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What mods can I reliably do on an underpowered 2019 laptop?


purplepat

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Owned Morrowind for a long time, played through some of it before Skyrim came out. Morrowind got pushed aside, never to be revisited...until now.

 

I have a rock-bottom Acer laptop I got for Xmas 2019. It has a Celeron N4000 dual-core processor running Windows 10 @ 1.1 GHz, with 4 GB of DDR4 RAM and UHD Graphics 600. It has a 64GB SSD serving as the storage. The max display resolution is 1366x768. I don't have much in terms of games installed on it, but figured that a game as old as Morrowind might run OK on it. So the vanilla game installed fine and seems to run OK (haven't done any frame rate tests or the like). So now, before I get heavily into any gameplay, it seems like now is the time to install mods before any worthwhile game saves get mucked up.

 

So I'm sure that even given that some mods out there take advantage of more powerful processors, graphics cards, memory, etc., a bunch of stuff will probably work OK even on this slug of a laptop (by today's standards). Admittedly, it's been a long time since Morrowind was on an old desktop of mine, but looking through the mods listing there are some I still remember from way back when. But some of them, especially things like graphics extenders, replacement HD meshes, etc., I have no idea of whether they will run on this laptop or everything will just crash or grind to a halt.

 

Can some of you in the mod community make some good recommendations about which of the big-time mods (I'm thinking mainly graphics enhancements) are likely going to run OK on this potato, or which ones to avoid because I simply lack the power to pull them off? Any other advice or cautionary warnings?

Edited by purplepat
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  • 1 month later...

I'd highly recommend using Morrowind FPS optimizer. I used it all the time a few years ago, running MW on a very slow PC, and it worked fabulously.

 

It automatically adjusts view distance according to your FPS .. so if FPS is low, it draws the view distance in. Conversely if you're in a high FPS area (in the wilderness somewhere with not many creatures or NPCs around), it can increase view distance to beyond the Vanilla MW default.

 

You can also use the mouse wheel to adjust view distance (and therefore FPS) yourself too if you like.

 

Anyway FPS Optimizer runs by itself (doesn't require any other utilities) and download link is here> https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/3875

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Incidentally in terms of actual mods, if you'd like to add extra NPCs, Danae's Friends & Foes is definitely worth considering, since it mostly adds NPCs to interiors (shops, taverns, etc) where framerate usually isn't such a problem. It also adds hostiles too, but the NPCs themselves are very vanilla friendly and well balanced (so no uber-weapons or anything like that).

 

Link is here anyway if you're interested > https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49251

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