There's no way my laptop can run BF3, but it runs the demo of this pretty well (medium settings at a really good framerate). Some people play that online and there's at least one server that's often close to full.

I was wondering if BF2 still has a sizable community and is it a decent one, i.e. is it full of fair and fun games or just a bunch of lowly cheaters?

(I did try Google searching this and all of the results were a year or so old, and none of them answered whether it had a bunch of cheaters/hackers/etc.)

It still has a ton of people playing i'm sure. I was playing up until BF3s release and there were a bunch of servers.

Yeah a lot of full servers, but the state of this game's community and administrators and even the gameplay itself is dreadful at this moment. So many patches that limited and ruined the gameplay and the fun, so many admin-created rules that make half your actions on the servers forbidden, and such an annoying community that boosts and exploits and hacks and cheats. 
 
I'd kill to play Battlefield 2, but seriously, the game is stuck in limbo.

@AhmadMetallic said:

Yeah a lot of full servers, but the state of this game's community and administrators and even the gameplay itself is dreadful at this moment. So many patches that limited and ruined the gameplay and the fun, so many admin-created rules that make half your actions on the servers forbidden, and such an annoying community that boosts and exploits and hacks and cheats. I'd kill to play Battlefield 2, but seriously, the game is stuck in limbo.

Really? Damn it. See, I wanted to know because I want to play BF3, but not the gimped console versions. And the farther time goes on, the more I prefer these old games on my laptop, so I figured I should just build a gaming PC. I was going to get BF2 just to sort of ease that long wait until summer when I can get one, but I guess not now. And Bad Company 2's console community is there, but dwindling.

I was playing a while ago and it still has a bunch of duders playing. If there are people hacking usually the servers are so populated it's hard to tell, unless they're doing something obvious like cartillery. I still prefer this game over BF3.