How do you rate that ?

May 12, 2008 5:22 PM

With respect to Vista - how are "Required System Ratings" defined ?

[asking for a friend]

According to wikipedia...

Flight Simulator X has a required system rating of 3 for Windows Vista and a recommended rating of 5

... how do you find out what that means ? My friend is wanting to buy a new laptop like this one and is asking me whether or not her son will be able to play MS FS X satisfactorily.

I'd like to know how to determine where that laptop sits on the 'Required System Rating' ? (any experience of playing FS X on such a machine would be a bonus).

posted by southof40 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

This is Microsoft's Upgrade Advisor. You need to download it to the computer, but apparently it will check the computer and give it a score; 1-5. Not so helpful to see if the computer could run it, since you haven't bought it yet, but if you had a similarly configured laptop you could run it on that and see how it scores.

Alternatively, you could run it on a lower spec'd laptop and see what score it got, then gauge from there.
posted by InsanePenguin at 5:43 PM on May 12

Ahh, also found this. Not the sharing part, but apparently if you open the Control Panel on a Windows Vista machine and type "performance" into the search bar, it will give you a score.

Again, useless if you don't have any physical access to the laptop that you're going to buy, but you could do it on a similar laptop.

Hope these help!
posted by InsanePenguin at 5:48 PM on May 12

Thanks InsanePenguin - that's really great, just what's needed.
posted by southof40 at 6:00 PM on May 12

I recently purchased a purpose-built gaming notebook from ASUS. It's got a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2G of RAM, and a GeForce 8600M GT display chip with 256M of dedicated RAM. It came with Vista Home Premium installed and set me back about $2400.

Anyway, Performance tool from the Control Panel says:

Processor score 5.3
Memory speed score 4.8
Graphics score 5.9
Gaming graphics 5.5
Hard disk 5.3

The overall score is the lowest one, thus 4.8 because of the RAM. (ASUS seems to have done a pretty good job balancing the components.)

That HP notebook will have lower performance. I'm sure it will score more than 3, but quite a lot less than 5.
posted by Class Goat at 9:15 PM on May 12

[My guess is that the limiting factor on the score on that HP notebook will be the CPU. A 2.0 GHz dual Turion will be considerably slower than a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (T7700).]
posted by Class Goat at 9:22 PM on May 12