New Laptop FFXI Compatible?

[Kobiko]

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7200 (2.00GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 667 MHz FSB)
[222-4795]
LCD Panel 17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen UXGA Display with TrueLife™
[320-4926]
Memory 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
[311-5638]
Video Card 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7900 GS
[320-4779]
Hard Drive 100GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
These are the specs to my new dream machine. It has Windows Vista unfortunatly, I might just uninstall it and put another version of XP on it, but, in the case that I actually LIKE vista, I hear there's some trick you have to do by installing POL onto your XP PC and then burning POL folder to a CD after updating, then pasting them onto the Vista PC to get it to work. Other than that little bug, I'm excited to get back into the game and try it out with high res and high frame rates. So what res do you think this powerhouse could do while still running at an optimal framerate?

[Liquidedust]

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7200 (2.00GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 667 MHz FSB)
[222-4795]
LCD Panel 17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen UXGA Display with TrueLife™
[320-4926]
Memory 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
[311-5638]
Video Card 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7900 GS
[320-4779]
Hard Drive 100GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
These are the specs to my new dream machine. It has Windows Vista unfortunatly, I might just uninstall it and put another version of XP on it, but, in the case that I actually LIKE vista, I hear there's some trick you have to do by installing POL onto your XP PC and then burning POL folder to a CD after updating, then pasting them onto the Vista PC to get it to work. Other than that little bug, I'm excited to get back into the game and try it out with high res and high frame rates. So what res do you think this powerhouse could do while still running at an optimal framerate?

Sadly Vista and Nvidia don't mix.

Sitting on:
Core 2 Duo E6600 @ factory speeds
Gainward 8800GTS 640MB @ factory speeds
2 GB OCZ PC6400 RAM @ 4-4-4-12 (no overclocking or anything)
WD Raptor SATA System Disk

And the game drops to 4-5 fps the moment I have more then 10 character models on screen no matter my settings or resolution.

Also have a Radeon 1950XTX that I tried in order to see if it worked better, and with this card I get a solid 27-30 fps no matter the resolution or the amount of objects on screen.

Short version, Nvidia sadly is crap when it comes to actually render and play FFXI on Vista. And if you use XP you get max framrat with Nvidia but get graphical artefacts and menus wont render instead. . . . .

[Lilani]

It's sad how Vista is supposed to be so good and helpful, and yet all I've heard about it is problems, problems, problems....

[Liquidedust]

It's sad how Vista is supposed to be so good and helpful, and yet all I've heard about it is problems, problems, problems....

Actually in this case you cannot blame Vista, it is FFXI lousy usage of DirectX that makes it close to unplayable on Vista since it doesn't follow the DirectX standard per se.

Graphics Cards developers usually releases hot fixes for this through their drives so the games are playable anyhow (it really is the developers fault to start with).

However so far only one official Nvidia driver that is non-beta for Vista has been released so far so it is a little too early for hot fixes to come in effect.

[Kobiko]

Actually with the setup I have it won't be that much of a problem, I'll just install XP onto either another Partition of the drive, or the same. May even be less fussy than Copying, pasting, installing and whatnot. So I'll run FFXI on XP and use Vista for everything else, just cause it looks pretty.

[Jarre]

Good luck with the DRM on vista, I have read manya rticles on people with media centres switching over to vista and putting on 400gb of media data i.e music and films only to find that microsoft wont allow them to play it because they don't have the original media disks!!!

XP with FFXI would be more stable until they sort something out to get it running smoothly with everything on vista.

[Kobiko]

One thing I don't understand, why doesn't nvidia work well with vista? There's gotta be more info on that subject.