Half Life 2 on Sentia

Hi all I'm new here and just to make sure we're all on the same level I'd like to inform you that (yes its a very low level). I'm just wondering how many Sentia owners have tried out Half Life 2 on it, cause I just bought a custom laptop that's outfitted very similar to a Sentia and I've been running Half Life 2 on it rather well at 800x600 except for the fact that the game shuts itself down every once in a while. I know what your saying... if its shutting down it isn't running very well at all, but seriously its running very smoothly. My laptop has a 1.5ghz dothan pentium m, 768 mb ram, and yes the 64mb shared intel extreme graphics 2. So I'm just wondering if any of you have tried it so far and how succesful its been, because our systems meet the minimum requirements according to the box and manufacterer who states hl 2 supports integrated graphics, except that the T&L will have to be done on the processor, and no the pentium m is not the best processor for carrying this out. The graphics card requirements according to valve are 32 mb dedicated, which in the bios I can set my graphics card to 8, 16, and 32 dedicated vram. I was wondering how high you Sentia owners can set your graphics cards to in the bios, I was chattin with the alienware live tech support on their website and he tells me that the sentia can be set all the way up to 64mb in the bios, which I didn't think was possible with 64mb shared, but thats what alienware tells me, but I'd like an actual owner of a sentias feedback on if this is true or not.

That's crazy, Sentias will go all the way to 64mb dedicated vram on a 64mb shared chip? Man I'm gettin screwed with my max 32mb dedicated vram max. Well thanks for the input. But has anyone tried Half Life 2 on their Sentia yet? With 64mb vram you'll have a lot better chance of it running well.

well yeah like i said mine only goes to 32 in the bios...drat. Even though its the same graphics card as in your sentias, and I was running the dvd edition not the cd edition which actually could make a difference since the cd part of drives reads much faster than dvd part. Does the cd version require you to have the cd in the drive to play or can you load it all to the hard drive( I doubt it this games huge), the dvd version requires you to have it in the drive to read off of. I can't believe the size of the demo file either that was just released it's over 3 gigs I'm pretty sure, and thats just a demo....

Man I'm getting screwed again. That reminds me anybody want to buy a very slightly used dvd version of HL2 that includes cs:source and Half Life 1:source thats mint, seeing as how my lappy bowed to its awesome powers.... we have confirmation that this game does indeed run well on the sentia.

wow I didn't realize people were still posting on this thread. Anyways I was wrong at the start in my bios where I was only able to set it 8, 16, and 32 I thought that meant the shared amount, but upon further inspection of my settings and hardware config that's setting the range not the max amount. It's setting it from 8-64, 16-64, or 32-64. It's just setting the bottom end that will absolutely be taken out of the total ram at all times.

update!! So anyways I just now figured out that pcclub installed the video drivers for the original Intel Extreme graphics instead of Extreme graphics 2. I updated the driver and now I'm getting much better results on games. I can now play Half Life 2 at 1024x768 at a pretty decent framerate and I no longer get error messages and it no longer shuts down.