Toshiba Satellite A135 Upgrades

I guess this is the best place to put this thread, so let me explain my situation:

I am starting college next year and my parents went cheapo on me and bought me a Toshiba Satellite A135. It runs alright... if all you want to do is go on the internet. I can hardly do 2 things at one time and startup/shut down takes a lot longer than it should. It also runs really poorly when it is unplugged. Even when the power settings are to run at maximum performance, the computer freezes up whenever I play a DVD while unplugged. We did upgrade the RAM to 2 gigs, and that seemed to do a little bit of good. Now the last straw was yesterday when I installed and tried to play The Specialists, a Half Life mod. After a while of loading, I would get a notice saying that the program is not responding. I will tell it to close the program then wait for a long time without any response, then I will have to do a cold shut down. I've lowered the graphic detail in the game, but I still get the same result.

So I want to know what I need to upgrade in order to be able to play this game comfortably as well as do other things. In college I plan on studying Musical Theater, so I'll need to be able to edit music, sheet music, etc... But I also don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on upgrades, so please try to help me find the cheap ones!

Thanks!

 

Please do not create more than one thread/post about the same thing, that's called cross posting and we don't allow it per the forum rules.

What kind of specifications does your notebook have right now? Upgrading the RAM was a good idea, that is the easiest way to increase performance.

I'd recommend going through some of our tune-up guides - Vista:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532
XP:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=5787

 

Best to post up your spec of your current machine. If it were me I'd re-install the OS from an OS disc rather than a recovery disc.