Video versus RAM

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dannythemanny

New Member
Hi.

I have a (fairly old) Toshiba Satellite Pro 2100. It has a 1.5GHz processor, 128MB of RAM and a 16 MB Nvidia graphics card. I like to play what some may consider older games on it - currently Mafia. It runs, but not well at all. I'm pretty sure I can't upgrade the graphics card - I 've read it's impossible on most laptops. So I'm thinking about doubling the RAM. Would this make any difference to game performance, do you think? I also had a problem with GTA3 (the first one), whereby after playing for 20 minutes or so, it would get jumpier and jumpier. Would more RAM sort it out, or do I need a newer system to play thise games? Thanks.

Dan.
 
the ram should help out quite a bit with the jumpiness and gameplay in general, unless its caused by heat which is a different issue altogether
 
no... get a new system. 1.5ghz what? i dont know much about older processors but if its an athlon XP its better than a pentium 4 at that frequency!
yea, ram will help a LOT... but a new video card would probably help much more.
if i were you i would research computers, figure out what's good and what's not... and then build my own. thats what i did, and my computer could easily play GTA San Andreas, as well as other games with twice or even three times the graphics quality.
 
Also, it boots me out to the desktop quite often while it's loading a mission or cutscene or something in Mafia. RAM help with that too?
 
dannythemanny said:
Also, it boots me out to the desktop quite often while it's loading a mission or cutscene or something in Mafia. RAM help with that too?
Click to expand...

Probably. Are you running XP? Because Windows strongly recommends that you have at least 256MB for XP
 
RAM does very little with performace, much less than people realize. My brother upgraded his laptop from 64M to 192M, and there's absolutly no noticeable increase in performace! Now it might help some machine because, espcially with laptops, their harddrives are quite slow(virtal memory and all) But I seriously doubt it'll speed up a game. Perhaps load times.

Now, I suppose it COULD make a difference if you have bad drivers or even a really bad chipset that causes a good big of lag when stuff is loading from your harddrive...

Ah, and you say it's getter worse as you play a game on it? The thing's probably getting too hot.
 
a few things to mention: with 128mb and like 40 bucks, you can make that 640 real quick, which will help out the glitching he gets after playing awhile, again assuming it isn't a heat issue. Second, 1.5ghz could easily be a PM or Celeron M, in which case it isn't all too bad. Third, I think everyone realizes he doesn't have anything close to a gaming laptp and if he were wanting to game we would suggest something totally different, like a new computer, but for a quick fix that will help out a little, ram would be a good idea
 
wouldnt recommend upgrading the ram because 16mb is not enough, i had an old toshiba with 16mb of vram and when i got a new laptop i loved it. new one definately
 
Thank you all very much. i can't afford a new computer unfortunately, so I decided to spend $40 on some more RAM. If it doesn't work, well, never mind. The game runs OK at the moment, but the load times take forever, and as I said it's a bit jumpy. But it's not half as bad as I'd expect. I'd like to invest in an Xbox, to be honest, but I don't think my girlfriend would allow it!
 
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