I'm thinking of a way to install NWN on my work laptop for work trips, but not install it at the same time..... since we have our laptops scanned from time to time when we connect at the office.

Here's my idea. Mount a 4 gig USB flash drive and install it there. solid state drive, so they're pretty quick, but if I disconnect it, then there are no files to be found in a scan. Just connect it and throw in the CD and I can play. I know there are a few of you out there that play NWN on a laptop so I have two questions.

1. You laptop'ers, do you have a laptop with a mobile graphics card? or is it just the onboard one that most laptops have.

2. Do you all think the USB drive idea is insane? I'm not sure if you are playing online, how much NWN actually reads from disc.

You may have some issues with the solid state Usb drive. Itll work, I think (Will on mac, havnt touched a windows for a few years so i cant really say anything on that front) but really firewire would be far better. Usb can be slow, and that transition time will effect gameplay badly.

It won't run AS smoothly as if it were on the PC itself - But it will work. I currently have nwn on a 20GB USB hard drive.

I play it off there, when I'm not at my house.

You'll be fine.

put it at home and do a gotomypc.com or some such

I have played NWN on several notebook platforms...even a Celeron M on a toshiba that's pretty bad. That notebook only had a standard intel graphics thingy and it worked fine, albiet slow, but fine.

I also have a state of the art HP Core 2 Duo notebook with a nvidia 7600GS and it works dream like.

I also had a Dell that was somewhere between the above two and it worked better than the toshiba, but not as fast as the HP.

Never tried to run it off a usb drive though. You also don't need NWN CD to play it....though NWN2 does. However there are ways around this issue. Things like PowerISO can create an image of the disc and mount it like a virtual CD/DVD-ROM drive.

I think you'll be fine, if not a little slow when big effects or lots of lighting points exist...then things'll slow down a lot.

You have an idea, and it just might work!

It sounds mechanically sound, at the very least. However, if it's a Microsoft PC, it will inevitably come up with some crappy error message, written by some sadist in a warehouse. Good luck!

Yeah, i think i'll give it a shot, see what I can do. When i'm traveling for work it would be cool to be able to check in a bit. I'm guessing it'll be cool for RP type stuff, maybe not heavy combat with alot of visual affects. Transitions might be slow too but I'll give it a shot.

Thanks for all the feedback.