Curse

king swift · Nov 29, 2009, 10:49 PM // 22:49

Ok soo my laptop is 2-3 years old now and is going extra slow on Guild Wars and WOW...

My system specs from CPU-Z are
Dell Inspiron 1501
AMD Turion 64x2 Mobile TL-50
894MB DDR2 Ram
Radeon Xpress 1150
Mainboard- Dell Inc. 0UW744
100gb HDD
Looking to upgrade the Ram to 2-3GB and the GPU to HD Radeon 3600+

Budget $100

Any Solid Suggestions? Been looking at newegg but my expertise is mostly with Desktop PC stuff...laptop stuff is foreign to me.

EDIT What is this p.o.s. worth anyway i might want to rid myself of it on ebay and start fresh. Not even sure if i can upgrade the GPU... it might be integrated

moriz · Nov 30, 2009, 12:00 AM // 00:00

err, you can't upgrade the graphic card on a laptop. as for selling it... maybe $300.

king swift · Nov 30, 2009, 12:32 AM // 00:32

If i upgrade the RAM should the Laggyness factor be minimized

gone · Nov 30, 2009, 04:46 AM // 04:46

Honestly?
for the money, it's not even worth it. the performance gain will be minimal, at best.

before you buy ram, look into tweaking the OS. if you go that road beware of registry tweaking. there are enough tweaks out there that you don't need to even be messing around like that.

What OS are you running?

even before tweaking, (which this is tweaking lol) start killing off those processes that aren't crucial to running a stable OS.

king swift · Nov 30, 2009, 10:58 AM // 10:58

Running windows xp home

Elder III · Nov 30, 2009, 02:52 PM // 14:52

you should be able to up the RAM to 2GB and it would help indeed, but the x1150 video card is very old and can't be changed either. That's what's hindering your gaming performance the most. I think lowering ingame settings is the only thing you can do that will help noticeably (providing you don't have any viruses or maware eating up system resources). You should be able to upgrade the RAM to 2GB for around $40, which I would do if you intend to keep the laptop, if not then obviously you don't want to spend more money on it.

If it's in good cosmetic condition and is reformatted, with a fresh install of Windows etc... you should get $200-250 on EBAY - I think $300 is too optimistic myself.

Quaker · Nov 30, 2009, 05:20 PM // 17:20

I would say that upgrading your RAM would make a big difference. After a while, Windows tends to get bogged down by all the little "services" and systray crap that take up RAM and cpu cycles. You can help that some by cleaning out some of the clutter, but you need to know what can or can't be messed with. Adding more RAM will at least regain some free memory and you may get it working nearly as well as it originally did.
But, beyond that, you can't upgrade the GPU. Laptop GPUs are usually either integrated into the chipset, or soldered directly to the mobo, or mounted on a module that's specifically designed for the particular laptop model.