Laptop specs questions

[EarthSquid]

I own an HP Probook 4520s, the specific model, along with specs is this
https/www.cnet.com/products/hp-probook-4520s-15-6-core-i5-460m-windows-7-pro-64-bit-4-gb-ram-320-gb-hdd-series/specs/#p=hp-probook-4520s-15-6-core-i5-460m-windows-7-pro-64-bit-4-gb-ram-320-gb-hdd/

I know it isn't that powerful and all, but my friends have told me that it should be able to run games such as Morrowind at max settings flawlessly, however it hovers at around 24 frames with the minimum fog distance settings, it is vanilla too with the only "modding" I've done being changing the lighting from linear to quadratic, and it's kinda sad, the fact that the Xbox port runs better than it does on my PC.
I don't know much about pc specs, but even Street Fighter 3rd Strike on fightcade has some slowdown(minor, like 60 to 40) in some bits where there's a lot of particles but that may be an emulation thing.
Anyways, I was wondering if there was something that could be done about these problems
Here are some pic of my processes and the performance http/imgur.com/a/OwdnB (without Google Chrome of course), I think it's eating a lot of RAM without much going on but as I said, I don't know much.
Another thing I wanna add is that I use Windows 7 Basic theme instead of Aereo, so with that I hope you guys can lead me somewhere. Thanks in advance!

 

[robert600]

hi,

i know nothing about gaming on pcs so judge everything I say through that lens lol.

thinking of settings - do you have your power plan set to high performance - if not,set it to that - it may help somewhat.

thinking of hardware ... in my mind ... 3 main things .... ram .... cpu ... disk

your ram - 4 gb .... not considered a lot these days ... unfortunately to get to 8 you'd have to buy 2 4gb sticks since your current 4 gb is 2 2GB sticks - you could try replacing 1 2GB stick with a 4 GB stick to give you 6 GB but then you run into the mismatched ram problem ... i mean, I do it all the time but most folks would say not to. Just as an aside .... despite hp saying the max ram is 8 GB for your machine, i think in fact it would use 16 GB quite happily (i know g6s do).

your cpu ... i5-460M - 2.53 GHz turbo to 2.80 GHz with 3 MB L3 cache
best processor for that socket is i7-640M - 2.80 GHz turbo to 3.46 GHz with 4 MB L3 cache --- there's one of these on ebay for $41 .... hmmmmm ... I'd be getting that right quick.

your disk ... small but reasonably quick (7200 rpm) HDD. An SSD would be great but you're probably ok with what you have.

I don't have a clue how those ideas would affect 'gaming performance' but i know for sure it'd be snappier for the kinda stuff I do.

 

[jaguarskx]

You know what?

I was feeling a bit nostalgic for Morrowind last year so I installed it on one of my laptops; a Dell Latitude 3540 with the i5-4200u. I expected the game to run very well on the laptop with the Intel HD 4400 graphics core given that the game was released back in 2002. Unfortunately, that was not the case, the game ran okay, but not as well as I expected it to. I ended up playing the game with the dedicated Radeon HD 8850m GPU. The Intel HD 4400 is a lot more powerful than the Intel HD graphics core in your laptop.

I suppose it is simply the case where the Intel drivers are simply not optimized to run the game very well. When running the game with the Intel HD 4400 at 1366x768 the performance only seemed to be a little better than running it long ago in 2003 on my ThinkPad T40 with a single core Pentium M CPU and Mobility Radeon 7500 (DX 8.1) GPU.

Skyrim actually runs a lot better with the Intel HD 4400 than Morrowind.