Wringing every drop of performance from a Vostro 1500

As is stated, I picked up a Dell Vostro 1500 a couple months back and didn't use it for gaming until now. Spec rundown is: running XP w/ SP2, C2D 1.6Ghz, 2Gb DDR2 and the nVidia 8400m GS (A side note about the vid card; when I ordered, I told Dell I wanted the 128mb 8400 as that was the lowest price one they had and I didn't think I would do any gaming on it but while I was surfing gamespot.com some of the games had this "Can you run it?" test that you can do by Systems Requirements Labs. While running that test on HL2/Source games, Doom 3, etc. I passed even the recommended specs which was surprising, but the program said I had a 256mb 84xx. Could it be that the Dell guy had a wee bit too much drinky drink and stuck the wrong card in or is that program bogus to begin with?)

Anywhos, my main deal is getting the most out of this comp. Now I know you're probably throwing your wooden shoes at me saying why did I get the cheaper card. At the time, I wasn't ready to drop another $100 for some more ram on my vid card when I thought I wouldn't be gaming on it. The CPU upgrades (to 1.8 or 2.0) was a ridiculous price jump as well, over $150 for not so much more speed, so I opted out of that as well.

I never really bothered to tweak or tune XP at all before so if you guys could point me to some "tune up XP for laptop gaming" sites I'd greatly appreciate any help in that area. Namely I'm trying to figure out how to stop those 50,000 processes I see in task manager from running while I'm playing. I'm aware many of them are necessary, and stopping them causes bad things to happen, but I'd like to weed them out and if possible, prevent them from even loading up in the first place at start up.

The second part of the performance would be the hardware. If there are any aftermarket video drivers or tweaks/SAFE overclocking I can do to the components, I'm all ears for that as well. I'd rather not OC, but just tweak the settings to get the most out of the stuff because 1) It's a laptop which hates heat more than anything else on earth and 2) because Mr. Dell probably wouldn't take my computer back should something happen.

I'm used to building tower PCs and dropping raw horsepower into them without tweaking. This 'budget' laptop is the first PC I haven't personally built for myself that I'm actually trying to game on for the first time heh which is why I don't know my way around this at all. I used to be the guy saying "Hah, you actually think you can game on a laptop? BAWAHAHA!"

All I have to say is, don't burn your bridges

Thanks in advance to all the help and replies...

 

Its a really good idea idea to miss out on some of those Dell upgrades as you did, a lot of the time they arent worth the money.

Doing Start -> run -> "msconfig" will allow you to identify the processes you have running and eliminate the ones you dont want to run. I Just use this little program for the first time last night and managed to reduce my processes in XP from 55 to 45, freeing up 80MB's of RAM in the process.

You can easily see which processes belong to which programs with this tool.

Dell Vostros are a business PC so you might be lucky and have very little bloatware cluttering your memory anyway.

If you want to tweak a little further, you can use a little program called RivaTuner to control the Clocking and voltages of your graphics card. There are tools available for CPU OC'ing too.

If you do a search on this forum you might find a thead on tweaking the 8400GS.

Hope that helped in some way.

 

http://www.tweakxp.com/

http://www.download.com/TuneXP/3000-2086_4-10290929.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=twea...s=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

 

The 128Mb 8400 means it has 128Mb memory dedicated to graphics. When you run programs, the card can allocate extra RAM memory to use for graphics. In this case, it took another 128Mb.

Another thing is that the 8600 GT is a much better card than 8400 GS because of more shaders etc. You can't really compare cards solely based on its RAM; it's actually the least relevant comparison possible.

Your 1.6 C2D will be fine because generally speaking, CPU never bottlenecks before GPU nowadays.

2Gb RAM's good for gaming already too. Vostros come with no bloatwares by default so unless you installed some by mistake, you shouldn't need to opt out anything with MSConfig to run games properly.

I would suggest overclocking your GPU a bit if you ever find that your not getting enough out of the 8400.

But other than that, you really don't have to tinker much.

 

First off, generally speaking and never don't really go together, but more importantly, there are a multitude of ways CPU's bottleneck before CPU's nowadays. Just some examples are AI-intensive games, video encoding/decoding, and mathematical programs.

Back to the point at hand, I'd recommend downloading custom drivers from laptopvideo2go.com. The 169.xx series is generally well-reputed. Make sure to read the instructions; you need a specific .inf file to run the drivers. Custom drivers from laptopvideo2go.com generally add a couple hundred to 3dmark scores.

Moderate overclocking should also be safe. Just keep an eye on the temperatures. nTune or Rivatuner should work well once the 169.xx drivers are in (the default Vostro ones disable overclocking).

 

Wow, thanks for the replies guys

*cracks knuckles*

Defoe - You're correct, that's one of the reasons why I picked the Vostro. I liked the fact you can get XP since Vista desperately needs that SP and back in Oct. of last year, after just leaving a Vista machine, I was in no rush to get back to it. XP is tried and true, everyone knows it and the software works. The clean install/'no bloatware' pitch was enough to make me choose Vostro and I've loved it. It's the first commercial computer I booted up and it had, count 'em, FIVE icons and started up pretty fast.

