After a thread got my old EQII receptors a-twitching I asked myself a question - will my 5-year-old laptop play EQII? The answer turns out to be a resounding "possibly". Well a man can't take that kind of answer lying down, so I pulled up my socks, rolled up my sleeves and promptly fell over. In retrospect I should have climbed down off the stepladder before attempting these maneuvers, but what is life if not a learning experience.

A quick check with SOE shows that my account still exists, though I have no idea if any of my characters are still around. I have no idea what my characters even are or what they are called, but no matter. I may well end up starting from scratch just for the fun of it.

I'm currently rocking a Toshiba Satellite P200-13Z with XP (came with Vista which was quickly removed and burned to death for the sake of humanity), a 1.73Ghz Pentium and 1GB of RAM, with dxdiag telling me that there's 225Mb of that RAM allocated to onboard video. EQ2 asks for pixel and vertex shaders and, according to Intel, the GMA950 will provide.

I have fond memories of my old desktop fighting to zone easily until I added more RAM but I have no idea if the game will be playable on my laptop, even if installable. I think the shared graphics and low ram will kill it but let's find out.

Currently the sticking point is the 6GB of free space. I have a lot of stuff on this machine and I'm running out of places to put it! As we speak, I'm shifting some big files off to my wife's computer. Soon the adventure will begin! Not the adventure in Norrath, but the adventure in trying to get there in the first place!

Well that's the install finished and it hasn't exploded yet. Now just waiting for Launchpad and the never-ending updates... this is nerve wracking! Well, for me, anyway...

Edited to add: Now's here's a thing. That 6GB of space it wants is in addition to the install space. I'm down to using the remaining USB memory sticks I have lying around in an effort to free up space - and I still don't know for sure if this will work!

Wow, the specs on the box lie! Had to free up more than 10Gb of space before it would let me even start the updates! I really don't remember having to do this before, this is crazy. Is it really going to download 10Gb of data on top of the 3GB+ already installed off the DVDs?

Edited: Oh my gosh. Yes it wants to download nearly 13GB of content. I'm starting to wonder what the point of installing off these DVDs was in the first place!

Hey Rogue, long time good to see ya still around here.

Thats quite a bit of effort going on there for the game, hope ya get it going.
Had quite a bit of experiences trying to game on laptop's over the last year while i was travelling... needless to say, think if your going to go alienware...it costs but it works.

13Gb though wow! guess the game has been around a while and has a lot of new content added (i assume) I know my steamapps folder currently has about 170Gb of data, most of that was downloaded over the last 6months, is only about 20 Games at that!

Hope ya get it going but try not to let the evercrack get a foothold

Laptop gaming isn't ideal but for the moment it's what I've got. There are some better alternatives but they all need some tweak or other. One lacks a mouse, the other is a much better spec but ATI never made Windows 7 drivers for the video card... there's always something!

I keep trying to pop back when I can. I'm making a concerted effort to raise a little noise. GVC was never meant to be quiet, let alone a ghost town.

Edited to add: Though at time of replying I'm nearly 3GB into the updates, I doubt this will be finished until the morning so no Evercrack for me anyway!

Well I know you're all eager to know how it went!

Eventually everything updated and the game started up, replete with warnings that I still need several million terabytes of drivespace free in case it needs to stream some more updates. Considering it just finished making me download the equivalent of the entire internet, I think they're being optimistic but thankfully the game continues.

As far as I can work out, I'm automatically a silver member because of my previous account. Alas, while Moriatus is still there I cannot play him, so I decided to make a new character. Before I did that, however, I tried to customise the settings to run better on the laptop.

I delved deep into the game and display settings. Deeper I went, deeper than most of you probably even realise exist. Through fire and water, from the lowest dungeon to the highest peak, I plummeted past the "low detail" setting, past "minimal", past "beyond minimal" and "existential", past "even lower", "keep on going", "nearly there" and "holy cow, are you some time traveller from the 1980s who is trying to install this on an 8-bit Gameboy?!?". Eventually I arrived at the setting I needed - "matchstick men making a real-time stop-motion film".

