Like everyone else. . . I say “wha. . ?”
Yes, if the video card, memory and processor on you laptop will support it you can play any games you want on your laptop. No additional considerations are necessary. And 350 gig is PLENTY for playing SIMs I’m sure.
Good heavens. A flash drive? I disagree with YamatoTwinkie above; it would probably work, but it would be SLOW. And by SLOW, I mean glacially slow.
You said you have 185 GB of free space on the internal? That’s bigger than my entire Windows drive on this (desktop) computer—which has at least a dozen games on it, including some doozies like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (which is a rather large game), and also, incidentally, The Sims 2 and a couple expansions. You could probably put The Sims, all its expansions, and every sim object and piece of clothing you care to download onto that drive, ten times over. I assure you, hard drive space is not a concern for you unless you suddenly develop a HD-video-downloading habit.
Thanks. She’s convinced that I’ll take up my ENTIRE hard drive. (Despite the fact that I originally had it on my old computer that was 40 gigs).
Soooo, I’ll try this weekend. My main concern now is getting it to work on Vista. cross your fingers for me. I’ve got some advice from The Sims Resource forums. I’m just so used to NOT having so much space that I’m being really, really conservative with what I have.
The newer Sims games also have cheat codes that prevent aging and death which I know a lot of people do to prevent their work from, well, dying. 
I know, but I’m still too attached to my old Sims to want to switch.
That’s why I said that they are essentially no different. Yes, a desktop is going to have more room for expansion/upgrades and, generally, a faster processor, video card, for your money.
My point was one apropos of the OP. That is to say, that the mere fact that it is a notebook will have no bearing on whether her game will run on it or not. What does matter is whether her notebook meets the system requirements. Given the game in question and the fact that it is a new notebook, I’d wager that it should run without problem (so long as Vista doesn’t crap all over her parade).
Guin, I could not get the original Sims (Deluxe pack? I think) to work on a Vista machine. I last tried about a year ago, there may be patches available by now. I am just warning you that it may be a real pain in the butt. There is a way to set a single program to run in compatibility mode for an earlier OS, but it did nothing.
As for the rest, your family apparently needs to take a computer class or something. 
Also SHHH! If you tell your mom she can use that lappy for any computer application, not just email, she may not give it up!
Since you’re using Vista it is possible you’ll have compatibility issues. As a pre-emptive to solve this try right clicking on the shortcut icon on your desktop or in the start men, and click properties. Try running it XP compatibility mode. (Click the compatibility tab).
Never install applications onto external hard drives (and that includes flash drives). Just mirroring what others have said there.
Slightly unrelated, but I just wanted chip in with a few things about the computer speed issues your mother and sister seem worried about. Processor speed, RAM and your graphics card are the key things here, not really hard drive space.
Also, using the internet. And this is an issue often overlooked - since your mother and sister don’t sound too computer savvy, do they use the internet? If they do, do they download things? If they do, do they scan them for viruses? On top of this, if you’ve had no virus protection at all, it’s likely your systems have been infected, which has likely contributed greatly to the system slowing down. Which of course, they seem to have blamed on hard disc space.
Most laptops do have cooling issues, especially as they are becoming more powerful. It’s increasingly difficult to cool so much power in so little space. If it does get a little hot, it’s always best to give it a rest to cool down. General use though, not playing any graphical intensive games, this shouldn’t be a regular problem.
I gathered that you knew that. I just wanted to clarify that there are some inherent differences between the performance of a generic “$1000 laptop” vs. a “$1000 desktop”, so that the OP sees the grain of truth behind (her?) initial misconception of “you can’t play games on laptops.”
There are two interesting points here, that Mom and Sis may be thinking of (directly or indirectly).
Laptops have a long history of working differently from desktops. I think this is much less an issue today, and for all I know there may be laptops and desktops that are no longer distinguishable from the point of their APIs and anything else that would matter. But at least for many years whether something would work on a laptop was not the same thing as whether it would work on a desktop.
And, a few years ago, Microsoft figured out that Sims had a bug that would release memory and almost immediately try to use that released memory. They actually wrote a feature into Windows that would evaluate whether Sims was running, and if it was, Windows would act more slowly to reallocate memory that apps had released. This was described in an article in Joel On Software (Joel Spolsky), which is a fascinating read I finished last night and recommend. I think it goes to show how messy and patched together the whole PC world is.
Compatability tab?
Yeah, the computer came with McAfee. Both of them use the internet, run virus scans and defrag monthly. (As well as ad-aware and the like)
Mom and Sis use Limewire, but that’s about it.
As far as getting it to run, The Sims Resource site is giving me some great advice, so I’ll let you know. I’ll try just Sims Deluxe, and if that works, I’ll give the rest a try.
The problem is, my mother talked to my uncle, who is a computer expert, but she never seems to understand what he tells her. sigh (Or perhaps, if she DID, he’s an idiot this time.)
May I politely suggest that you stop listening to your mother when she talks about computers? I’m sure one of these days she’ll be right about something, but it can’t be better than random chance at this point.
Yeah, I know. I just wanted to get her and my sister off my back, so I could say see, I CAN-some actual experts told me otherwise!
I have an older laptop (IBM Thinkpad 90) and I have The Sims 1 AND Paint Shop Pro 8 running just fine on them. I am running XP SP2.
I have *tons *of other stuff on it too, and I have 11GB out of 33GB left.
So, I can definitely state that you should have no problems unless Vista causes one (does that qualify as an oxymoron?)
It worked!!! Woohoo!!!