I ran the msconfig as you suggested and got rid of some extraneous crap and programs I didn't want running (The only thing the build came with that I really didn't want was Roxio which constantly monitors folder and the HDD and was driving me nuts with pop ups about updating and what not). My PF usage went from about 370-375mb down to around 325mb so thanks a lot for that

My biggest draw on resources when it's actively doing something is Kaspersky which I don't mind as it only uses the resources it needs to update or scan then quietly skulks back into the shadows monitoring my traffic heh. I guess I can turn off scanning while I'm playing if I really need to but I'd rather leave it on.

I'll check out those other tips you gave me also thanks


crash - Thanks for those links man I'm checking them out now


Hahutzy - I wasn't aware that the card could pull more memory for its own use. Learn something new everyday heh. I hear what you're saying about the 8600, when I was picking out my specs, at the time I had a 360 and I said to myself 'I'll never use this thing for gaming, it would suck running modern games anyway' and yadda yadda. I didn't think much of the 8600 designation because I figured from previous experience, most bump ups in numbers of card series designations just mean more transistors, maybe a bit faster GPU and more dedicated GRAM. I didn't suspect there was much change between the 8400 and 8600. I was just tickled I was actually getting dedicated graphics in the first place for the price I got this thing so I wasn't too worried about stepping up to a bigger card. Win some, lose some. I'll have to learn to work with what I've got.

You confirmed what I already suspected, that I was ok in the CPU and RAM departments. There's no bloatware to speak of on this machine which is awesome, the only programs I've installed myself are a couple codec and player programs to play videos and music and Kaspersky for AV and packet monitoring duties.

If I do get into the OCing as you and others suggest, are their any special cooling 'appliances' for lack of a better word that I might need? I looked at some cooling pads for laptops but they are generic ones that don't really match the grille/ventilation patterns of the Vostro so I don't think they would do much good. With the laptop already acting like a super-thick keyboard, playing FPSs is gonna strain my hand with a bunch of cooling crap underneath. Is there anything else I can use to cool the pc down without doing crazy stuff to it like cracking it open and liquid cooling it?


Apollo13 - I'm not doing anything crazy with this machine that might have the CPU bottlenecking other components other than the gaming I'm talking about. In that case, I guess I'll just have to live with turning down some settings which I absolutely detest I've prided myself in the past on building rigs that laugh with impunity at maximum game settings and can calculate Pi and the perfect parabolic curve while encoding every TV series that ever existed at the same time but alas, I'll have to make do with this machine

As for the drivers, thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I know there are tons of drivers by different programmers out there and it can be pretty daunting for someone just wanting to get some more frames out of their rig.


I'll check back in after I've done all this and see what I've come up with. Thanks again guys.

 

Good idea with using laptopvideo2go, their drivers are good.

I have an Inspiron 1520 (which is the consumer version of the Vostro) and I've found that my GPU runs really cool. I have my 8600m GT overclocked and I still don't get temperatures above 62C. I recommend you use RivaTuner to check your temperatures before considering a third-party cooler.

Good luck!

 

I downloaded the 169.09 drivers and the accompanying INF but I've heard that some individuals have made modified (read: better maybe?) INF files specifically for the 8400m GS/Vostro 1500 and I'm wondering where I can find those? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places but I can only get the default ones.

I did those other tweaks and things you guys said and my system boots and runs pretty darn fast now heh. Running only 38 processes at idle, using about 1-2% CPU and only about 280-300mb of the PF and that's with Kaspersky running.

 

Welp, I got 1406 on the 3DMark06 benchmarks which is pretty flippin' abysmal. I didn't go above 6 FPS in ANY of the tests, and on the CPU tests forget about it. I averaged a whopping .677 FPS on the CPU tests :/

I guess that relegates me to the realm of Civilization IV, oh and maybe StarCraft or DOOM. Whoopteedo...

If anyone knows how I can bump up my scores (BEFORE OCing) let me know please. I've heard of some people getting 1500 to 1600 stock with a 8400m GS so I'd really like to know. I know if I OC I might be able to push the 2K envelope but I want to get every bit of juice out of the comp before I start OCing stuff.

So I'm all ears guys...

 

Review of the 8400M GS here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=213438

You may be pleasantly surprised with what you can run with it.

As for tweaking, short of optimising drivers, temperature and memory, not sure what else you can do prior to OC'ing.

I wouldnt mind finding out as well though, Im 300 3DMark05 marks short of where I should be for my current laptop and I have no idea why either.

 

Sorry if im mentioning something thats already been mentioned, just making sure the basics are covered:

1) use the reformat to relax and relax to righteous guides from www.tweaktown.net

2) download and use TuneXP

3) use the 169.09 drivers

4) use the Viper? services guide, its a really good guide which helps you decide if you need unnecessary services.

5) when gaming, unless online, disable firewall and AV to help free up RAM/CPU