Starcraft – Does Starcraft 2 run better on Windows or Mac

The answer is yes, you will be able to install Starcraft II on any future box you have.

Soon after you purchase Starcraft II, you will link your key to your battle.net account. If you don't have a battle.net account yet, you will have to create one. You must link your key to play the game.

Once your account is linked, you never need your key again. What's more, you don't even need the install disc again, as you can download the entire game client off the battle.net site. The disc itself is just a convenient way to install the game; I myself bought it and didn't even use it. The same is now true for any PC Blizzard game released in the past 12 years, including Diablo 2 and the original Starcraft.

What's more, for Starcraft II your match history, achievements, and current campaign progress will also transfer because it's stored on the server. There may be some stuff like Replays which won't transfer over to your new box, but for the most part you will be playing the game where you left off.

The only way you could hose yourself here is by somehow losing access to your battle.net account, for example by forgetting your password or permanently losing your internet connection. I'd recommend against that.

The nVidia GT 330M isn't really a gaming graphics card; it definitely has trouble with recent games like Bad Company 2. In-game benchmarks for the 330M show the performance of the chip in a lot of fairly recent games, and you can see for yourself that it doesn't really do well in high settings for most games. The PassMark benchmark for the 330M shows that the 330M isn't competitive on par even with current mid-market graphics cards like the GTX460.

As a comparison, my laptop has an ATI 4670HD (772 PassMark vs the 330M's 479 PassMark), 8GB RAM and a Core2Duo@2.66GHz, and it has trouble handling the game on medium at 1920x1080.

I hate to say it, but you're more or less out of luck trying to get Starcraft 2 to perform on a laptop on high settings unless you've forked out for something that advertises itself as a gaming laptop.

I've also heard that performance of Starcraft 2 under OSX is abysmal; it might be worth your while getting bootcamp running with Windows to see if that gives you a bit of a performance boost.

Summary: settle for lower settings, try installing Windows under Bootcamp.