Upgrading an Alienware M17x-R2

[Cowens95]

I recently bought an Alienware M17x-R2 from ebay for gaming, but its kind of slow and can only run games on low settings, sometimes medium (Modded Minecraft, GTA IV Etc..) i know those are kind of big games but even my old Toshiba satellite could run the games decently. Im kinda clueless about upgrading laptops and pcs so what would be the best stuff for me to upgrade so itll run a bit smoother?
My specs are:
Intel Core 2Quad CPU Q9000 2Ghz x64-based processor
RAM 4.00Gb
Hard drives x2 150GB each and 300GB in Total
NVIDIA GeForce 9400 Total memory 2175MB,
Dedicated 256Mb System video memory 64Mb Shared System memory 1855Mb
and its running on windows 8.1

Any help would be appreciated

thanks

 

[hang-the-9]

That's an older laptop, did it come with a clean setup of Windows? Did you check for driver updates?
The GeFroce 9400 came out in 2008, that's about 70 years in video card time and it uses DDR2 or DDR3 RAM which is pretty slow compared to the GDDR5 cards out now.

Any upgrades you can do will cost as much as just selling this and getting a newer system. You may be able to find an MXM video card to replace it and a faster CPU and more RAM if the system will run 8 gig, but to find out if that laptop will work with them all you need to do a bit of research.

I'd just sell it and get a newer laptop.