Old school gaming bliss

Finally got around to installing and playing a few games on the little Gateway.

Warcraft 3

Runs beautifully. I left the settings at the default, but kicked the resolution up to 1024x768, and it hasn't hiccuped yet. I played a few skirmishes against several computers (and got my ass kicked, jeez. it's been a long time). I also played through a bit of the campaign. I didn't install the Frozen Throne, but seeing as how it's running on the same engine, it should be fine. I'm definitely keeping this one installed. It ate several hours of my day yesterday.

Starcraft

Actually, I have no idea. I've run Starcraft on my Aspire One, and it performed flawlessly. So I don't really see a point in installing a game I know will work.

Diablo 2

Same as Starcraft, actually. I know it will run. I first played Diablo 2 on a Celeron 600 with 128MB of RAM with integrated Intel graphics way back in the day. It'll run on this Gateway, trust me.

Quake Live

I had little success. It runs, but not well. Considering that it runs as a plugin to a web brower, I wasn't suprised. Once I found a decent resolution to play at (1024x768) it was okay. Just okay. It seems to run very smoothly at first, until you start making jerky movements (as Quake 3 demands constantly). It doesn't seem as though the game is lagging from video problems, but from input problems. Like it has to think about what your mouse just did. It's more of a stutter every time you move your mouse fast. It's difficult to explain, but once you experience it, it makes perfect sense.

Imagine playing Quake 3 Arena with 10 people, suddenly running around a corner into a crowd of people, and it lagging right as you turn the corner. You know they are there, but your mouse won't let you do anything because it can't keep up. This actually happened a few times when I played it on my desktop for comparison. I almost want to call it a CPU bottleneck, but when you're playing, it doesn't feel like one. It just feels like your mouse stops communicating for a second while your video buffers. I tried it in IE8 and Firefox 3.5, so it wasn't a browser issue. It seems like if the browser was not there and this was a standalone game, it would be perfect.

So don't get your hopes up on this one. You could just install Quake 3 Arena, I can promise you that would run nicely.

Need for Speed Underground 2

I really can't explain why I still play this game at all. It was bad even when it came out. But the free roaming city and different cars with different driving characteristics keep me playing. I installed this as soon as I bought the Gateway. It runs nicely. Definitely a CPU hard hitter. You can raise the graphics up and then drop them to the floor and the game runs the same. But at the floor level they run more fluidly. The game never was about graphics to me, it was about driving. So in short, it runs very well, without the crazy effects turned on.

Reading what I just wrote kind of tells a tale not of bliss, but disappointment eh? Not really. I had no idea what Quake Live was until a few days ago. Fantastic idea, but I'd rather a standalone game that works well, rather than a heavy, buggy application that runs in a browser. It's great for running on a computer at school with decent hardware, but when you've got a laptop that you control, what's the point? Pick up and playability? None that I saw. Even on my desktop the game was heavy and buggy for what it was (Quake 3). I can't count the times it "lost" my mouse cursor, forcing me to alt-tab and close the browser to restart it. I have a copy of Quake 3 Arena floating around somewhere, I'll have to find it for some more old school gaming.

Android.

On a HTC Touch? Works great too. More to come.

Also games on the Gateway. Finally installed Warcraft 3 and played Quake Live. Results later.

Steam Games on a netbook?

Not so much.

By request, I downloaded Steam and installed all of the big games I had on my list. Half Life, Counter Strike, Counter Strike Source, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2.

Half Life

Plays well. A good single player game to pass the time. I couldn't find a scene where it became laggy at all, even with head crabs jumping at me and soldiers shooting everywhere.

Counter Strike

Same as Half Life, but it can get a bit laggy with 10 people on the screen shooting each other. Never unplayable actually. Unless you can't find a server like me, then it's really unplayable.

Counter Strike Source

Don't expect to be yelling headshot every 2 seconds playing on this machine. It's playable with all settings to low and resolution at 1024 x 600, but it slows down in big situations. I was able to kill a few people in tight spots with an M4 by spraying and a few with a pistol. But with more than a few people on screen it lags too hard to aim reliably. For a quick fix? Maybe. Just maybe.

