Acer 6930g, not pulling its weight?

I bought an Acer Aspire 6930g a while ago and realized it had really, really weak gaming performance. I never cared much but a friend recently got a recently spec'd asus which does considerably better than my Acer.

I have a 2.53ghz Core 2 Duo 2 T9400, 4gb DDR2 RAM and a 512mb 6900GS. In games like Bioshock I have to play it with all the settings on low at 1024x768 to get anywhere near acceptable performance (30 to 60fps, still drops down to 20fps in some places). The strange part is that if I make everything high the performance doesn't drop that significantly, between about 20 and 30fps.

I have the latest laptop nvidia drivers and umm, well I dunno what else should I be doing to get better performance?

 

Respectfully, would you mind doublechecking your stats again. A T9400 is a top of the line CPU. I suspect that you might mean a 9600GS NVidia card.

 

oh right, yeah, it's a 9600m GS with 'TurboCache' something or another.

I've double and triple checked it, I've spent whole nights checking it. I dunno why but I thought this was the best laptop gaming had to offer (well at least marginally better than the older 8600m GT based laptop I owned ^_^).

Could there be some setting in there that is causing this? I've checked all the processes, I've even run it with the barebones number of background processes running, performance doesn't improve at all.

 

It is really odd that you aren't noticing much of a shift between the high settings and the low ones. My understanding is that games like Bioshock are only marginally playable on any mid-level cards (please someone correct this if it is wrong, this is just my impression). I don't have much I can offer you besides moral support, but hopefully someone with a more info comes along and then we can both learn! Sorry I can't be more help. Oh, and sweet comp