Because of my power supply troubles with my gaming machine, I decided to install LOTRO on my Atom+Ion nettop machine. While the machine is pretty wimpy with only a dual-core + Hyperthreading 1.6GHz Atom, the Ion GPU makes it able to play some games. It did okay on Sins of a Solar Empire when I tried it a few months ago. The install of LOTRO took forever because: a) the machine has a laptop hard drive, so is slow; and b) Norton kept deciding that the machine was idle and therefore is due for a virus scan, which slowed the installation even more! But it finally finished.
I adjusted the video to be full-resolution on my 1920×1200 monitor, though I turned down the texture quality and other settings to not drive the machine to its knees. It didn’t help — no matter what I did at that resolution, the game looked good but was sluggish, taking perceptible time to respond to mouse movement and key presses. It made the game quite unpleasant. When I dropped the resolution to say 1280×1024, it was much more responsive, but looked like crap, which also made the game unpleasant.
In short, no PC games until the power supply arrives. Time to find that Star Ocean disk for the PS3…