A Good Idea???????or Not........Any sugestions.........I am going to be living in a crashpad enviorment for the next 3-4 month and would like to have my FS2004 and my PMDG 737 and PSS 7772004...with my Simflyers and FlyTampas stuff.Help me out....

Buy the most powerful laptop your money can buy.Otherwise you will be disappointed in the performace compaired to your desktop.Addon scenery can bring FPS down to the low signal digits. I have a 1.6 Centrino that I use on the road and it's okay, but I would buy a more powerful laptop next time around.Since you say only 3 to 4 months I would save my money and not buy a laptop just to run FS9. You could use that money much more wisely.Ed

I have to agree with Ed. I bought a notebook with a powerful enough graphics card (very important) to run FS9 smoothly.......I realised it cost twice as much as my FS PC and my FS PC is much better! :-lolNow if I had taken that money and put it into my FS PC I would have the ultimate FS!I have no regrets though ..it is a gorgeous notebook and runs FS9 beautifully ...and I can now take my addiction on holiday with the missus! :-hahnotebook specs:

It can be done, but as Ed says, it will be expensive.I've spent almost three years now flitting between various ships, naval establishments and home. A desktop PC is not a viable solution for me so I've been using a laptop for all this time.Buy a couple of laptop magazines as they will give you an idea of what's available, plus most laptop vendors will have adverts with their current range of systems.Here's a few points you may want to consider:Bear in mind the "mobile" CPUs such as the Pentium M and AMD Turion run at a lower clockspeed to their desktop counterparts. This can be a bit misleading though as their horsepower is very close to their faster clockspeed desktop counterparts. I've been using a laptop with a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 desktop CPU in for over a year now, it's given me plenty of power, but eats battery life and creates a #### of a lot of heat.A laptop will never give you the same storage space as a desktop. Most laptops these days will give you 80-120Gb storage space. An FS9 installation with all the addons will eat up that space very quickly. Most laptops also feature 5,400RPM hard drives. These will give slower access times to the 7,200RPM drives you'll find in a desktop, but I find I can live with the difference. You can get 7,200RPM drives in a laptop but it will add to the cost, heat and will diminish battery life. It might be worth getting a USB HDD to store any music or other stuff on to free up space for applications on your main HDD.If you can go for a widescreen display. These are great for watching DVDs on and most games these days support widescreen resolutions. If not you can run the game in a more conventional standard resolution and the image will be scaled to fit the widescreen. A 17" widescreen display is great, but will make the laptop quite a bit larger, so bear that in mind if mobility is a big issue for you.As for a graphics card.... avoid any laptop with "integrated" graphics at any cost. If you try and run FS with an integrated graphics solution you will be sorely disappointed. I've been running FS9 on a laptop with a 128MB Radeon X600 Mobility. It's adequate for FS9 but it does bog down with clouds and complex scenery. I'd say go for at least an X700/X1600 with 256MB. There are laptops available now with Nvidia 7800 or ATI X1800 graphics, but you will normally be in the top of the range cutting edge laptop systems and you will be paying a lot of money for these.A final note is heat. Basically a laptop is a lot of components squeezed into as small a space as possible. This makes heat dissipation a problem. This becomes even worse if your laptop has lots high spec components (more power -> more heat to dissipate). If your laptop has inadequate cooling you will first notice it starts to slow down dramatically. Eventually it will throw in the towel and shut itself down. The moral of the story is make sure your laptop has adequate cooling! Always put your laptop on a hard surface, and if possible prop the base up to increase the airflow. Never put a laptop on a carpet, blanket or anything else that will block the airflow.Two good laptop vendors in the UK are www.rockdirect.co.uk and www.evesham.com These guys provide very good systems, far better than what you could find in the high street shops. I'm actually going to order a new system from Evesham tomorrow morning:Intel Pentium M 2.0Ghz1 Gig RAM100Gig 5,400RPM HDDGeforce 6800Go 256MB17" widescreen displayThis should give me plenty of performance to run FS9 along with the likes of UT, AS6, LDS 767, PMDG 747, etcAt the end of the day selecting a laptop will be a compromise between performance, mobility and price.Hope this helped!

I just took delivery of a fully loaded Dell E1505 (15.4") and it runs FS reasonably well. The video card isn't the greatest (Mobility X1400) but it does run and is flyable - you'll have to go up to something bigger and more expensive in the 17" range if you want desktop like performance with a top vid card. For me though, I wanted something I could use on planes, at classes etc on battery and a 17" with a high power vid card rarely gets more than an hour. I get close to 6 with the 9 cell battery on my E1505, so it's a good tradeoff.