Help: Running A Game On A Dell Inspirion 5100 How can I make it work better?

[gunbound 0]

Yeah, to most of you I'm sure you'll notice that my laptop is weak, but I already know. This is what I got:Dell Inspirion 5100XP Home edition16MB Video Card512MB RAMPentium 4 - 2.4GHzI used to play Unreal Tournament 2003 and it was a bit slow, low frames per second. Then I got UT2004 and it was worse, so I stopped playing it. Then I started playing GunBound, which is a free (for download) 100MB multiplayer online game. It was good at first. Now it's getting low FPS again and getting generally slow(er) at all times.Yes, I defragment, but which is better? Windows Defrag or Norton Speeddisk? They seem to do different things because when I use Speeddisk, Win Defrag will read the drive and even more fragmented.I run 32 - 34 processes. That's because Norton and Symantec run a lot of processes.Commit Charge: 195M / 1245M - I don't know what this means.And I don't run anything more than MSN Messenger and/or Winamp when I'm playing the game, and it lags.What can I do? Thanks.

[GM-University 0]

Hmm, your hardrive might be pretty full, i'm on an XPS, and my laptop runs slow because of that, but if you get a top-of-the-line graphics card you should get higher frame rates... Also, what version of DirectX are you using, go to start>run>dxdiag to find out...

[biscuitrat 0]

I would definitely start out with a better video card. I believe you have the one you got with the system, which is meant for people who don't play games that require good graphics. Get an NVIDIA or ATI from newegg.com and have it installed or install it yourself. That would solve a lot of problems. Make sure you have enough RAM to run the game. I would say have 512 as a minimum. Since you have a laptop, I'd make sure you have someone professional to look over your computer while you mess around with it, or have them do it themselves so nothing happens. We all know that they can be costly to repair or replace.

[GM-University 0]

Your laptop isn't too weak, just not meant for games really, but yuo can change that, get a NVIDIA or GeForce 5 or some other good graphics card, and make sure your running DirectX 8.0 or higher (if you use windows).

[gunbound 0]

I have DirextX 9.0How does disk space affect proformance? I thought that my C: drive was just for storage.

[odomike 0]

My recommendation is that you should change your video card to another one with 32MB mem or more. Thtaht should help solve your problem.Commit charge means then aamount of Virtual mem your comp is using at that particular time

[Trystim 0]

I will say this till the day I die due to how many virus's nortons as let slide by and same with mcaffee as compared to AVG they are system resource intensive hog programs that can be alleviated by uninstalling them. First thing I do whenever i work on someones Dell and they ask me to use the restore disks I let them know that I personally have seen 6 virus's that nortons and macaffee has let slide by and AVG has not let one by on testing I have done. And inform them that more then likely they will see a gain in computer speed in general due to cutting out processes they use as well.Graphics card upgrade will help your fps as well and maybe a labtop SATA hard drive for the faster transfer of information other then that i can't see anything else standing in your way.Good luck.