zv5320ca..(slow,choppy,needupgrade(s)).. It's driving me MAD!!

I Hey everyone..
I've had this laptop for just under a year now.. and I am in college and besides school work and chasing tail, there is really not much else do do but play games to entertain yourself. Anyways, the laptop is a P4 2.8ghz with 384mb ram because of the lame 128 ati 9000 is intigrated and stealing from my ram. I desperatly want to be able to get this thing to play doom3 and halflife2... I have both of these games but it plays it SOOO choppy at 640x480 res, it makes me want to puke. I don't understand, I know the video card is terrible, but I would have thought it would run half life 2. It's driving me mad. I've ordered a 1 gig stick of ram that should be in next week that will boost it up to it's max of 1.25 (because I don't want to void the warranty and go under the keyboard). But yeah, I am just praying it will run battle field 2 (another game that was given to me to "enjoy" with my new laptop). My question is, what else is there that I can do (besides updating drivers, I've gotten ALL the new drivers, and have even used omega drivers which gave a minor boost in performance.) I'm at my witts end, and I don't want to get a new laptop, I just spent a lot of money getting what "sounded fast". I was under the impression that a pentium 4 with 2.8 ghz and 512 ram (which was a lie) and 128mb video card (also a lie because it's not dedicated ram, #$@@#$@) would be fast as hell.. especially because my friend can play bf2 on his desktop that is a pentium 4 at 2 ghz with 512 ram. I don't know what else I can do to make this thing run any better so I'm open for suggestions. Like I said, I don't want to buy another laptop, and I was told upgrading the ram would let the computer think much faster because it would have 2 times what is has now, so the video card wouldn't starve out in D3 either. Thanks for any help you can offer!!
-JackMan

edit: because it's a wide screen, it has to run at 1280x800 res or everthing on the screen looks fat (and terrible beyond belief). Is there a way I can maybe play the game in that high res? Ugh, this is going to be the death of me... **** laptop

 

Adding RAM will help. ATI's current-generation shared memory GPU (the Radeon X200) is actually pretty decent, but unfortunately your notebook predates that. There's really nothing you can do other than save up for a new notebook. These days an AMD Turion notebook with an ATI Radeon X700 GPU is the way to go for midrange gaming, at least until nVidia refreshes their notebook chipset offerings next year (probably 2Q2006). Too bad HP refuses to make such a notebook. Acer and MSI have decent offerings though. P4's should be avoided like the plague, horrible battery life and mediocre performance. HP wisely dropped them from the zv6000 series.

 

I concur with brian - more RAM (probably upgrading to 1.5GB) would be the best solution to your problem. I used to own the zv6000, but unloaded it due to its medicore GPU, however it could play HL2, BF2 and (barely) Doom 3 on 1GB of RAM. I believe that upgrading your RAM would greatly help your problem.

 

what is your hard drive, JackMan? You cannot expect much from 4200rpm, if this is the case; 5400 rpm is generally much better and gives a considerable performance boost.

 

Thanks for the reply's.
I guess I will have to wait and see if it gives me a performance increase (waiting on the ram). I certainly hope it does.. As for my harddrive, I am guessing it's the lower of the two you mentioned.. It's the one hp gave me :'(

Is there a way I can upgrade to the faster rpm harddrive? or should I just get an external HD, I guess not because I don't have firewire :hp: (any more info on this would be greatly appreciated aswell )

The ram should be in within a week or two so I'll post whether or not it shows a boost in fps or not. Hope I can get that faster HD aswell, maybe this comp will be able to last another year or two... but saddly, you're right, I gotta save up and unload this thing and get something close up to the higher end. Untill then, I'm going to try to get this running a little faster. grr

Thanks again for the reply's, I'd be lost without the advice of laptop guru's:hardfind:

 

Swapping in a new HD is easy. Reloading the OS and other software is the time-consuming part. I'm not sure I'd expend the effort for that notebook. If you do get a new HD, check out the Hitachi 7K100 and Seagate 7200.1 series drives.

 

ohh alright, well I used to have an old extremely unreliable desktop computer before this laptop, so I'm used to reformatting/reinstalling the OS by now haha. I am desperate for anything to boost performance. I know this is one of the more basic models for laptops.. but I'd like to hang on to it for another year or two.. It feels like I just blew a lot of money on this one haha. I will check into those drives and ask my local supplier if I should swap them too Thanks so much!