Advice please, 8600 being replaced

Hi, my Dell 8600 met with an accident, and my insurance company have appointed a third party firm to replace it. It took a week of hagling to get them to admit it had an ATI 9600 Pro Turbo in it, and I listed all the things it had, but they acted stupid. I eventually was sent a Dell 6000 with an X300 128 meg graphics card in it, the same processor speed, ram and hard disk size that my old laptop had. It does not have the 9 cell battery, docking facility, infra red port, think pad style finger mouse. I like to play games on it, and found the 9600 PT to be very good considering, and was a good compromise, but the X300 seems to run somewhat slower. I have spoken to the insurers and have written to Dell to ask is the 6000 with the X300 sent comparable to my 8600 which I thought was great.
I am no expert in laptops, and need to act quickly if I am to get it changed, so your advice as to a comparable machine would be appreciated.
The 8600 specs were 1.6 M processor, 512 ram, 40 gig HD, Wsxga screen, plus the bits as described above.
The 6000 is a nice machine, I am just a bit dissapointed in the graphics speed.
Thanks in advance

 

wow, those must be some pretty intense games, im currently running GTA san Andreas, full everything at the highest resolution on my 6000d with the x300 and runs buttery smooth. If you want something better than the x300 the next step is the 6800 from Nvidia, an awesome card and is used to deliver the power in the XPS gen 2(the ultimate gaming laptop by dell). You can find a less tuned version in the 9300 and in the 9300 you can still get the 1.6 pent M, 512 ram, and 40 gig HD. Although this will come at a cost for you get the big 17 invh screen, as well as the cost itself, for this system runs 200 bucks more than the 6000 even with the same confguration.

 

My desktop is P4 3.2 Ghz with hyperthreading, 512 mb ram, 128 mb x300 pci express, and I can only run San Andreas on 800x600 with a good framerate, 1024x768 is alright but not great Do i have the same card as you? Howcome mine isn't as smooth?

 

First off my machine is completely clean the only thing on this sytem is SA. If you happen to have many processes runnig at once you game will slow down. Now, even though you may never have opened any processes before you played there are typically alot of processes that run in the background, and hog up memeory. Another reason is the pentium m is quite possibly the best processor avalible today,and considering the gaming laptop benchmark, the dell xps gen 2, which reatures a pentium M, and not a pentium 4 HT, is shows how capable this chipset is. Otherwise another reason could be different drivers, but i assure you this is no exageration on my behalf.

oh, i just thought of this at the last minute, there are different versions of the video card, one designed for a laptop, on the other a desktop. Usally the desktop is the better variant, so it seams kinda backwards in this situation, but this could very well be the distinguishing difference.

 

I generally keep my system very clean, with spybot, antivurus...etc...and keep the processes down, I would like to format eventually, just waiting til I finish some work. My card is the x300 SE, whcih mihgt have somethign to do with it. I'll be honest, the game looks great, amazing lighting effects and such, it's just that vice city ran better. Anyways, I'll format...I have a pretty good configuration though, so theres no reason it shoudln't run fine. I want to clean it up , so many files all over the place unorganized.

By the way,this may seem off topic, but in San Andreas:

Remeber how in vice city you could use the keypad on the keyboard to rotate the camera, like when you're in a shoot out and you want t o see behind you ,, you didn't need hte mouse, you could just press 4 to rotate left, and there you go. That doesn't work in san andreas - do I need to use the mouse? THat's a PAIN! Thanks

Also, another off topic thing,
on my 700m, there's nubmers on the top of the keyboard, but there;s a keypad built into the FN function where the letters are. All of a sudden, these stopped working. the other FN keys work fine, but the nubmers stopped. Any ideas?

Thanks