[Tyramon]

Recently I purchased a new laptop to be my primary source of entertainment on a tour in Iraq. When I ordered it I did so over the phone with a Dell Sales person. Long story short I got a 256 NVidia GeForce 7300 Go. Problem is, it's not really 256 megs of dedicated memory. It's 128 and another 128 shared with my processor, which means games don't run so good with it.

Any suggestions on tweaking it? Or purchasing a replacement? I know even less about laptop harware than I do about desktop hardware (which isn't saying much )

Thanks!

--Tyr

[rhagz]

You can upgrade the system memory so it has less reason to use video memory, but other than that there probably isn't much you can do in the way of upgrading a laptop. Video cards are usually not able to be changed in one.

How much System RAM do you have? Probably 1GB. Going to 2 should help some since Vanguard usually only uses 1.5GB of RAM or so.

[Fozzik]

The shared video memory is indeed part of the problem (part of what's causing low performance in games)... but it's likely not the main issue. The 7300 is a low-end graphics processor...not so much designed for games (even though they may represent it that way for marketing purposes). Also, the CPU and the speed of the hard drive very likely have a significant impact, along with the additional processor load created by onboard sound, and the total system RAM (as rhagz pointed out).

As was said, there's not much you can do. Some Dell laptops can be upgraded to a higher-end video card, but I'm not sure if yours is one of them. The price will likely be very high for what you end up getting, if it is possible to upgrade.

[Tyramon]

Thanks for the timely replies gents! Here is some more info to digest:

I have a T5600 1.8x Ghz Dual Core Centrino processor and 2 Gigs of 667 ram. It's in a Windows Vista Home Premium (32 bit) Inspiron E1505... Hope this can assist in troubleshooting/working around the issue.

--Tyr

Originally Posted by Fozzik

The shared video memory is indeed part of the problem (part of what's causing low performance in games)... but it's likely not the main issue. The 7300 is a low-end graphics processor...not so much designed for games (even though they may represent it that way for marketing purposes). Also, the CPU and the speed of the hard drive very likely have a significant impact, along with the additional processor load created by onboard sound, and the total system RAM (as rhagz pointed out).

As was said, there's not much you can do. Some Dell laptops can be upgraded to a higher-end video card, but I'm not sure if yours is one of them. The price will likely be very high for what you end up getting, if it is possible to upgrade.

[rhagz]

Yeah, that doesn't sound terrible. I think what is holding you back more than anything is the 7300 GPU, not the video RAM.

[Malosar]

Riva Tuner I believe has the ability to turn off the shared memory on nvidia cards, thus removing the issue with Vanguard and other games. However, you will need to reduce quality to max performance to be able to play it (along with the fact that it's a 7300 of course).