Okay, I was feeling suitably geeky this past week, and thought: I wonder if DDO will run on a netbook. Specifically, our household netbook, which is a Dell Mini 9 with 1 GB of RAM, an 8 GB SSD drive and Windows XP.
I knew I would have to install DDO to a flash drive, and since I have an 8 GB usb flash drive that I use regularly, I thought that it would do the trick. I'd have to also find a place for the install files. I knew I couldn't fit both the install files and the install on the same disk, so I looked at another solution.
Now, the other computer in the house is a MacBook Pro with OS 10.5 and Windows Vista. Knowing that Vista <--> XP file sharing has some bad mojo, I decided to use the the OS 10.5 file sharing with SMB turned on. Then I just went to My network places on the netbook, typed in an IP address\user name, logged in with my OS X password, and was looking and my home directory. Ran the .exe for the install (the standard install, not the turbine download manager), and waited for it to install.
(Don't forget to turn off the 'turn hard drive off' feature, as OS X doesn't register the windows file sharing with normal disc activity and will stop your install prematurely.)
So once that was all finished, I let it patch itself up, and was gaming in no time. It's a little slow in parts, especially the marketplace, and with lots of mobs on screen. But turbine was great with the supported 1024 x 800 resolution, and the unofficially supported but works fine running off of a flash drive. A great advantage is that the game is on a different drive then the OS. And the solid state drive helps with the speed quite a bit normally.
If I had to do it over again, I'd get a 16 GB SSD, windows 7 64-bit and 2 GB of ram or more, but hey, it was on sale. And $250 for an ultra portable DDO machine? Not bad.
Any suggestions on getting it to run better? Or have a question? Feel free to leave a comment!
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