now looking for a Pentium 4 @ 2.8 - 3 GHz laptop with a 15-inch screen, 17-inch screen is too bulky and heavy to take with me to game at coffee shops like Barnes & Noble/Panara Bread, laptop weight ~5 - 6 pounds is what I'm looking for. I've refined my wanted specs from a Core 2 Duo to a Pentium 4, as you can see. That 256 MB NVidia looks good, but it's not one of these defective cards, is it?

Also, I hate placing bids on ebay; I did this 10 years ago for a game that I wanted in the worst way, and when someone out-bidded me, I was mighty upset, so this lesson taught me never to bid on stuff - only go to the ebay sales where they have a "buy it now" button - that way, I wouldn't risk losing an item I want (perhaps very badly) to an out-bidder.

Could you please keep searching, Inland, for only laptops that match my wanted specs as closely as you can get, please? I'd appreciate it.

EDIT - I tried a search on ebay and Amazon using the keywords/with the ebay search specifics "laptop+XP+Pentium4" and I found 3 such laptops on ebay, one had a 3 GHz CPU, but the HDD was something in the neighborhood of 40 GB, (on ebay), and Amazon's search pulled up laptops with Win 7 on them, so it looks like Amazon's search isn't as good as ebay's search engine? Or am I going about it the wrong way on Amazon - how exactly do I make Amazon's search engine find exactly what I want?

Will do Cruise - it's going to be a challenge

I know what you mean about the 17" screen - that's exactly why I went with the Toshiba 3DV8.

What do you mean by this - did you want a 17-inch screen just b/c it would be too big and heavy for your grandkids to steal from you when they're itching to play some of your neat games and would thus get discouraged b/c of the laptop's size/weight?

Yes it was. And the M1730 was one of the laptops on the recall list. The Nvidia Geforce 8700 was essentially a souped up Geforce 8600. The Geforce 8800 was a different build though.

The only reason I know so much about the defective Dell laptops with Nvidia cards from that time period is that I was thinking of getting one and was reading several of the laptop forums at Notebookreview.

Inland's 3DV8 is a 15.6" laptop with a 3D screen.
http://us.toshiba.com/computers/laptops/satellite/A660/A665-3DV8