Tips on running a game a little better!

Hub

Ok I own a dell 5160. Its about a year old.

I installed GTA San Andreas and its running slowly. The graphics are pretty lame to. Definitely not its full potential

Laptop spec:

Processor Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
Processor Speed 2.73 GHz
Memory (RAM) 512 MB
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

What I want to know is, maby there is something you can do to improve it without spending. Maby download some drivers or whatever. Delete stuff fom my hard drive?

andy1249

Whats the graphic card , is it a standalone card , like a mobile radeon or is it onboard graphics ,
The processor and ram are plenty powerful enough for games , the problem here is almost certainly the graphics system.

If its onboard graphics then no driver is going to help , see if you have a slot for a standalone card , if you do then you need to upgrade the graphics card.

Rabies

You have the same laptop as me i think.
The graphic card is a Nvidia Geforce Fx Go5200

mrmrbungle

and if its windows xp you're using u shud have a minimum of 4 gb free at all times to maintain optimum performance

Hub

No stand alone card.

I have a vga output connector, if thats any good. I think it is a Nvidia Geforce Fx Go5xxx built in.

It should run the game properly though.

Endurance Man

Hub wrote:

No stand alone card.

I have a vga output connector, if thats any good. I think it is a Nvidia Geforce Fx Go5xxx built in.

It should run the game properly though.

LOL, not really m8 , its a more demanding game than you think. It could hardly play on my bro's desktop when he had a Geforce5700.

commited

The geforce FX5xxx series were pretty pants cards...
Adding another 512mb ram will help and turning everything to lowest settings.
Make sure the Processor is running at full speed, and that all unnecessary processes are turned off.

Hub

It ran GTA III glitch free, but SA it massive

Ah well, I've exams nest week, maby its best I dont get it running properly

di11on

Hub wrote:

maby there is something you can do to improve it without spending.

There is actually quite a lot you can do to improve the performance of your system without investing in new hardware. The longer you have owned and used a computer the more parasitic processes you have accumulated. You'd be surpirsed how many processes you might have running in the background gobbling up your system's resources, spyware/adware. etc etc.

The following is a very comprehensive guide to making sure your system is running as efficiently as possible.

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

Some of the things which you need to do (which this guide covers) are:

- Clean install of XP
- Regularly defragment all your drives and partitions (I've a scheduled task to to do this every night - so all I have to do to defrag everything, is to leave the PC on when I go to bed
- Clean your registry
- Spyware removal
- Update your drivers
- Remove old drivers
- Disable unused hardware and ports (for example: com port, serial port, floppy controller, etc.) (Only if they're not used!)

These are tips for the general health of your system. When playing games there are more things you can do to speed things up:

- Disable any unnecessary processes, like: msnmessenger, anti-virus software, email clients, browser windows, download accelerators, file sharing programs, etc. etc.

- Game Settings - Make sure you have optimised the game's settings for your hardware - for example, make sure you have the right sound device selected (rather than generic/primary drivers). Make sure you have options like anti-aliasing turned off. Experiement with the options to get the performance that works for you.

- Resolution - Sometimes running a game at the same resolution as your desktop can increase performance.

Hope that's of some help.

daywalker

Have you tried updated graphics drivers from the dell website, if the ones available there are older than 6 months, then you could try omega drivers.

http://www.omegadrivers.net/