I can't seem to find one anywhere, am I right in thinking there isn't one? No way I'll risk au$100 on something I'm not sure my laptop will run.

I think you're right. I just checked steam as well as the official homepage and nothing.

Yeah I looked on steam but having no experience with it, I wasn't sure if there was a special demo section or something.
Oh well, no buy for me then. Shit.

Why didn't you try the beta? It was free for everyone...

Its not available anymore since the game is out

I know and because of this I used simple past tense. :P

well dow2 is very scalerble just compare your specs with the min specs of the game

Hmm, maybe I didn't read the beta question properly. I didn't have my netbook at the time the beta was on & I didn't want to put steam on my laptop whilst it was my one and only mission critical computer (I don't like installing any unusual software on my PC without a backup machine).
I'm very skeptical about the minimum specs. "Any" core 2 duo is far too vague & generous for an IT nerd like me, does that include the centrino laptop line? My cores are 1.66ghz each so mathematically I should be over the minimum but its also a matter of how different the centrino 2 & core 2 are at processing. My RAM is fine but my GPU is a Go 7600 which seems to be schizophrenic or at least bi-polar because it's spectacular one minute and grinning & drooling like a retarded foreign cousin the next.
There's just too many variables to risk that much cash on at the moment I think. Sure I'll definitely have a PC that can run it one day but spending the cash on the game at the moment would slow the acquisition of the computer and if I don't get any entertainment out of the game then its just going to piss me off.

You can play the game with low settings but Empire: Total War will run better than DoW 2. But do you love Total War Series?

Oh I love the total war series, both platonically and romantically. Since my lappy shits itself trying to play Medieval 2 Total War, I'd say thats fairly conclusive