Upgrading RAM for Gaming. Need advice. Halflife 2

I am considering to upgrade memory to my laptop, but still hesitating.

I bought a new laptop, ACER Aspire 5024WLmi last week. It comes with ATI X700128MB and 512MB of RAM. I thought It should be enough to run last year games.

I wish to play Half-Life 2 smoothly. I run the game at 1280x800, because it is the native resolution for my laptop. And HL2 also supports widescreen. The pictures looks nicely, BUT....


When playing games, if there is nothing coming, i mean just walking , and no new events such as explosions, environment sound effects.. door sounds is going to happen, the game will run smoothly. But if the new events is going to happen, the game is noticable skippy when the events or special sound effects are load.

I don't know if I explain the problem in an understandable way. But hope you understand.

How can I improve the game smoothness? what does the skippy problems come from?

1. Is it because of ATI X700 is not powerful enough to run HL2 at 1280x800 resolution?

2. Or is it because of 512MB is not enough?

3. Or soundcard problem?

How can I fix the problem? Should I upgrade RAM? The slots are full 256x2. I need to take one out A piece of 1GB RAM cost 175 euros. Does it worth upgrading? Will upgrading RAM solve my problem?

Any advice???

 

Do you have the virtual memory(for the system) turned on?
I turned mine off and got problems playing HL2, turned it back on right away...

Also, to my knowledge HL i more of a processor intense game than a graphic ditto. Therefore, be sure not to have any unnecessary backgrounds processes running. And make sure that you set CHC or NHC to maximum speed(f you have it installed ,that is).

Your questions:

1. Is it because of ATI X700 is not powerful enough to run HL2 at 1280x800 resolution?
It most definitely is!

2. Or is it because of 512MB is not enough?
Should be.

3. Or soundcard problem?
No idea...

Also, if the above doesn't work try turning of vertical sync.

 

I didn't changed anything for the virtual memory. I just checked in the control panel. It was alreay set as ''custom size" initial size 768MB max 1536. Would that be ok? should i change anything?

what is CHC and NHC???

 

CHC and NHC are the same thing Notebook Hardware control. CHC is the old name the C standing for Centrino.

 

I have almost the same Pc as you(acer 5021) but with a 1.6 ghz turion. I have 1.25 gigs of ram and that helps Half Life run alot better

 

You might try the following:

1. In your Display Settings, Advanced, set OpenGL and Open3D to Performance.
2. Shut off "primary" non-essential tasks when you're gaming. I keep a taskkill.bat file on my desktop screen that looks like this:
Echo On
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im AdBlocker.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im Ad-watch.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im AdmServ.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im AGRSMMSG.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im alcwzrd.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im alg.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im ati2evxx.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im atiptaxx.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im pstrip.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im scardsvr.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im textExtractor.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im WRSSSDK.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im YahooDesktopSearch.exe
"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /f /im YDSsystray.exe
pause
exit

 

The most likely problem should be your RAM. It might help you if decreased the detail level, coz the lower detail textures are much smaller and hence dont need too much RAM.

 

That is a known issue with the sound, it doesn't seem as if they fixed it yet.

Yes, X700 is plenty powerful as posted above - I run HL2 @ 1680x1050 with 2X AA/8X AF no problem, very smooth.

It DEFINITELY helps to have 1GB of RAM - drastic difference, especially in gaming applications, over 512MB.

 

A bit of a wildcard...
Try to put:
-heapsize 30000
in the launch options for HL2.
If that doesn't help try searching http://forums.steampowered.com/ for more solutions.

 

Just out of curiosity, what video drivers are you running? I have the same machine, but with 1GB of RAM and HL2 flies... If you are using the Acer provided drivers, update to Catalyst 5.11 immediately!

 

with my N6210 i could run halflife on medium textures/medium models no AA with evertying else on high, that was with 512mb of ram, I got another 1GB stick and now have 1.25 gb and i can run HL2 on all settings high, with 2x AA with no skipping, and i have an X600, but you will definitely notice a big different in load times, performance with more ram, it is worth it, I got a 1gb stick of Corsair memory from newegg.com for about $90

 

Check out this: http://www.tweakguides.com/HL2_1.html . This guy writes some incredibly detailed (and LENGTHY!) guides. He does an awesome job.

 

I would try and put the following string into the launch options and see if you get better performance -dxlevel 81