Suggestion For Laptop To Play XI On

I'm playing XI on an HP Pavillion G6 with a dedicated gfx card that would switch on/off for high performance and has worked fine for the last 4 years or so, but recently it's been chugging along, low fps even in crappy windowed resolution its a 16inch monitor and i only have the window taking up like 3/5 of the screen and i have to turn shadows and effects off. I believe newer laptops can probably run this a lot more smoothly but wanted some suggestions. Looking for a laptop under 800 that's all-purpose but can play XI with shadows/effects that won't lag like crap. Since the day i got it i had to run with weather/shadows/effects off, but wondering if laptops now are strong enough and have high enough cpu to handle a cou intensive game without running at 99%cpu

http://m.store.hp.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/m20ProductDisplayView?storeId=10151&productId=721151&urlRequestType=Base&langId=-1&catalogId=10051#/choices

This is a great starting point:
http://lappylist.com/best-gaming-laptops/

I have recently bought a cheapo Acer Aspire V3-572G (i7, 8GB RAM, GeForce 840M) and it can 5-box (640x480 windows) quite well, so it should be able to handle one client at full settings smoothly. Make sure the first thing you do is install Windows 7, as most new laptops come with Windows 8.1 now and FFXI doesn't play well with it.

So I would have to buy windows 7 and install it? How does it work downgrading an OS? Never did it before.

do you multibox at all? Even though ffxi isn't known to be a graphic intensive compared to many others, it's still not the same as when it just came out some ten years ago (if you crank up all the settings of course).

I'm currently running gtx 660m on my laptop and with all the lowest settings, i can roughly triple box decently, but you can forget about doing stuff like besieged or wkr when there are lots of people.

it is however a different story if you're only playing 1 character, my suggestion is to look up your current graphics card with benchmark scores, a good place to go for example would be here: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-660M.71859.0.html (that's for my 660m), go down to the general benchmark scores, ie) 3DMark 11 - Performance GPU 1280x720, and look at the graphics card's benchmark score, and use that as your current standard, and compare it to your new laptop candidates' graphic's card.

for "bang for the buck", i suggest waiting for lenovo y series to go on sales (slickdeals.net?), they *usually* have the best price/performance with a mid-high range card. with the new gtx 9 series that came out, the 8 series are being pushed on sale quite frequently, you can very easily get a laptop with gtx-860m for under 700 bucks which will last you some good time.

these are all opinions of course, but personally i'd go for the best specs you can get with the price you're willing to afford, because laptops aren't like desktops which you can just pull out the graphics card and put a new one in, it's always better to have the better specs even if you dont need it (right now), than to barely support what you can do now but in a couple years you need another one because it's not powerful enough.

hope this helped!

http://www.microcenter.com/product/439001/N56JN-MH71_156_Laptop_Computer_-_Black_Aluminum

How would this work compared to my HP G6? When I run 1 character i get heavy slowdowns in delve/wkr even on minimal settings. What i'm worried about is i see conflicting issues in regards to directx/windows8. Some people say windows 8 works fine with XI others say it doesnt. Not very computer savy, will i have to downgrade to 7 and if so is it complicated to do so? People said it can work in compatibility mode or something? Also worried about drivers, will i have to rollback the driver for this to work with xi?