Short answer: Yes, you bloody well can.
Longer answer:
First of all, in case you didn’t know, a netbook is a tiny little laptop, usually with screens of between 9 and 11 inches in size. They’re meant for web browsing, viewing videos and writing… And maybe playing an old game or two. On saturday, I bought a Samsung NC10 so I can work away from my Mac when I’m stuck on something and need to move about. Of course, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so some gaming must also happen.
And World of Warcraft is… well, you should know by now. Released by Blizzard in late 2005, it’s the world’s most popular MMO, bar none, and it looks quite nice, too. Blizzard pride themselves on their games being playable on most computers, so I figured I’d take this puppy for a ride and try it out.
Now, this is the first hurdle, and the only really big one: Installing takes fucking forever! Netbooks don’t have optical drives, so I had to download it from the WOW website to install. That’s 4.5 gigs of download. YAWN! And then after that? Patch-time… A 1.7 gig whopper of a content patch, too!
Buuut in the end, I managed to get it all in there, and I booted up the client. At this point, I should tell you that I had no expectations. I didn’t even remotely expect the game to be playable in any way, and I was frankly a bit worried because when I last logged out, I was standing on a bridge over a large drop, which would kill me if I dropped into… So if it ran shoddily enough, it would mess up my steering and I would die. And dying is such a hassle.
I needn’t have worried.
Before I went into it, I obviously turned all the settings down to bottom, so it didn’t look nearly as good as it would on my Mac, but I did get between 10-30 fps through testing it, every now and then dipping below or spiking above in some cases. Even taking flight-paths (very fast travel. Taxes the machine quite a bit) I was normally between 10 and 20 frames per second. Now, I haven’t gone in and done any heavy fighting, and I would NOT recommend going into a group instance with this thing, but the fact that this dinky little 300-quid thing can play WoW several times better than the desktop I had when it was released less than four years ago is amazing to me.
If you’re wondering if your netbook can play it, I will say “probably”. Most of these netbooks are pretty much identical in specs, be it Dell, HP, Lenovo or Asus. Check for the Intel Atom 1.6(or 1.66) processor, and make sure it has about a gig of RAM and plenty of harddrive space, though.
I might do another post about the Netbook itself, but that’s for later.
EDIT SINCE CATACLYSM: I don’t play WOW these days so I don’t have Cataclysm, but from what I gather, the system reqs have been upped with the expansion. It seems more netbook players are having trouble with their netbooks now. Shame, really.
You should be writing these posts for a magazine. this is very informative
thanx ur very informative
I was wondering this myself as I’m thinking about buying a netbook just for writing and Web browsing. But I’ve also got a roommate who started playing and was going to try to help them level. But we only have the one desktop. I may just save up a little more and go for the next level in the 400-500 range laptop. Thanks for your post.
hey thanks that was very informative, just wondering, could you install it using an external disk drive? that way it would require less download? thanks x
Yeah, absolutely, Cat. At the time, I didn’t have a disk drive for it, but if you have one, that would be a LOT easier. ^_^
thanks so much i just got a netbook without thinking about and ws hoping i could play wow all reviwes so no to gaming on it so was not going to try:-( after reading this i installed morrowind and it worked fine on med settings so im sure it will play wow. so now in the long wait of installing lol thanks again
Just downloaded it, after tweeking some settings and adding an additional gig of ram (2g ddr in total) I can run Instances!! I have the toshiba nb305 amazing machine!!
Im having trouble on my netbook playing the game. When I enter a city like Stormwind it lags like crazy then outside of the city its a little laggy tho not much. However I was about to start a quest in Stormwind City and as I went to the area where the quest was my screen went black and made a very high pitched sound so my netbook must really be a bad version for that to happen.
hi guys what you think about playing cataclysm on samsung N145 plus ? its 1 gb ram 1.66 ghz, thanks hope some1 will reply :p
It’s possible to play WoW on a netbook in Cata, and even do dungeons. My desktop computer is currently in pieces awaiting upgrades, and I had a gutted external HD laying around. So I took the card from the external HD, hooked it to my desktop’s HD, and WoW is running smoothly. FPS rate is the same as yours, but I managed to run a H-ZG with minimal lag, and will be trying Ulduar25 (with far less than 25 people). This is using a 250gig HD from 2007, and an HPmini 1000 from 2008, so someone using more recent technology may even be able to pull off raiding Firelands with this. (I have a fan blowing on the HD though since this is a bit taxing on the poor thing)
hi, i’m just wondering if its possible to run WoW on a netbook from an external hard drive? ive looked up how WoW runs coming from an external hard drive and there has been mixed information ranging from “it will but initial loading and loading of terrian takes longer.” to “it runs absolutely fine.” for example. your thoughts on how a netbook will handle it? thanks
p.s im only going to be installing/playing VANILLA WoW on the netbook, im starting a new account so ill have no need for the expansions. when i get my desktop computer i will then install the expansions as i hope to have at least one level 60 by then haha.
I don’t really know. It would depend on the speed and quality of the harddrive, really. Firewire harddrives are a lot better for video editing than USB 2.0, so it’s possible that’s true for loading of terrain and such from a game as well. As long as it’s just an interim thing for you, I’m sure it’ll be with any medium-range external HDD.
I haven’t played WoW in years now, so I can only imagine the speed of the machines and such has improved since then.