Driving me nuts

The laptop is a VPCEE23FX. I've had it for about a year and a half. I didn't buy it for gaming, I was hoping to bring the desktop here at some point, but this is excruciating.

The stock specs are ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4250, and AMD Athlon II P320 (2.10 GHz). Not very impressive, but even this feels wrong. It's been through a couple formats, I've removed as much bloatware as I can, I turn off programs like VAIO Update at startup, have it on high power mode when plugged in. And yet it can run basically nothing at native resolution.

Max Payne 2 used to run fine at native (1366 x 768), now it doesn't want to. It gets a huge drop for about a second or two with certain effects, such as considerable explosions or dense smoke. Same with Freedom Fighters. Completely undemanding game, I used to play it on an old Dell from 2003-4 with minimal issue. But if anything blows up and there's smoke there it goes, down to single digit framerates. Even 2d games like Bastion, I have to run at custom resolution. Capsized can't even be run, the mouse lags too much., which I think is baffling. And I know it's a bit of a stretch given how much of a unoptimized mess TF2 has become, but I feel like it should be doing better than minimal resolution, maxfps configs with DX8 mode.

Or someone could just look at the specs and decide "That's about the awfulness you should be expecting." As long as I'm getting some kind of answer.

 

kk. The 4250 is barely, if even, faster than the old Intel GMA HD. Slower than the Intel HD2000, and definately slower than the HD3000. Back when it's nearly identical predecessor came out under the HD3100 name, however, it was amazingly fast for an IGP.

HOWEVER... did you update the drivers? As old as the IGP arch is (RV610 based, iirc), it's still no pushover, so it should be able to handle at least something well. Otherwise, is it throttling under load? Dust buildup? BIOS updates (could help)?

 

I've never seen any video driver updates. I only saw one driver, which I assume is the default one. I'm not really sure I want to try a BIOS update, because I'm at school and if anything goes wrong, that's a big problem.

 

Assuming you run Windows 7 x64, just install the latest AMD GPU/Chipset drivers:

ATI Radeon? Video Card Drivers

However, the "used to," statement makes me still believe it's just dust clogging the system, making it throttle under load...

 

Max Payne 2 is the only one with issues like that. The rest were always bad.

I tried installing that (the operating system is W7 64-bit, as you guessed), I don't think it made any difference. I looked for drivers, the only ones on the ATi site even after searching for this video were "incompatible with hardware," which means driver support for this chip is nonexistent. How can this be right? As weak as it is, I'm pretty much getting performance on par with a 3-year old laptop or an old Intel chipset. The performance of this computer is shameful. My friend's laptop just says "4200 series," and it completely outperforms this one. I tried installing the whole package and restarting. I don't know if it helped TF2. Improvement to Bastion was nonexistent. So I can't tell if it had any effect.

Not sure how I would clean dust from it. The computer has never been particularly loud and has never shut off of its own accord, so I figured it wasn't having major issues. It has always been this poor, there was never any sort of decline.