Toing

Hello all,

I've recently bought a new laptop for work and the occasional game. The specs are:

Dell Inspiron 1564
Core i3M
3GB DDR3
Intel GMA HD
Windows 7 64-bit

This is a laptop that can handle MechWarrior 4 (full settings), Rome Total War (medium to full settings), Demigod (low settings), Unreal Tournament (full settings) etc.

However, none of the Infinity Engine games will work smoothly on this machine. They all install, load and play fine, without any errors or graphical glitches whatsoever. However they all experience some or all of the following (with all graphical settings and hardware acceleration turned up):

- Periodic stuttering/freezes (time between freezes seems to be faily consistent, and happens regardless of what is on screen)

- Lag and general slowness in game and in menu screens

- Mouse pointer lag and "jumpy-ness"

To compare, I've never had any IE game issues on my main PC (Windows 7 64-bit, Core 2 Due E6600, 2GB DDR2, NVidia 8800GTS). If fact the laptop specs exceed the PC specs in some areas, and they both use the same OS. That narrows it down to the graphics card. But surely the Intel GMA HD, which is a fairly new integrated chip can handle IE games? I've hardly seen any complaints online of people having IE trouble on that chip; most people seem to have issues with the 8-series cards.

Progress so far:

- Turning down all the graphics options, using the lowest colour depth, software acceleration on everything seems to solve most of the issues. This removes freezes in IWD1 and IWD2 and PST, but BG2 freezes remain. This removes lag in BG2 and PST, but not in IWD1 or IWD2.

- Using Resolution/UI mods have no effect on the performance. The games are just as likely to freeze at low resolutions as they are at high resolutions.

- Using the D3DWindower seems to solve the lag issue of the games, but it does not stop the stuttering and freezing.


Although I've been able to play most of IWD1 and some of PST with everything turned down, I would ideally like to play these games smoothly with all options turned on. Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!