Sony Vaio VGN-N38E_W

You have the GMA950. It can take up to 224mb of video memory but to be honest it's a horrible card for gaming. Most games won't work on it, or will work but very poorly. the only games guaranteed to work are those from roughly 2003 downwards. Age of Empires 3 should work though, not very well, but you should be able to start it up and play on lowest settings. What error are you getting?

You cannot upgrade the card.

Here's your laptop

You can't upgrade laptop cards. Apart from a tiny percentage, which use an expensive format which only appears in very high end and gaming laptops. Your's appears at the very bottom of that ladder unfortunately

The only other thing I can think of is that the bios has the card set to a maximum of 32mb or something, although usually the gma950 takes ram dynamically as it needs it. Again, I've seen people play AOE3 fine, so maybe it's just an issue with the demo at the same time. Either way, it shouldn't be happening.

The third thing is that maybe you need newer drivers for your card, the ones that came with it are quite possibly very old.

Yeah you should be able to get them from the Sony website or from the Intel one directly.

Check out this, it should help and give you an idea. I've never personally owned a GMA but I did use someone elses to make the thread I linked to, it was a very asked about card about 8 months to a year ago. It's since been replaced by the much better GMA 3100. Look at the yellow number in the top right of all screenshots, ideally, a game has to be at least running at 25 frames per second to look and feel smooth, otherwise it gets choppy. But that said, you would ideally want an average fps of about 35, to allow for dips in intensive situations.

Newer games are a no-go for the most part, although new games in the genre of MMO or RTS are more likely to work, Command and Conquer 3 works fine for example. FPS games, new ones, will not work, full stop, even going back a few years in some cases. I couldn't get Doom 3 or Far Cry, both old games, to run at playable levels.

The GMA950 can technically take up to 224mb of memory, but don't use that as a guideline for determining whether a game will work. For example, some games that require 32mb video memory run terrible on the GMA, while others requiring 64mb work great. Just an example, so you don't look at boxes and think 'Oh it only needs 64/128mb video card, I'm sorted' - not the case.

It does a lot of processes that most cards do via hardware on the card through software, putting extra load on the CPU, and is why many games run terribly. You'll find any game that doesn't not need hardware transform and lighting will work great - but those games would all be very old.

As I said, it's just hit and miss, and you'll have to work it out for yourself, but trust me when I say no modern demanding FPS game will work, FEAR, Battlefield 2, Team Fortress 2, Call of duty, all those games are completely out the window.

RTS games are a little more forgiving, with titles like Dawn of War, Command and Conquer 3 etc running relatively OK on lower settings.

There's an Intel list here, but its very limited to the more mainstream titles. But don't take it too seriously - in my tests, I found that their claims were in many cases totally wrong.

For example, they state that FEAR works fine, and Half Life 2 does not work at all. In contrast to that, I found FEAR totally unplayable even on the lowest possible settings, while Half Life 2 was completely playable on lowest settings.