Tibbets, I do agree that WGT is a resource hog, more than it needs to be. I don't really think this is just "a simple Flash game" however. Yes it will run on a netbook, but I don't exspect it do so smoothly. Nor do I think you need some monster gaming machine to run this.
I just played 36 holes, 100% glitch free on my desktop. (psj-gs04 server btw) This is not unusal, any glictches or lag are rare.
On my laptop, totally different story. I have to run gamebooster to even come close to the game being playable.
The two machines have similar specs. pentium dual core processors (defintly not top of the line) 2GB RAM on the desktop, 1GB on the laptop. (quite enough in either case)
In game, cpu usage is about 15-20% on the desktop. 80-90% on the laptop
The main difference between the two machines is that the OS is complely streamlined on the desktop. (Optimized for digital audio editing, but that's not really the point) And the laptop OS is a big old mess of processes,(gamebooster dosen't shutdown absolutly everything)
For sure, there are problems with this game that go beyond the users machine. I am convinced, from my experiences with this game on numerous machines, that most of the complaits about the 'horrible' meter are due to the users setup... or rather that they could be mostly alleviated by some optimization.
But yes, the game is a resource hog. I wish it would run perfectly on my laptop, but I'm not surprised that it dosen't.