Left 4 Dead

Don't bother. Sure, you can run around and shoot at stuff, but you'll die very fast. Get jumped by a Hunter? Give up, because you won't see it coming. And if you do see him, you won't be able to hit him. I had trouble hitting a Smoker after running into him around a corner. Point blank, I missed several times before I wasted him. The smokescreen he produced brought the machine to a crawl. Zombie hordes coming at you? Just spray and hope your teammates will kill them all for you. Like I said, don't bother.

Team Fortress 2

Another solid "don't bother" with this one. It was worse than L4D. It requires razor sharp reflexes, and those are just not possible. One on one with another player shooting me, and I couldn't even hit him with a Scout's scattergun. It was that bad. With 4+ people on screen, which is like 90% of the time, it was hovering around 3-4fps. Don't even waste the hard drive space.

Verdict: Half Life 2's engine is very CPU intensive, we all know this. And the Gateway's Athlon is not up to the challenge. Half Life 1 based games are doable, and I'll probably leave them installed. But I'll be promptly uninstalling all of the HL2 based games, as they aren't even worth keeping on the hard drive.

On a lighter note, World of Goo runs very nicely. So does Armadillo Run. I'll be trying some older games later. Any suggestions on what I should try?

On a side note, I'll probably be reformatting back to 64 bit Windows 7.

Skype

I read a comment on NetbookTech's review about Skype video saying it was unusable.

I'm on a Skype video call with another person right now. We both have our cameras on. It's laggy, but even my desktop's video calls lag because of the latency. Audio calling is perfect, even conferences. The microphone is very clear, and the camera is actually very nice. I'll probably never use the camera again after this test, but just to prove that it works for the sake of science and whatnot.

I'm also running three tabs in Chrome in the background (one HQ YouTube, this blog, and the Skype download page), and WoW minimized. When I open WoW Skype (audio) doesn't stutter at all. Perfect. Then again how often will I even use this to play WoW realistically while chatting on Skype? Umm, quite a bit I'm finding.

My Aspire One could not handle Skype video calls with anything else running (or even audio conferences) by the way. I must have just had a bad One. See that? Clever.

**Edit: I think I have to clarify something. While in WoW, I was in a Skype voice chat (conference actually), not video chat. If you are doing nothing but video chatting, the Gateway plows through it with no problem. However, my router hiccuped about 10 minutes ago and everything started lagging. Hard. Video went crazy on both ends for both users, but audio remained perfect. I think Skype's video implementation is just not as polished as I thought. My friend on the other line is running an Asus Gamer's Republic laptop. Core 2 Duo E8400, 4GB of DDR2 800, Vista 64 bit, 9800M, etc. A powerhouse laptop. And Skype started to lag his entire computer like it was doing to mine. Only on video, and only after a big lag spike. It was odd, but I thought I should mention it. After a quick recall, it was back to working. It was almost an hour long call at that point though. Can I explain it? Nope.

Quick update

I reinstalled Windows 7, 32 bit this time. Went smoothly as usual. Install Atheros drivers, use Windows Update for the rest. It feels great, just like my last install. However, this time, Notebook Hardware Control installed and runs fine.

A huge thanks to Mr. Falgun C for telling me about Notebook Hardware Control. It detects clock speed of the CPU and GPU, and temperatures of the CPU and hard drive. It is also definitely more lightweight than Catalyst. So thank you very much for the heads up. I'm re-rating the system as I type this on 32 bit Windows 7.

**Edit: Lower score than before. 2.3 Index because of a lower (2.3) CPU score. Possibly because of the 32 bit instruction set being used as opposed to the 64 bit one before?

Also, earlier I came across a fantastic review of this little Gateway I so adore. It's over at NetbookTech, so go check it out. I agree with most of the review, but not all of it. I do, however, love the detail of the review and the pictures!

I disagree with the performane comparisons and assumptions made. Sure, synthetic benchmarks show the Athlon and Atom to be somewhat even matches, but in every day use the story is much different. I've been using this machine solidly for over a week now -- doing most of this blog's postings, image capture, editing, video watching (including 720p), flash video watching, surfing, and even some light gaming. It completely smashes the Atom in everyday perfomance and sheer willingness to perform.

A good comparison just happens to be a car. Drive an automatic 4 cylinder and it can seem decent if just a bit pokey. Slow to start, slow to react, but okay for driving around town. Switch that same car to a manual gearbox, and that 4 cylinder comes alive. It responds exactly when you want it to and it never feels lazy to rev. The little 4 cylinder becomes usable. It becomes fun to drive. Make sense?

