Compaq F572US laptop Upgrades

I bought a couple of these laptops for my sons but I may have messed up. They would like to play some games on them. The newest games require faster processors, better graphics cards and/or more memory. They came with the Athlon T-53, NVIDIA 6100 and 1 GB of memory. Does anyone know if the processor and/or graphics card are upgradeable? If I wanted to add more memory, do I have to buy it in pairs? I asked Compaq and they said I do have to replace it in pairs but watched a video on their website showing how to do the upgrade and it just shows one memory module. I am pretty handy but don't want to do anything that may turn the laptops into paper weights (slodering, splicing, cryo cooling, that sort of stuff).
Thanks

 

Putting in more memory will help a little, but not much. Gaming is heavily dependent on the gpu, and somewhat on the cpu. What you got is the bottom of the barrel in terms of gaming power. The only way that you can have your sons play newish games is for you to get them new computers with better dedicated graphic cards.

 

Yep, I agree with adinu. I have this laptop and its fine for some older games - including, somewhat surprisingly in my opinion, HL2 - but not much of anything new. I did upgrade to 2 gig of Ram which helped Vista run much better, but it doesn't do much (if anything) in terms of gaming.

 

Thanks for confirming my fears. My kids will probably put me in a crappy rest home when I am (more) over the hill. BTW-is HL2 Halo 2? We had that and it would only run intermittantly in the smaller windowed screen then lock up. Also when you replaced the memory in yours, did you have to do it in pairs or can you just buy a 2 gig stick.
Thanks again,
Dave

 

HL2 = Half Life 2. It never occured to me that Halo 2 might also be abbreviated HL2! I upgraded with 2 1 gig sticks - I don't think that this laptop will accept any stick over 1 gig, so your 2gig stick won't work. I don't think that you have to match, but your only other real option is to go for 1 1-gig and 1 512mb stick for 1.5 gig total RAM. With ram so cheap, there's no real reason to do that...

Good luck. Although it might not be the greatest for games, you can remind your kids that it's a good laptop overall!

 

Thanks. I was spacing out yesterday. I had just bought Orange Box too when I questioned HL2(duh!!). When I was searching for info on Orange Box it occured to me that HL was Half Life. My bad... Thanks for the memory upgrade info. I will definately go with the 2 1 gig sticks.