Notebooks and WoW

Notebooks are a wonderful thing. Portable, powerful (for the most part), and a great way to get your WoW fix while you're on the road. However, because it's a notebook, a new set of issues come into play when playing WoW.

Heat
Notebooks and WoW really don't play well together. By their very nature, notebooks are much more difficult to keep cool, and WoW will definitely test that ability. Its recommended that you use a high quality notebook cooler when you wish to play on a notebook. This helps keep the temperatures down, and increases the useful life of your notebook.

Signs of overheating would be your screen going blank, game shutting down, notebook shutting down, and obviously, parts of the notebook becoming extremely warm to the touch.

ALWAYS have your notebook on a hard, flat surface. Despite being called a 'lap'top, they really shouldn't be placed on the lap as it restricts airflow and can cause the machine to overheat very quickly.

Performance
Notebooks tend to come out of the box with the CPU tuned to save as much power as possible. While great for your battery, it will give very poor performance in game. Go into your Power Settings in Control Panel. Ensure the notebook is set to Maximum Performance to get the best game results. This will drain the battery quickly, so be sure to plug in the notebook asap.

Graphics
This is the area where notebooks tend to really fail, especially the cheaper notebooks. While it may have a decent processor, chances are it's not going to have a graphics card or chipset to match. Knock your graphics settings down to medium or even low if you're having graphics issues in game.

Theres also the opposite, where the new gaming laptops have the i7 CPU, along with a 360m graphics card. While the GPU is great, the CPU on these notebooks are generally 1.7GHz, which is under System Recommendations by quite a bit. As such, you won't get the stellar FPS in-game you think you should be receiving.

Netbooks
While some users have been able to get WoW to run on a Netbook, it is HIGHLY discouraged for use to play the game. The Intel Atom processor is just not able to keep up. It takes way too much tweaking to get it to run reliably even on low settings.