Just bought a Compaq V2424NR...Graphics help wanted...

Hey everyone,
I recently bought my first laptop from Best Buy...it is a Compaq Presario V2424NR with a 1.8ghz 64 bit AMD Turion Processor, 512 mb ram, 100 gig hd and the ATI200M graphics card. After doing some reading online I was under the impression that this card had 128mb DEDICATED memory but now I have found out that I would have needed to get the card with HYPERMEMORY to get dedicated video. I was hoping to get at least average gaming performance from this laptop, but I installed and am having some major problems playing Far Cry. I turned the video settings on the game to auto detect what video quality to play it at and it seems super slow; it will freeze on certain parts of the gameplay and the framerates are really choppy. I was really hoping that the graphics would run alot better on this laptop...what can I do (if anything) to allow it to run this game reasonably well? Is there anyway that my 200M video card could be upgraded to the hypermemory version of the card? I can't imagine that adding RAM would increase the graphics processing speed all that significantly but maybe I am wrong. I really like everything else about this laptop, I just wish the video performance was a lot better...Any one have some suggestions? I really dont want to have to return this laptop and pay the 15% restocking fee...but if it cant run graphics very well I think I will have to do this.
Thanks for any help!
Dan

 

That's very annoying isn't it? They need to be much more clear about the differences between the two 200m graphics cards.. Its especially worse in some retail stores where the sales people often have no idea what "dedicated video" even means.. BestBuy usually is one of the better ones that has a knowledgeable staff. I'd like to know if they misled you into thinking this laptop had dedicated video memory.. Or perhaps suggested that it'd play the latest games? That would be interesting to know. I think there was a PC World article a few months back that reviewed a bunch of retail chains.. There was a sales clerk (I think he worked at BestBuy) who didn't know it was possible to record TV on a laptop.

 

Well, try adding more RAM. My brother has the same laptop. Hypermemory, IIRC, is just ATi's term for taking memory from your RAM and using it for the graphics. I'm pretty sure you already have it. Add 1GB of RAM, and your performance might just increase. With an ML-37 and 1GB of memory, minus the 128MB used by the graphics, he plays World of Warcraft just fine on his computer. I'm not sure about the games you play, I'm not a computer gamer and don't know games or their graphical differences/requirements. No, you cannot change the GPU.

 

The 128MB dedicated version is only a modest improvement, but yeah, having only 512MB of RAM with 128MB carved out for the GPU leaves 384MB of main memory... and WinXP itself is using most of that. Pretty much every large app is going to be slow until you fix that. I recommend getting a Crucial 1GB PC2700 or PC3200 SODIMM (see newegg.com, mwave.com, etc) and replacing one of your two 256MB sticks.