FSX on my Vostro 1700.....Not so good

As posted in the Dell forum, 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...

 

FSX is a very demanding game, its also one of the very few games that may be more cpu intensive than gpu. So if your cpu is not up to snuff your going to have bad performance.

Using the dual core patch with a dual core cpu nearly doubles fps for dual core users, that shows just how cpu dependant this game is.

The 5470 is what 1.66ghz??? if so thats definitly on the low side of the scale. I have the same video card in my c90 but with a 2.93ghz cpu so I might get fsx and see how it compares.

 

I was having the same issue with FSX so I stopped playing. It doesn't even run that great on my more powerful desktop. Never tried the dual core patch though.

 

thanks, good to know. I was thinking of doing more experimenting with settings, but don't think I'll bother now. I think I'll return it, and either buy a cheaper dell, maybe a Vostro 1400, or spend the same money but on an IBM T61.