Duron vs. Athlon Processor. RE: World of Warcraft

I am trying to install WOW on my laptop but upon doing so I am met with the message that I have insufficient CPU speed. It states that I must have either a pentium3 800mhz processor, or an AMD Duron 800mhz. I have a Mobile AMD Athlon XP-M Processor 2500+ (1.87GHz) with PowerNow! Technology. Is there any reason WOW wont run on that?

What is the difference between Duron and Athlon? More importantly is it even worth attempting to run wow on this machine?

Thanks

the spec for my laptop can be found at the link below in case they are needed to answer this question.
»h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?d

sorry. The link is:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&lang=en&cc=us&product=374485&dlc=en&docname=c00249077

My wag is your CPU was not invented when WOW was released and the program misreads it. Look for a patch on WOW website, also check their message boards.

If it is due to speed step, you should be able to turn that off, maybe by running it off AC power for the install.

The Duron is basically the cut down budget version of the Athlon processor, with less L2 cache, similar to how Celerons are cut down Pentium 4s. An Athlon XP 2500 is more than fast enough to run WoW.

Your laptop has PowerNow tech, which automatically turns down the processors clockspeed, when full power isn’t needed, to save on battery life. Make sure the processor is running at full speed when you try to install the game.

Also, what video chip does your laptop have? I can’t get that link you made to open, and the video chip is more important than the CPU when it comes to running modern games.

Does it actually prevent you from installing it ? I got the same message on my laptop but there was an ‘Ignore it and install anyway’ option. I did and it runs fine (although there poor thing starts to get hot after a while).

If I were you I’d try it and see if it works, but that laptop should run it fine if it’s got decent graphics.

SD

I actually did get it to install but when it runs it plays very very choppy and the ground looks patchy at best.

That’s almost certainly a graphics card issue…hmm…it says you have an ATI Mobile, that’s a good card. Try updating your video card drivers and see if there’s a setting somewhere to always have vid car and CPU running at max.

Actually, the mobility Radeon is not that good of a video chip, especially since this one has to share the system memory, which is slow compared to onboard video memory. The video on your laptop barely meets the minimum graphics card specifications to run WoW, that is why the game is quite choppy.

Oh, for some reason I didn’t notice the video memory was shared. I was like “64MB, that’s enough” Yeah, it would be twer it all it’s own.

would it be worth it if I upgraded the ram to 780 or 1 gb?