HP dv9700-9930us, A Moment of your time!

Hi! This is my first post and am glad to be a part of this great community! Lots of great info.

I recently purchased this laptop the other day at Staples and really think this is a great laptop, the specs are as follows: Intel T5750, 4gigs, nVidia 8600 GS Vista Home Premium 64bit. Lots of cool features but I must say I'm not feeling I'm getting the full performance out of this system. I did a couple of tweaks from PCStats which helped some what but the CPU is being used almost 50% most of the time and at times will go down to 6% then peak and stay around 13% and 24%. Is this normal? Would upgrading the processor help in anyway? The only game I play on the computer is the Counter-Strike Source and I find that on some maps I get great FPS, anywhere from 40-100 but then on a map like dust2 I begin to dip at around the 20fps mark. I guess I'm kind of worried I got an outdated laptop, I would like this laptop to last 3-4 years. Is this feasible? Thanks! CJ

 

CPU usage is normal since it's doing indexing and background tasks while your computer is idle. There's nothing to worry about there. Also the T5750 is 2.0 GHz, that's plenty fast for today's standards. Upgrading the processor would only show improvement in either 3dMark06 or in CPU intensive tasks such as encoding videos. You should be fine with the T5750.

I think you're power profile might not be on High Performance. I usually get 60-120 fps on most source maps. rarely down in the 40's.

 

The processor is a little weaker, but that usage is normal with Vista.

As for the low frame rate, that is most likely a problem with the 8600 GS. I'm not sure how much you paid for that notebook, but they just released the new DV7T line less than a month ago. It features a 9600 GT which is more than enough.