UPDATE:  I installed the Intel drivers from 6/08 (I had to update them through device manager) and they did not make any change to the game play.

My girlfriend recently moved closer to me and consequently I have been spending a lot of time at her place.  This is great and all, but she does not have a gaming machine.

She does have  a Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet PC.  It sports an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950, which is not the best.  She did upgrade the RAM to 3 GB and had been playing WoW on it with no problems - I figured EQ2 was worth a shot.

After transferring EQ2 from an external hard drive I started it up.  The loading screen looked amazing - there was hope.  As soon as I got into the game things were choppy.  I immediately went to the graphic settings and turned everything down (as low as they would go)- it helped a little.

I also went in and turned the wide screen letter box all the way up to max.  This also helped, but by no means was the game playable (or recognizable for that matter).  I didn’t bother to see how many FPS I was getting - I know it was horrible.

Considering her computer has a Core 2 Duo and 3 GB RAM I am force to believe it was the Intel graphics card that killed any hope of getting this to work.  It used shared memory and was able to go up to 128 MB in XP.  After some research I noticed that in Vista it could go up to 256 MB.

She was planning on formatting her computer anyway and just happen to have a copy of Vista Ultimate laying around.  After a little bit of trouble loading the correct raid drivers for her computer, the install went smoothly.  We updated all the drivers and I immediately loaded up EQ2 - the extra memory did not help much.

At best, one would be able to run around and do some harvesting, but I would never trust this computer for play in a group.

EQ2 is a much more demanding game (graphics wise) than WoW is and that was crystal clear after this.

There is still hope though - she just got a MacBook…I will keep you posted.