Cheap Gaming Laptop
Yes, a cheap gaming laptop would rock. More bang for your buck and all that. But will it live up to the job it is intended for? Is it possible to to use a laptop as a cheap gaming computer?
SO what is your definition of cheap? 200 bucks? Or one thousand. There’s a big difference between what that sort of money can buy you.
The first step is to look at what sort of games you’re going to want to play. Let’s take an example:
Say for instance, you’re like me and into first-person online shooters. Counter-Strike: Source is a great FPS – it has a massive online following, and more importantly has been around for awhile, so you would expect that you could pick up a cheaper system that could run the game no hassles. So what are the minimum specs for CounterStrike?
According to the offical site, the MINIMUM system requirements are a 1.2 GHz Processor, 256MB RAM, and a DirectX 7 level graphics card running Windows 2000 at least (Plus of course a mouse, keyboard and Internet Connection – duh). Actually, that’s a good point I’ll raise right here – you will need a proper mouse regardless – you simply cannot game on a laptop with those little built-in mouse pads – it’s just to infuriating. Period.
Anyway, I tried running CS: Source on a laptop that actually had a 1.7GHz processor and 256 MB Ram and XP – despite the supposed minimum specs, the game simply would not run. It installed OK, but refused to load. So what’s my point?
Well, just because you can say your machine meets the minimum specs for a game your really want to play, it ain’t necessarily going to run it. That’s one of the pitfalls of looking for a cheaper computer – often minimum just doesn’t crack it.
As an aside, I suspect actually that 256MB of RAM is really just the bare minimum to run Windows XP alone, so probably adding some extra memory to the laptop would have fixed the problem.
So the point is that even though a laptop may sound cheap, it’s no use to you if it’s not going to run the games you want it to.
Ideally, it would help to have a friend who has a similar system to the one you are looking at buying. You could try the games you want to play on their machine first before parting with your cash.
Otherwise, check out forums. Most games these days have dedicated user forums, so search those or add a post and see what sort of gaming system they are using.
At this point I would also say to be very wary of cheap refurbished laptops. Again, it comes back to the specs. If you’re looking at buying a machine with a 2GHZ processor, but only 256MB of RAM that you can’t unpgrade, is it really going to be a good deal?