Speeding up my 1520? (graphics 3d wise)

Well, i just got my inspiron 1520, alpine white (to die for) with:
-2.0ghz C2Duo
-8600gt
-2gb ram (thinking about upgrading to 3gb)

I was just wondering if there is any way (short of getting a lappy with customizable internals) of speeding my 3D power up. The only things i can think about right now are:

-using riva tuner (or can you throw out a program),
-getting another gig of ram ( to 3gb)
-setting game priority (in taskmngr) to high (to get the most out of my proc. power)


what ELSE can i do to get mo'bettah fps? (to be frank)

-jl

 

no one? please, i need some help (so ican decide whether to save up for a desktop gaming rig)

 

if you dont have one of the nvidia gpus then there is not much that u can do.

 

wait, what? i though that the 8600m GT is a nvidia card? am i mistaken?

 

The 8600GT is an nvidia card, and the best you can get in the 1520. The best way to improve your performance is make sure you have the latest drivers (the one's DELL provides are always very old, go to www.laptopvideo2go.com and get the latest) and make sure your computer isn't loaded with crapware.

 

so the only options are

- add ram
-clear crapware
-new drivers, always
-overclock

right?

 

yeah I installed the 163.15 driver and it seems to work quite well (if you have ne troubles installing I can do a step by step). Im tentative to run the very latest drivers they have on that site because often they have little bugs or installing glitches which need a month or so for fixing.

 

will going from 2gb to 3gb RAM help much? im considering doing this when mine gets here. Im running Vista.... so i know it will take up a bit more ram than the XP guys. What do you think, worth it or not? also where is the best place to get a 2gb X1 ram for my 1520?

tnx

 

on normal usage?...no

the only way it will help is if you have an immense # of prog. running and using them all at once, OR if you have a memory-intensive game, such as aa or halo2 (or anything else like that
) running. I found out that when i have aa running, i only have about 100mb of ram left until it starts to use the slow pagefile.... So in my case, adding that 1gb to 3gb will make a bug difference. Remeber, your comp wont se 4gb unless you have ultimtex64bit edition

 

Would actually be a very bad idea IMHO... by upping it to 3GB that means you'll have a 2GB chip mixed with a 1GB chip... You'd loose all the benefits of Dual Channel memory by doing that.

For dual channel both chips have to be the same capacity...

 

3GB of RAM will not help with games/etc, unless you're multitasking in the background as well.

Aside from drivers, overclocking will be the main way to improve performance, especially if you can get the memory clocks up from 400MHz upwards to 500MHz (some have been reaching around 550MHz).

 

and this problem with mixing a 1gb with a 2gb is valid? i read another thread that said the 1gb extra would negate any drawbacks you might have from having mix matched chips.

 

i kept saying the 3gb ram because i have ZERO ram left while playing games... then my comp starts to use page file and slows like crazy


what about if i just shot the gun and got 4gb of ram (to keep the benefits of dual channel, knowing that the os would only be able to use 3gb of it.....Its just that i hate using pagefile, especially on my 5400rpm drive, on my raptor, its no prob, but on my lappy, big prob.

what do you guys think about the 4gb to keep the dual channel mode?

 

is there anyone?