And it... works. Amazingly enough. Slow and juddery, and I dread to think what would happen with more than a handful of other people in the area. Fighting is a pain because the steady pulse that indicates the next part of a heroic move takes forever - by the time you know what the next move should be, the fight is over! Because you're fighting against the controls all the time, you often find that instead of activating a move you have actually picked up the button from the toolbar and are now struggling to return it before you get killed.

The limitations of the account are immediately and painfully obvious. You never realise how vital six bag slots seem until you're limited to four, even in the bank. A handful of very useful starting quests helps you tackle these limits though. One gets you the indispensable (for me) gathering bag - 12 slots dedicated to raw materials. Another gets you a six slot bag - luxury!

As it stands I'm still level five and haven't even begun to touch on crafting yet - not through choice, but because the starting place I was sent to is full of fairies and plants. Oh how I yearn for the heat and smoke and dirt and soot of the forge, dirty hands and sweating brow, cracking open the hardened shell of raw material to let the delicate art of the finished product emerge.

As it stands it is fun for a freebie. I wouldn't pay for it at the moment, simply because I couldn't get the value out of the game under present conditions. I think I'll still work on developing skills and gather materials as far as I can for now. If the opportunity presents to move to a better PC then I might treat myself to a month or two subscription. Or maybe three. Yeah, that's the crack alright

Rogue wrote:

Well I know you're all eager to know how it went! Eventually everything updated and the game started up, replete with warnings that I still need several million terabytes of drivespace free in case it needs to stream some more updates. There is some of your problem now and future. People are going to wait a while for you to zone if you are using the streaming client. Download the full install client. Considering it just finished making me download the equivalent of the entire internet, I think they're being optimistic but thankfully the game continues. As far as I can work out, I'm automatically a silver member because of my previous account. Alas, while Moriatus is still there I cannot play him, so I decided to make a new character. You are aware it only takes a drive-thru's amount of cash to buy unlockers? Before I did that, however, I tried to customise the settings to run better on the laptop. And it... works. Amazingly enough. Slow and juddery, and I dread to think what would happen with more than a handful of other people in the area. Fighting is a pain because the steady pulse that indicates the next part of a heroic move takes forever - by the time you know what the next move should be, the fight is over! Because you're fighting against the controls all the time, you often find that instead of activating a move you have actually picked up the button from the toolbar and are now struggling to return it before you get killed. Make sure cloaks are turned off, shadows, particle effects way down (you want to see shinies at a reasonable distance don't you?) and if you can stand it, turn off all PC names which can give you an extra 4-5 FPS. The limitations of the account are immediately and painfully obvious. You never realise how vital six bag slots seem until you're limited to four, even in the bank. A handful of very useful starting quests helps you tackle these limits though. One gets you the indispensable (for me) gathering bag - 12 slots dedicated to raw materials. Another gets you a six slot bag - luxury! See above. As it stands it is fun for a freebie. I wouldn't pay for it at the moment, simply because I couldn't get the value out of the game under present conditions. I think I'll still work on developing skills and gather materials as far as I can for now. If the opportunity presents to move to a better PC then I might treat myself to a month or two subscription. Or maybe three. Yeah, that's the crack alright

Pest Control wrote:

People are going to wait a while for you to zone if you are using the streaming client. Download the full install client.

I've used the full install from the DVDs and the EQ2 shortcut that it places on the desktop. It then did a massive amount of updating - the EQ2 folder is now just under 14GB!

Pest Control wrote:

You are aware it only takes a drive-thru's amount of cash to buy unlockers?

Yes, but I was interested in exploring the free-to-play options. If I move the install onto a machine that can handle it then I'll probably throw a month or two's subscription at it. As it stands, any money spent now is an even bigger waste than money spent on fast food! I wouldn't put my good character in the firing line at the moment because he would get trampled. There is no such thing as "reaction time" on this machine. You click and pray while you wait for the game to realise you're trying to do something!

Pest Control wrote:

Make sure cloaks are turned off, shadows, particle effects way down (you want to see shinies at a reasonable distance don't you?) and if you can stand it, turn off all PC names which can give you an extra 4-5 FPS.

I didn't appreciate the impact of the PC names setting, I'm happy to drop them if it would help though. Thanks for that bit of advice, I'll try it out tomorrow when I fire the game up again.

Did you realize that the above "full client" is a link to download the full client launcher?

heh, my install with all content is like 16GB on my SSD