Considering upgrade (gaming related)

Hi all,

Recently managed to get hold of an IBM Thinkpad T42 (14"), for £400, in excellent condition and in good specs, these being as follows:

Pentium M 1.8ghz
Mobility Radeon 9600 (64mb RAM)
1gb PC2700 RAM (2x 512mb)
7200rpm Hitachi Travelstar HDD

I bought this machine as it was the biggest bang for my buck, as I am heading off to uni which is why I needed a laptop, but I also wanted to be able to do a bit of gaming, and not break my bank account. My parents have agreed to fund a little upgrading as a present if I'd like it, and I was looking for advice on whether either of these would improve gaming performance noticeable:

1 - Upgrading to a Pentium M 755 (2.0ghz)
2 - Upgrading the RAM to 1.5-2GB

Would either of these improve gaming performance, or is my graphics card a bottleneck here?

Thanks in advance,

Mike

 

most gaming isn't too processor intensive, at least on the games i know

increasing the RAM would probably be better if you want to play current-gen games like BF2, Oblivion, CoD, etc...maybe

does anyone else have more info?

 

You're basically tied to your graphics card. The processor won't give you a boost, but try the RAM. That might help a bit. you may have to go with 1.5g, because you already have both your slots filled. Unless you want to take both out and replace them.

 

The processor upgrade won't do anything for you, a 1.8GHz Pentium M is plenty fast for games. You may have some problems with the latest breed of games and getting playable FPS because of your video card, but all games should generally be playable.

I would simply use the 1GB of RAM you have right now . . if the hard drive light is on or flickering when gaming, that's an indication that you are out of RAM.

 

Thanks for the replies,

I noticed recently after checking the performance tab in Task Manager after a couple of hours of CSS that my peak memory usage was above the amount of RAM I have installed.

I think I'll grab a 1gb stick and replace one of the 512's, thanks very much guys!

 

Make sure you try all of the possible performance tweaks for your 9600 64mb!!!

 

I would take the money from the processor and get two GB of RAM. That will help with today's games. Also, conider maybe the Omega Drivers or something like that to get the most out of your GPU.

 

Since your parents offered to pay, get the upgrade to 2 GB of RAM.

 

RAM will help quite a bit with texture loading and such. (Less "Lag")