Originally Posted by
Agent Bon
No one has mentioned something really important on this topic. The machine you'll need, and in particular the graphics card or chipset, is largely dependent on what resolution you want or need and how fancy you want the special effects to look. If you're good with 1024x768 or the widescreen equivalent, you aren't going to need a lot of power. If you're willing to turn almost all the special effects down to low quality, you'll need even less power. The more you want, the more CPU, RAM, Graphics card capability, and power supply you'll need (mostly the last two).
I played PSU on my laptop with pretty low settings and all was good (except some of the boss attacks caused low framerates). Mine has a fairly cheap graphics chipset, which sadly I doubt will muscle PSO2, but if you get one with the right parts then you should be able to run PSO2 on low settings for about $600. No guarantees it will be able to run well with games released the next year though.
Something else I've found with personal experience is that, if you have 4+ cores in a system, and if your Graphics card starts dragging on the processor, then it won't hurt as badly as with less cores. Then again, that depends largely on how many background processes you have going.
My last point is: If you don't need the upgrade yet, laptop or desktop, wait it out. You can always get something better later for the same price as the tech advances, or at least wait for a good sale if you can. HP, for example, tends to release new tech in July, after everyone buys their old tech as graduation presents. If those people waited, they could have gotten better stuff. As for the big sales, most of them are in late November to late December.