My Vostro 1700 and FSX....

I posted this in the gaming forum, but thought it might be of interest in this forum as well. If not, then moderators - please feel free to delete.

I received my Vostro 1700. In terms of build quality, looks, screen......it is perfect. No graininess in the screen (wuxga). I'm really impressed by the overall quality.
However, a big part of the reason I paid $1900 (Canadian) for a laptop was that I really enjoy the FS series, and wanted a laptop that could handle FSX OK. My previous laptop, Inspiron 8600 with a Radeon card handled the 2004 FS really well.
So my current build is:
5470 Core 2 Duo
2G Ram
160G HD
Nvidia 8600M GT
WUXGA screen

I did the normal tweaks to Vista, turned off unnecessary services. Installed the latest video drivers from laptop2go, then installed FSX, then installed the FSX patch.
I believe I had the screen set o 1024 in FSX, which seemed to be the lowest choice to get the full screen? I then had all the settings at "Medium-low".
Well, I'm not impressed. At those settings, the game looked worse than the 2004 version, and played slower (fluctuated between 12-20 fps).
So I'm thinking of returning my Vostro, since $1900 is a bit much for a web surfing, word processing, music, etc. laptop, which is mostly what I'll do if not using FSX...

 

To me that seems a little off, fsx is not very demanding. You may want to try installing fs04 and see if it also performs worse then before, if thats the case it would obviously indicate some kind of driver/hardware issue.

 

You sure about that?? FSX seems to have a reputation on this forum as being one of the more demanding games out there, no?!

 

Maybe I'm mistaken, from my past experience with the FS franchise they have all had rather soft requirement. I used fs a lot in college (flight school) and it ran on pretty much anything although I must used it to practice IFR stuff so graphics weren't much of a concern.