Stepmania laptop?

[vesper]

I like playing Stepmania on my TV, except it's a lot of work for me to move my PC and hook it up so I'm going to buy a laptop.

What cheap laptops out there can run Stepmania fine and have an S-video output? I'm thinking of buying from Dell, but if anyone has any other suggestions let me know

[ceraf]

if you're getting an old laptop, careful with the hard drive....don't load it too much, or it may crash. happened to my friends old dell inspiron 4100.

otherwise...if you're getting it new from dell, it's fine. besides, dell will replace anything while you're under the warranty. =)

[Spectere]

*bump* Hope it's not too late.

One thing that you're definitely going to want in a StepMania laptop is a made-for-mobile processor. I have a Pentium M in my laptop, which allows it to run for long periods of time without getting too hot. The Intel Core Solo/Duo chips are based on the Pentium M and should give you good results. I used to play StepMania on a mobile Athlon XP-powered laptop and for something like that you'll definitely need a fan underneath the unit. I would recommend against Celeron M processors since they actually run hotter and less efficiently than the Pentium M and Core chips.

You're also going to want a decent video card. My laptop has a RADEON MOBILITY X300 64MB and it works just fine for StepMania.

You shouldn't need more than 512MB of RAM.

Going with a faster hard drive should decrease load times, but I don't have a problem with my 5400rpm drive. If your simfiles are mainly video-less, they won't take up much space, but the more space the merrier (after all, you'll always want some space left over for porn...err, other data).

Most modern laptops have pretty extensive TV output support, supporting composite, S-video, and component from one port if you have an adapter.

I took a quick glance at Dell's site, and this one here looks like a pretty nice system: http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=E1505S3&s=dhs

If I were buying it for myself, I'd upgrade to the UltraSharp LCD display (max resolution would be 1680x1050 instead of 1280x800), put 1GB of memory into it, up the hard drive size to 80GB, and put the 128MB RADEON X1300 into it. With all of that, the final price would come out to $1,154.

It's a bit of an investment, but in my experience it's better to shoot for a mid-range laptop (this one would definitely be mid-range -- it would perform well even in higher-end 3D games if you wanted to go that route) than to get a cheap one that is basically built from spare parts.

Edit: Whoops, I was wrong about the Celeron M not being based on the Pentium M. It is based on the Pentium M, but has several major disadvantages. For one, the processor has less cache (a staple of the Celeron series). Secondly, and most importantly, the Celeron M lacks the battery-saving, heat-reducing SpeedStep technology. SpeedStep dynamically clocks the processor, allowing you to save a considerable amount of battery power when you're unplugged. Since the processor runs at a lower clock rate, it also decreases the amount of heat that it puts out (not too big of a deal -- I can run my Pentium M equipped Inspiron 9300 for hours at its full clock rate and it really doesn't get very warm).