Wednesday, August 19, 2009

My poor, poor laptop.

.

So I have a Dell laptop that's about a year old. It's got Vista (yeah, go ahead, flame me). It's got quite a bit of RAM. It's got a good hard drive. It's a decent machine. Unfortunately, it also has an integrated video card. This means that I can never, under any circumstances, upgrade the card. It's just not possible (or so I'm told).

I played wow on this laptop for quite some time. Sure, it was annoying getting 6 FPS in Shatt, but I dealt with it. I was busy leveling to 70, and when you're hanging out in Thousand Needles or Azshara with not much going on, you really don't need a good graphics card. I never raided a large scale raid (eh, I take that back. I got pulled in to do Teron Gorefiend once) so I never really had any graphics issues.

Then, my boyfriend Pete bought a used laptop from a guildie that had a way better video card. I sort of ended up inheriting this and using it for gaming. I raid on it all the time, and rarely have any graphics issues. There's no chop at all. Sure, I can't put things on their max settings, but overall, things look great.

A couple days ago I pulled out my old Vista-wielding crapideo-card laptop to half-assedly play some wow while watching TV in the living room (Pete and I JUST got cable.... oh, my god, it's awesome. The history of the truck stop? Yes please. Top twenty celeb breakdowns? Hell yes! IRON CHEF? Amigawd. Last night we watched a special about peanut brittle and baklava. And then a show called "Obese and pregnant" (I'm not kidding). We literally sit on the couch together, and just stare at the glory that is cable, our mouths slightly agape, speaking only to ask the other to adjust the volume, or to pass the food. My quality of life has *significantly* improved with the addition of cable. =P)

Anyway, I set up my laptop to level my hunter while watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (the MOM is guilty, by the way, not the ex-boyfriend, and I totally knew it all along!), and this is what I see:



Durr?

Then:

Hm. And here's what my map looks like:



I logged out, changed everything to the lowest graphics settings, and still, no luck.

Is my graphics card just too lame to handle WotLK?

Sad panda.

SIDE NOTE! I have over 400 subscribers!!! SWEET. You guys rock ^^ <3

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9 remarks:

Steven Casagrande said...

try the repair.exe in your wow installation folder

Droodjerky said...

It's obviously not her WoW installation that is causing the error. It's the older graphics card and/or computer itself. Try Directx10 or updating your graphics drivers. I know, it's the basics, but they do sometimes work :)

Adeanna said...

at a place i'm not suppose to, i played WoW on a Dell pentium 4 machine with ati integrated graphics, and it was ok for doing dailies/farming/quests/anything not involving a group. i think i got like 4 fps in dalaran, which was fun. so... i think your laptop is okay to play WotLK.

it might be the graphics driver that needs to be updated.

Icedragon said...

She has porn on her world map, but Blizz censored it.

BAD AVERNA!

Khi said...

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18971780464&sid=1


=)

I had the same problem after 3.2

Dan said...

It could be:

-compatibility issue post-3.2 due to Blizz's code

-driver issue

-video card borked but good ><

The last one happened to the first computer I ever played WoW on (also a laptop). But yeah, your raiding machine is NOT ALLOWED TO BREAK. EVER. :D

Averna said...

Khiow!

It worked!!!!!

That was exactly the problem... I hadn't updated my vid card in like, a bajillion years >.<

I'm so excited ^.^

@Dan: rofllll

lissanna said...

Yeah, with graphics issues, getting driver updates for your video card is usually the best fix. :)

ArchDruid Angela said...

That defiantly looks odd. I had that to a much lesser extent on my old MacBook running OS X. Everything was fine until the patch when WotLK came out. Then all the sudden I could see defiant square patterns in all the land textures. It was a little weird, but as it was mostly just the outdoor terrain in areas of the game I seldom went, I didn't do much about it. Fortunately I have a new computer now so it's not really an issue.