Upgrade Laptop for Gaming

FooFighters

I have a Dell Inspiron 1100 ( I know dont laugh or post comments about it) It has 256mb ram and dunno what kinda video card. I just want to get Battlefield 2 (not bad company). Can anyone tell me what i should do. I know i have to upgrade the ram to 516mb. What video card should i get for it and how much should i be paying for the 516mb upgrade and the video card. Any help would be appreciated.

VinLieger

Upgrading a laptop is not as easy as a desktop and since your doing it to a dell one and not one of your own creation theres warranties etc to consider, you might be better building a cheap desktop

Hank Scorpio

That laptop has a integrated chip, meaning its probably not possible to install a video card. Even in modern laptops video cards are sometimes impossible to change.

Upgrading the memory from 256 to 512 MB isnt gonna make much of a difference either.

Your best bet is to build a cheap gaming PC for a couple of hundred euro, or pickup a decent modern laptop but ones capable of running newish games are very expensive.

Companion box

You cant upgrade the video card on most laptops, they are almost always integrated with the motherboard.

About the only thing you can upgrade on a dell inspiron 1100, is the ram and the hard disk and im not sure how easy the case makes that job. Either way theres not alot you can do to get BF2 running well on that, if it runs poorly at the moment upgrading the ram wont improve it by a huge amount.

If you want to play games, dont do it on that mate.

FooFighters

Right so, i have Elder Scrolls Morrowind on it and when im in a building it runs smooth as anyone would want but when i go out in to the open it gets jerky. Will upgrading the ram solve this

Overheal

FooFighters wrote: »

Right so, i have Elder Scrolls Morrowind on it and when im in a building it runs smooth as anyone would want but when i go out in to the open it gets jerky. Will upgrading the ram solve this

...........................................maybe.

From what I learned about Graphic Engines: Yes. On such obsolete hardware though I want to make no guarantees, even though we are just talking about morrowind.

Don't go broke doubling the RAM on this though. If you spend more than €30 at the upper limit doing it, you're better off replacing the whole laptop. Actually, you're still better off replacing the whole laptop.

FooFighters

Overheal wrote: »

...........................................maybe.

From what I learned about Graphic Engines: Yes. On such obsolete hardware though I want to make no guarantees, even though we are just talking about morrowind.

Don't go broke doubling the RAM on this though. If you spend more than €30 at the upper limit doing it, you're better off replacing the whole laptop. Actually, you're still better off replacing the whole laptop.

I know i should but the income isnt high enough hahaha. I can upgrade to 1gb for twenty euro if i pull some strings. Thanks youve been a huge help man.

cherryghost

I had a similar laptop years ago and yes it can play Battlefield 2. However you definitely need 512mb RAM. The game won't launch without it. Your graphics robs 64-128mb of RAM to render the games, so 256mb RAM is impossible to run.

On top of that, make sure that your Intel graphics drivers are up to date, and download 3D Analyser, and under that choose BF2.exe, and tick 'force SW TnL', and 'emulate HW TnL'. Got the game running at 60fps on minimum settings with high resolution.

Good luck!

Skerries

use this site to check if it will run it

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/