Help with my laptop and WoW

Hey everyone, I have a Dell 1736 Studio laptop with these specs:

-Core 2 Duo T9400 @ 2.53ghz
-4 gb ram
-256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
-Windows Vista Ultimate

Now before this comptuer I had a Dell Inspiron 1705 that ran World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade perfectly, no problems. That laptop had 2 gb of ram, a slower processor, and a nVidia 7900 Go GS graphics card. When my inspiron broke Dell sent me this studio laptop. I've installed World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and the game runs horribly. I put the resolution at 1360x768 pixels, shadows off, everything else on medium, and the colors up to high and I still get around 12 FPS. If I turn everything on low I get around 30 FPS, but the game looks like crap and the game drops to around 15 fps sometimes.

I'm frustrated because the specs on my laptop are great, but the game runs horribly. I've heard people with the same settings are running the game on max and getting 50 FPS. I've made sure that my power settings are always on high and that I have nothing else running in the background. My old laptop ran WoW perfectly, but for some reason this laptop can't do it. Am I doing anything wrong? I haven't updated the drivers to my graphics card so that might be the problem, but I don't think that would make that much of a difference. Please help me, I can't even play WoW anymore because I can't stand playing the game on low settings.

 

Have you tried updating your graphics card drivers?

I would also suggest running Windows update and making sure all updates are installed. Also disable any unnecessary programs and services running in the background.

 

I can't get that to work for me. I get to this step...

. Go into the Device Manager and expand the Display Adapters by clicking the "+" sign. Right-click on your adapter (there should only be one) and click "Update Driver Software." Install the driver of your choice and do not let Windows search for it. Click "Have Disk" and go into the folder where the drivers were extracted - the default location is C:\ATI\Support\[driver name - something like "7-1_xp_dd_40211"]2KXP_INF.
4. Choose the "_CX" .INF file and click OK.

I found the driver folder, but there isn't anything that lets me press OK, it just keeps letting me open folders. I'm not sure if I'm doing it right cause the installation said it succeeded in the beginning, but my drivers never changed.

 

The guide linked was only for nVidia cards.
You can get tweaked ATI drivers here:
http://www.tweakforce.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=23

 

The guide linked is for ATI cards too. It says ATI in big red letters.

 

You're right. My bad.

 

Well 1 thing could be the fact that Burning Crusade was less taxing than Wrath of the Litch King... Many users report slowdows after that last expansion...

And the 3650 is more or less equal to the 7900, or a bit better but not by much... And ATI cards are harder to "tune" with drivers, due to their bad driver support... Try different drivers...

 

90% it's a driver issue. Try manually grabbing them from ATI's website.

Does the rest of your comp perform OK?

 

Here is a direct link to ATI's laptop drivers download.

http://ati.amd.com/online/mobilecatalyst/

These should work without any problems, make sure you uninstall your old drivers first.