I've posted my opinion on the performance of this machine, and I've given many comparisons. I've owned my Aspire One and used it for some time now, and I've had my Acer Travelmate for going on 4 years now. The Gateway feels peppier than my Travelmate with its 1.6GHz Celeron. That could be the RAM talking, but the Travelmate runs XP Home (and ran with 1.25GB since it was purchased until now), remember?

720p video. I agree that watching 720p video is not the brightest idea on this notebook, as it lacks HDMI out and the screen barely has the resolution to display it. But it plays 720p WMV encoded files flawlessly. At 50% cpu usage even. MKV files are a different story, however, as they tend to get choppy in intense scenes.

Enough of my opinion. Oh wait, this is a blog. Right.

**Warning: rant incoming.

And battery life. Now, I can't pretend to be an expert on battery life and what consumers want, but I am a consumer and a long time mobile computer user. As a consumer, I don't understand the obsession with 9 or 10 hour battery life on devices that run a full operating system. My HTC Touch doesn't get 9 hours of connected (3G) battery life, why should my laptop? What would I do for 9 hours straight on a laptop without being able to plug it in? Or for that matter, what would I do for 5 hours (which I've tested the Gateway to get with WiFi on) without plugging it in? How many people surf the internet for 5 hours straight without being near a power outlet at any point? Seriously. Come on.

I could understand if you were on a long flight, or in a bomb shelter after nuclear fallout, you'd want long battery life. But in those scenarios why would you be connected to WiFi?

I can sit on my couch, with my Gateway on my lap, and surf. And surf. And watch Hulu. And play WoW. And look down, and only an hour has passed by. Then I get bored. I'd like to think I'm sort of an average consumer, so other normal people will mimick my habits somewhat. Are you a student? Taking notes all day on your laptop while in class? Great, buy the 9-cell...it's value to you will outweigh any other disadvantage. Why are you in class for 9 hours at a time anyway? And where are the outlets? Are you in a field-study class? Feel bad for stealing their power? Don't, my University charges me a $100 energy surcharge every semester for just that reason.

I like to think of myself as a realist. A highly opinionated realist who doesn't expect 24 hours of battery life from a device that was 400 bucks. By the way, this rant was not directed at any specific reviewer of any device, but at all of them simultaneously.

Long story drawn to a short end: if you want the performance, don't expect the battery life. If you want battery life, buy a PDA or a big ass battery. My HP iPAQ got ~10 hours of WiFi connected use, AND it had great handwriting recognition. I took short notes with it for a semester, fantastic device. Any questions? I love questions.

Couldn't resist

I had to post something about this. Right now I'm running World of Warcraft in the background. I'm alt-tabbed typing this. The background downloader is pre-loading the early patch 3.2 content. And not a stutter to be found. Amazing.

But that isn't my point. I'm on battery. Here I am, sitting in my living room on my couch watching the Science Channel, wondering if any of my auctions sold or if any of my friends are logged in. So I launch it, it loads up, and I'm in the middle of Stormwind. 10fps. All kinds of people running around and such, not so great. I alt tab and launch the Catalyst Control Center (yeah I got it to work, and the latest drivers...). The core is clocked at 110MHz because I'm on balanced battery mode. With a predicted 3 hour 18 minutes remaining. What?...

Scott at Gadling remarked that he couldn't get any ATI driver package to install, that he had to rely on Windows Update for a working one. I used ATI's legacy driver package for Vista 64 bit. It said something about support for x1250 chipsets. The x1270 is simply a derivative of the x1250, and it even recognizes it as x1270 and installs perfectly. Well it recognizes a device ID of 791f with a vendor ID of 1002 (which is the x1270). Catalyst works perfectly and even detects the correct clock speeds. It has support for Powerplay as well, so it can scale the graphics performance with the Windows battery mode (which mine is doing, it scales to something higher on high performance mode). So if you'd like to have Catalyst, even though it really doesn't seem to have changed the performance at all, give the legacy driver package a try.

I like not having to worry about this thing dying half way through a post. And actually being able to type without my fingers cramping.

Updated Battery Tests

Go here, added idle test. More benchmarks to come as well.

Hectic day today eh?