Nostalrius Begins - Quality wow vanilla realm (1.12)

So my girlfriend has decided to get a laptop mostly for doing her university stuff. Not a gaming laptop, but she would like to play WoW. I think the laptop can run it, I just want a second opinion because I am not good with the integrated GPUs and older CPUs.

The laptop is ACER ES1-520-364T (Can't find a website in English with it...)

RAM- 4GB
CPU- AMD DUAL-CORE E1-2500 (1.4 GHZ)
GPU- AMD RADEON HD 8240

Will play on PvE probably. Less people there

It will probably work.

Dont expect it to be ubersmooth though and loadingscreen will probably take half of an eternity but its going to be playable for sure.

AMD is horrible together with WoW, dont know why, it's just how it is.

I run a AMD quad-core CPU, Raedeon r200-series GFX card and 8gb RAM and my game works just fine.
Slow loading screens because of slow CPU and no SSD and getting some horrible FPS in Org during peaks.

Instances and raids are fine though

Use a cooling pad with a laptop. It can help a lot as the main problem with laptops is overheating due to to lack of air circulation causing poor performance. It's the same idea as people putting fans/liquid cooling in their gaming pcs to make them run better. I have an old laptop and with a cooling pad I can play wow and have 20 tabs open and other programs open without any problems, without it I lag like crazy in raids or cities even with nothing else open. I highly recommend one for anybody gaming on a laptop.

My Notebook is way worse and it's working.

It will run fine just definitely get something to cool the laptop off as they over heat pretty easily.

I have it on my 5 year old laptop and it works fine. Plus, it's really nice to be lazy as eff and lie in bed while I grind murlocs in Westfall.

So, to give you an idea what you might expect, I've dug up my old manual from 2005, when I bought the game. Throughout vanilla they did update the minimun requirements so I am not sure wether I have the newest. Information on other sites vary alot, but here they are from a reliable source:
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System Requirements
OS: Windows 2000/XP

Processor: Intel Pentium III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon 800Mhz

Memory: 512 MB RAM

Video
Minimum: 32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as an NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card or above.
Recommended: 64 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 class card or above. For a complete list of supported 3D cards, please visit: http://www.wow-europe.com

Sound: DirectX-compatible sound card.

Install size: 6.0 GB.
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All in all: You will probably not have any issues what so ever to play the game on the laptop. Pobably on very high/highest settings. Have fun playing!

jakeadams wrote:So, to give you an idea what you might expect, I've dug up my old manual from 2005, when I bought the game. Throughout vanilla they did update the minimun requirements so I am not sure wether I have the newest. Information on other sites vary alot, but here they are from a reliable source:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
System Requirements
OS: Windows 2000/XP

Processor: Intel Pentium III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon 800Mhz

Memory: 512 MB RAM

Video
Minimum: 32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as an NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card or above.
Recommended: 64 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 class card or above. For a complete list of supported 3D cards, please visit: http://www.wow-europe.com

Sound: DirectX-compatible sound card.

Install size: 6.0 GB.
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All in all: You will probably not have any issues what so ever to play the game on the laptop. Pobably on very high/highest settings. Have fun playing!

Those specs are intended for a single physical core processor and newer videocards, especially integrated mobile cards, have trouble handling older rendering pipeline versions. I have a laptop with an AMD 1.8GHz Dual Core processor with an integrated video card, 6GB RAM and it gets around 15-20 FPS at native resolution (1366x768) on a clean Windows 7 install. My older desktop computer, a 1.7GHz P4 with a 256MB Radeon card and 2GB RAM runs it at 1680x1050 on XP without a problem.

don't expect your laptop to last more than 1 year tho.