My last post mentioned that I had purchased a Lenovo S10 netbook computer. I have been using it has my main machine at home and I can say that it was a very worthy purchase. Now, you may ask why would I use a 10″ netbook as my main computer. Well, I decided to sell my Alienware M17 gaming laptop and go back to a 17″ Macbook Pro. The Macbook Pro does not have nearly the same graphics card power as the M17, but I really missed using OS X. Plus, with the hours I have been working, my gaming time has dwindled drastically.

The Lenovo netbook is what made me realize I missed OS X. You see, it is possible to install OS X onto the S10 and that is exactly what I did. I am now dual booting Windows XP and Mac OS X. Installing the Mac operating system on a machine like this is not the easiest thing to do, but when you get it completed, it runs perfectly fine. All the hardware works well. The only exception to that is the built-in ethernet card. It currently does not work, but the built-in wi-fi does, so it is not much of a problem.  I started with this guide from the Lenovo S10 forums.

The Lenovo S10 uses a 1.6ghz Atom processor. Its intended use is light tasks and that is exactly it shines at. I can browse the web, check email, view online video, play music, and other standard things. It can’t view high definition video. It just does not have the raw power necessary to do so. I don’t find this much of a limitation as I don’t think most people get a 10″ netbook with the intention of watching high definition video. Non-HD content plays fine, but it does push the processor. If I watch a YouTube video or watch Twit Live, the CPU utilization stays at 75%.

I only have one complaint about it and that is the placement of the right-hand “shift” key. It is not in the standard position and I find myself pressing the “enter” key most of the time by mistake. It is awkward but I can live with it. All-in-all, the Lenovo S10 is a great little machine.

My 17″ Macbook Pro won’t ship until February 26th, so I will get even more use out of the S10. I wouldn’t recommend it for every day use, but for light use and travel, it can’t be beat.

I will post a review of the unit once I have had more time with it.  I plan to dual boot Windows XP (which it comes with) and OS X.  I have missed using OS X since moving to my Alienware laptop.  More to come as time permits.

First, I don’t want to give the impression that the M17 is not a good gaming machine.  It is a great one.  The 3DMark ’06 score is well over 12,000 and it plows through World of Warcraft at max settings while running at 1920×1200 resolution.  WoW has a very refined graphics engine, however, while Vanguard falls far short in this cateogry.  It also plays Crysis and other games extremely well.

I expected to be able to run Vanguard at Very High settings while keeping to my screens native resolution of 1920×1200.  In reality, the best I could do and still get a smooth experience was set it to High and tweaking it from there.  One of the biggest performance killers are shadows, and I had to set them to low quality.  I wanted to use full drawing distance but I had to set it at around 70%.  Turning on HDR made the game flicker like crazy, so I had to keep that turned off.  I also had to lower tree detail at long range.

I am not a FPS numbers kind of guy, so I don’t have that for you.  What I find important is how the game feels and flows as I play it.  If it hitches or stutters, that is all I need to know that the game isn’t running well at the current settings.  With the above modifications to the High graphical settings, the game runs very well while I am out in the field adventuring.  Things get much worse when I go into a town.  The game struggles to load NPC’s and buildings, which causes major stuttering until all the objects are loaded.

I had read that Sony had made some improvements to the graphics engine that they claimed would improve performance and reduce the “chunking” effect.  The Vanguard world is cut into many squares of land, or chunks, and when you pass from one chunk of land to another, the game freezes and churns away while it loads the contents of the new land area.  My experience since returning to the game is that there has been no improvement whatsoever.  My character still freezes in mid-stride and I have to wait a few seconds before he moves again.  Many times my character will start moving again but his legs are stuck in place, which makes him float over the terrain instead of running over it.

Keep in mind that all of this is happing at a high screen resolution.  Sure, I could lower it down to 1650×1080 or even lower, but I bought this computer in order to run games at high rez.  Other games are not a problem, but it is painfully obvious that Vanguard still has a long way to go before it will run well, even on high-end computers.

Now here is the kicker.  After being disappointed in the performance of this game on the M17, I did some research and discovered that SLI in Vanguard is not supported if you are using two separate video cards.  Bingo.  This is the reason for my troubles.  It boggles my mind that it doesn’t.  Here we have a game with extremely high hardware requirements and yet it doesn’t support SLI.  Fah!

So, the fault isn’t with the M17, it is with the game itself.  With this information in mind, the M17 plays Vanguard amazingly well.  I am not so disappointed after all.

The Alienware M17 is not built with portability in mind.  It is a desktop replacement machine that weighs around 10 pounds.  Needless to say, not many jet-setters will be carrying this thing around.  If you are looking for a gaming notebook and portability is not that important to you, then you need to take a serious look at the M17.

The M17 can be customized in many different ways.  I chose the 2.53ghz Core 2 Duo processor.  It can be easily upgraded to a quad core processor later on, so I didn’t feel it was necessary to pay the extra money for it now.  I also choose to get 4gb of RAM, 320gb hard drive, 17″ screen, illuminated keyboard and more.  You can really make the M17 your own.

The most important feature available on this notebook is the SLI graphics card option.  I went with dual ATI 3870 graphics cards, each with 512mb of RAM, and running in Crossfire mode.  That is two full video cards with a total of 1gb in video ram – in a notebook computer!

I haven’t had a ton of time with it yet, but I can tell you that this thing screams!  It plows through World of Warcraft at max settings with ease.  I also love how quiet it runs.  Even with the GPU fans at full speed, the noise is very acceptable.  I expected it to sound like a jet engine but it absolutely does not.

I’ll report more on its gaming performance as I get back into playing.  I am very interested to see how it can handle Vanguard’s hefty graphics engine.

Since I’m going to start up Everquest 2 and Vanguard again, I wanted to get a beefier machine. I don’t like to play games on lower settings and I was worried that Vanguard would be a problem. That prompted me to order a desktop PC with a stronger video card. I have built my own computers for years, but this time around I went with a pre-built solution. Computers are so inexpensive these days that it wasn’t worth my time doing all the parts/pricing research that usually goes into my building a custom PC.

It didn’t take me long to find a decent PC at at great price. I ended up purchasing a HP Pavilion m8200n Multimedia PC from Amazon.com for $669. The specifications include an AMD X2 6000+ processor, 3gb RAM, 500gb hard drive, TV tuner, etc. The included video card is very weak, so I found an Nvidia 8800GT 512mb card on sale at Best Buy for $250. This system is certainly not the best, but it’s a fast computer at a cheap price. The bummer for me is the estimated arrival date isn’t until January 2nd, so here I am waiting for it. But, soon enough, we’ll find out how well it performs with these games.

–Wolfen