gaming on an Hp presario with vista

Hello everybody ... im sorry i know that the title is ironic regarding that Hp presario notebooks are just an office laptops ....specialy that mine is a
c710EN , but to make a long story short ... when i bought it i wasn't planning to use it for hardcore gaming , im ok with playing games that 3 or 4 yrs old ...
so now i tried playing ROME TOTAL WAR , but it's kinda slow , although it's requirement are like 1.4gh processor and 64mb vga card ....
so i wonder is it the game that's too high for my specs or is it the vista ....
specialy that when i check the RAM usage on my laptop , i find it like 50% constantly even when it's only windows explorer that's working ....
the C710EN specs are 1.86 Gh celeron processor ,1GB RAM and i think that the graphic memory is up to 251mb shared ...so...
any advice ?

 

In a way it's both. Vista is a hardware intensive OS and is certainly not helping you get better framerates in RomeTW. What you've listed are probably the minimum requirements for the game and even though you do meet them with your CPU (barely though, it is a Celeron after all) you most likely come behind because of your integrated X3100.

A 'downgrade' to XP should definately improve performance, but not by much.

 

what about the RAM usage thing ? .... is it normal to be that constantly hight ?
thx for reply after all
and how much improvement should i expect after downgrading to windows xp

 

ram usage for vista is that hi.u can downgrade to xp or get a 1gb ram stick and the game should run much beter

 

Well my RAM usage right now is about 590mb, so since you only have 1GB (pretty much the bare minimum for vista) 50% usage sounds right.

 

so there is no way to reduce the RAM used by vista ? ... as an option in windows vista ?

 

u could turn off aero and kill some startup programs but still 1gb is too little