"Multiboxing" on a laptop

[Aarelan]

Well not really multiboxing - more single boxing but with multiple accounts (anybody got a name for that?)

Anyway - I've been away on a job for a week (I'm in the sports technology industry so this happens a lot) and haven't been able to do anything with my team. My problem is, that since I went to 5 toons, my laptop won't hack it anymore (I can run 4 with the graphics cranked down on all of them). Even when running 4 I sometimes run into a problem where my machine overheats and shuts down.

Does anyone run 5 accounts on a laptop. If so, how successfully, and what machine do you use?

[mikekim]

last year i had to purchase a laptop for someone to use for multiboxing. (i work for a famous royal family - so money is not an issue when they want something)

I decided to use an alienware M-17 (8gb ram, 7950m x2 running SLI GFX & 17" screen). this machine was quite happy running 5 accounts at between 35-50fps.

I myself run a Macbook Pro for multiboxing when i'm travelling - depending on foreign internet connection speeds i can get a playable game running between 3-5 accounts at once.

basically you need to get a machine that has a reasonable gfx card and 4-8gb of ram

[Toonarmy]

Aarelan,

Try the Sager 9280. Here is the link from a few weeks ago when issue this was discussed.

Laptop for 4 wows.

[Sychosys]

I had a long griping post but Ill shorten it up

Dont buy Alienware. Its a rebranded Something at this point in time and all that extra money actually gets you less. Sager laptops are actually what Alienware used before they were bought out by Dell, they are good solid laptops and are generally half the price with a wider spec range. They also used to have really good back to school time specials for their systems. Another brand of computer are the Falcon Northwest laptops. I have never used them cause they made Alienware look like cheap systems but they have always gotten good reviews. Do a google search for gaming laptops, you will find quite a few other brands out there.

[aboron]

I can manage to run 5 on a laptop, but very marginally, enough to keep up with dailies mostly. I had to turn down to minimum on all 5 and then also make sure the windowing software is allowing the actual resizing of the game. Like if you are running in a 200x150 window on the clones, then that is all the game is trying to render. IS prefers to normally run all instances at the same resolution as the main window and then scale to fit the preview windows, this helps the pip swap action speed, but when it does that on my laptop, all 5 at full size it too much to handle.

This is running on a dell 1720 w/ Core2 2.2Ghz 4Gb ram Vista 64 bit and the weak link: nVidia GeForce Go 8600M

It's a fairly sad experience in dalaran, but for a simple daily run it gets by. And of course it works tip top for my #2 use of wow, in game chat.

[Xtremepayne]

I also use an M17 to multibox. I am using 4 gigs at the moment. I do have a question for the person using the M17, where did you get your 8 gig sticks from? I didn't know it could go higher then 4gigs. Also planning that for my desktop system. With 3 instances of Lotro running, memory per Logtitech keyboard lcd screen says I am running at 90 percent and sometimes its been as high as 97 on the desktop system which is XP64. Laptop is Vista32, and I know I will have to upgrade the OS.

[emilg]

Umm, i can run it great? i bought this bad laptop for like 800$ or so.

Infos: 4,00 GB Ram, Dual core, t4200 @ 2.00 Ghz 2.00 GHz

A Packard bell Easynote mh36

[Esca]

I run 5 accounts on a two-year-old Dell M1710. It has 4GB RAM, 32-bit Vista, and a 2.33 dual core processor. The key graphics feature that made a huge difference for me was setting the max fps. On the slaves I have it set max fps for backgrond and foregound to 5. Then on my main I set the max fps foreground to 30 and background to 5. With those settings I run all 5 accounts very smoothly on this old laptop.

[Aarelan]

Thanks for this. The sager seems really good, but I'm a bit concerned that the i7 is not a mobile processor - I had a computer like that some years ago, and it was a battery hogging (about 30 mins) heater (too hot to have on your lap).

I actually use my laptop for work as well, so I occasionally need to do an hour or so on batteries. The m17x has stealth mode (which sounds cool in concept) but I'm really concerned about the comments by Sychosys.

I also once had a supplier collapse on me, so have a small concern about "smaller" companies if I'm spending serious (for me) money. What is the company who supply the Sager like for delivery / support etc. - I'm pretty competent so don't need help on switching it on, but if it breaks...

[Otlecs]

last year i had to purchase a laptop for someone to use for multiboxing. (i work for a famous royal family - so money is not an issue when they want something)

Ohhh, come on! You can't dangle that little tidbit and then NOT name the famous royal who multiboxes!!!!!

:cursing: