It all depends on your specs. I bought this laptop last year for The Sims 2, but it runs The Sims 3 on all high settings with only a little lag. My boyfriends, on the other hand, can't run it at all and his is the same brand.

Check the specs before you ever buy a computer game or you'll just waste money. =[

...and never trust people who sell it to you as a 'gaming laptop' without checking that its specs actually meet those required by the games you most want to play on it.
This should be a computer buyers golden rule. The vast majority of salespeople just want you to leave the store a few hundred pounds poorer, as quickly as possible.

IUt runs fine on my laptop. It just tends to overheat alot, so I prop it up on stuff

I'm using a Dell XPS M1710, which runs most games fine on high settings (for TS2 I have everything set to high) or, for things that need a better framerate like FPS, medium settings. It's really dependant on the laptop, not the fact that it _is_ a laptop. You get what you pay for, essentially.

And as heavenzdvl987 said, everything is labelled as "gaming" lately... It's very misleading.

Also, when I use it on my lap, I have a hardback sketchbook underneath it, and I can still feel the heat when playing games. Playing Left 4 Dead (for say...just over an hour) with nothing underneath it gave me a heat rash on my legs.

I have a Dell XPS M1530 and it runs it really well on the highest graphics settings. When I first got it, I couldn't believe what crappy graphics I had been settling for with my previous 'non-gaming' laptop.

The two biggest differences between a laptop and desktop system performance are usually going to be hard drive and graphics adapter. In many cases, the system memory is step or two behind the RAM in a contemporary desktop rig in the bandwidth and latency departments as well in order to save on power consumption/heat and cost.

IMO, A true gaming laptop should have at least 1 7200rpm drive and an actual discrete GPU w/ dedicated memory that is at least DDR3.

Most integrated graphics solutions use shared system memory that is a good bit slower and use the system bus for all their reads/writes causing big time I/O bottle necks. The chips themselves are often underclocked and have significantly less pipelines than their desktop equivalents. Integrated graphics solutions with dedicated memory generally have faster/higher bandwidth memory and discrete interconnects between the GPU and this RAM.

Heat build up can become much more of an issue in a laptop as well and makes a huge difference in stability if it become a big enough issue.

I'm going to try loading up TS3 on my laptop from work tonight (HP nc6400). It's running XP 32 SP3 and has a Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2 GHz, 2GB of RAM, but only an X1300 Mobility graphics chipset. Hopefully I can get playable performance on low settings at least...

I installed TS3 on my Macbook because my boyfriend got Spore to run just fine on it so I assumed TS3 would be the same. I have to keep the graphics low so I don't know how fantastic the game really looks. I am, however, going to get a new laptop sometime this year (my bf and I jointly own the Macbook) and I'll install TS3 on that.

Can you get a new graphics card for a laptop? I thought that you couldn't do that...
I'm too poor for a new computer lol

I have a asus laptop with dual core, 4 GB of ram and a GeForce with 512 MB but it still needs a couple of minutes before the launcher pops up. the game itself is running smooth

I have an acer aspire 5315 laptop' But before i bought the sims 3 i upgraded the memory and hard drive'The memory i upgraded to 2x 1gig slots and the hard drive i upgraded to a 250 gig.
I haven't had any problems with the sims 3 at all'those of you who have laptops out there will need to upgrade just the memory'the memory should be minium of 2x 1 gig at least.

This forum isn't meant as a general social chat and bitch about problems forum.

If people are wondering whether their computer meets requirements or for help with getting the game to work well, then I recommend reading the help stickies in this forum. There's a -a lot- of information there if you're willing to take the time to read. If anyone still has specific questions after reading the help guides then they can feel free to post their own individual questions. If you want advice you -must- provide system specs.

I'm locking this because I don't see any point except for people who tried to play the game when their computer wasn't up to it.. and big shock, it didn't work well. Plus there's already been several instances of incorrect and ill advice being thrown about and I don't want to spend tons of time continually trying to correct it all.