Just wondering if anyone has any experience of running old/basic games on a puny netbook… It’s got a 1.5ghz Atom N550 and 2gb of ram, Windows Home Premium, and onboard graphics. No DVD drive so ideally would be downloadables or otherwise easily transferred. Thinking time-sink strategy games mainly, maybe rpgs or realtime strategies…

Yeah, works fine as long as you’re not trying anything silly like the latest shooters, especially if you have a mouse rather than relying on the trackpad. I have stuff like World of Goo, Peggle, Monkey Island Games installed on mine (all available cheap on Steam). Angry Birds as a Chrome app is a good timekiller too.

Oh, World of Goo, need to check that out… Not really one for casual games in general, I like something to get sunk into. Cheers for the help!

Need to get yourself the original command and conquer red alert.

Will run on any pc! Not sure if its on Steam tho?

If we’re talking classics, surely a Caesar III sesh would be in order? Epic game.

Never mind your spec, it would probably run on most calculators these days!

You could run pretty decent games from not long ago on that, no worries.

Command and Conquer
http://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/command-and-conquer/

I bet you could play half life 1.

Northwind downloads C&C. Wonder if I can get the dinosaur missions…

My netbook has the same spec. I downloaded the Stronghold castle building/medieval war sims (Stronghold, SH2, SH Crusaders and SH Legends) as a bundle from Steam for about £7. They run fine. A bargain if that’s your kind of thing.

I fancy trying Return to Castle Wolfenstein next (shooting Nazis game). It came out in 2001, so it should work OK on a netbook.

My son wanted to try Minecraft. The netbook is the only PC in the house powerful enough to run it.

I fancy trying Return to Castle Wolfenstein next

Return to Castle Wolfenstein was ace!

‘What could possibly be better than shooting nazis?’ I hear you ask…
Shooting nazis, zombies and zombie-nazis!? Get some!

i’m running moh pacific assault and half-life 2 quite successfully on a 1.6ghz ion with 4gb of ram and 64bit 7 premium if it helps.
i was running return to wolfenstein on my ~ 2000 win xp pc without any major bother, so if this is as far as your aspirations go you should be fine!

For the older stuff I was wondering if we’d run into compatability issues/driver issues more than lacking power (getting Master of Orion 2 to run on my big machine was a total mare frinstace even though it ran on my old P75 :mrgreen:) But I guess the commercial versions of old games are probably built for new machines?

only one way to find out…
i highly recommend portal BTW. bonkers. 8)

My son wanted to try Minecraft. The netbook is the only PC in the house powerful enough to run it.

my laptop doesnt run that! Even on lowest graphic setting its rubbish! I have a 2.2GHz pentium dual core and 4gb of ram too.

C&C Generals runs fun tho! That’s another awesome game!!