I have an inspiron 6000 with

80 GB hard drive
1 GB of RAM
1.73 GHz Pentium M
Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset Family (Intel(R) 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset)

on the system requirements lab website it says that everything is fine except that my video card does not have HW transform and lighting and i was wondering if this is absolutely necessary to run the game

Yes it is, it's part of the specification.

Games have needed this for years now (Max Payne 1 for example) so don't complain dude

SW KOTOR is also supposed to require HW T&L but it works perfectly fine on my computer (albeit with the graphics kinda low)

Well it's always up to the programmers wether there's a fallback path for not having HW T&L. But it seems like most don't prepare any path at all. Hence it's not supported.

Blizzard has always been pretty good about making sure everyone who wants to play there game can. The majority of your specs are right on for playing a MMO, except the videocard. Also, A lot of video options can be disabled through their video options. Here are some of the issues you will have playing WoW on your laptop, however, if you can get it to run...

Choppy Graphics.
MMO's are a dynamically changing world, with other people walking around and interacting in addition to the world itself. As soon as you find yourself surrounded by other players, that's more models that need to be loaded into video RAM and system ram as you play. The on board solution you have shares the RAM with you system, and is going to gag on this every time it overflows. If you attempt to give the videoard more RAM to se, it will gaga when the system RAM overflows and hits the paging file... painful indeed.

Minimalist Graphics
In addition to the problem above, you will have to turn down all of the graphic settings to make the game run "smoothly". Basically everything will be set to low, low, low none, none, none, etc just to make the game semi-playable.

To give you an idea, I can barely play on my laptop from school (Back home for the holidays) and have to use minimalist graphics, on a much better system. I'm running a 3.2GHz Intel, Nvidia GeForceFX Go5700 w/ 64MB of RAM, 512MB DDR, and 80GB HD with a 1.2GB Paging file (because 512 isn't enough for WoW, damn that Ironforge!!)

In my opinion as a game designer and gaming experience with WoW on a laptop, I really don't think you will have an enjoyable experience on your current laptop system. I'm sorry :blush:

T&L is required to run the game - your integrated graphics wont do

And seeing as you have a laptop, it only makes the situation worse, as there's no upgrading the graphics card...

Although - the rest of the specs would enable you to run WOW smoothly, a switch from 512MB to 1GB does wonders for WoW, you would be running smoothly at medium details most of the time, if you could run the game

Hey

I know this is an old thread but i have a question. I've been running wow on my new laptop without knowing my intel graphic card dosent have hardware transform and lighting. It runs no prob really smoothly on low graphic settings. The thing is the computer gets pretty hot after a while. Alot of forums say that its a typical sony vaio FZ problem, but still i dont want to overheat my laptop and i was wondering if the fact that my card does not support hardware transform and lighting could be a contributing fact to my laptop overheating...

Some laptops get hot and when you are playing games you are putting a load on not only your video card but your CPU as well. Load = Heat which is normal.

Try this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834997396

They have tons of others, but I like the idea that it blows air in instead of pulling hot air out.

yeh dude he is right