Quote Originally Posted by overweightninja
Vaios tend to be fairly high performance yes...for a laptop. In general though laptops will never be as powerful, components will always be nerfed to preserve battery life and space. It is possible to get laptops that can quite competently play most modern games, however you'll be paying through the nose.

You mentioned getting a 531S. I would advise against this, a quick google reveals these specs:
AMD Sempron 3600+
NVIDIA GeForce 6150

In one word, nasty, especially for that price. 3.6Ghz is very slow for the money you're paying, and the 6150 is ridiculously outdated. As a benchmark, I was able to pickup a rig with a 5.6Ghz Athlon cpu, 2gb of ram and a Geforce 8600 (not a brilliant card but it'll do on a budget) for perhaps fifty pounds more about six months ago. In short that rig looks very pretty, but inside its a dog.
With three or four hundred pounds (or more) you should be looking at at least 5-6Ghz, a couple of gigs of ram and hopefully a 8800GT or 8800GTS if you shop around.
Cheers
EB appears to be playing pretty much as fast as vanilla Rome on my mom's 531S right now,so maybe hers has upgraded performance than the stock version. I played numerous custom battles and about 15 turns of a Greek long campaign last night without incident after I downloaded and installed it. So all's good for right now.
Quote Originally Posted by Tellos Athenaios
The lower performance shouldn't be your main concern when trying to play EB on a notebook. The heat, however, should. Really: to cram in as much components as possible the cooling system is a wee-bit left behind, which isn't exactly alleviated by the fact that there is very little isolating air to begin with. So after some time the laptop will be hot like a 25W lamp... Well not exactly that hot yet, but you get the point: too hot to be comfortable.
Heat actually isn't a problem for me as I have a really good external cooler which keeps my notebook at around 5 degrees even on its highest power setting. PC,XB360,PS3,I get external coolers for all my high performance electronics.