Upgrades Improving Gameplay?

I need to figure out if doing the following dramatically increases gameplay performance or at least what to expect from these upgrades:


1. Upgrading my 1GB RAM to 2GB

2. Upgrading my b/g wireless conection to n/n+ (Is this reliant on the adapter itself or the router which it may be passing through)

3. Overclocking the CPU (if possible on an intel laptop)

4. Overclocking the GPU (if possible on an integrated graphics card)

[5. Upgrading from a 4200rpm to a 5400rpm drive]


Thanks in advance

For a laptop, memory is the way to go. Swapping to the hard drive is bad enough but laptop hard drives are notoriously slow (well the vast majority of them). It won't speed up your framerate but as TargetOne says it will smooth out game play and reduce zoning times by eliminating one bottleneck in your system.

Thanks for the responses; currently my laptop is (at a glance):

Gateway MT3705 NoteBook
Intel Pentium dual-core T2060(1.60GHz)
14.1" Wide XGA
1GB Memory DDR2 533
100GB HDD 4200rpm
Dual layer DVD Burner
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M IGP


How would upgrading to a 5400rpm drive affect performance?

I really wouldn't recommend overclocking an integrated video chipset... especially since it's not a desktop and you can't improve cooling. You are playing with fire..

Just so we are on the same page while discussing this ...

Laptop Specifications - Laptop Support Page

Processor Specifications Note this CPU does NOT support 64-bit in case someone comes along with that suggestion.

You can only max out memory to 2 GB. Here are the selections at NewEgg. Good news it's fairly inexpensive.

As for a hard drive upgrade. It's nice to see that your laptap is designed to make this easy. As for improved performance in this game switching to a 5400RPM drive, can't really say. Note you can't use SATA laptop drives. Only review I could find may not be all that fair (the 4200RPM drive has a much smaller cache and who knows what platter size, which with rotational speed pretty much determines how fast the drive can be). Some of the benchmarks do show significant improvement in loading times and performance in some software.

Only problem of swapping the hard drive is reinstalling the OS, I'm assuming Vista looking and the drivers they have at the support site. Even if you have an OS install disk from Gateway I see lots of potential hours needed plus whatever headaches you could have with the laptop specific drivers.

There may be a few optimizations we could do to your game settings and look over the software you have loaded with a CoHHelper and HiJackThis report.

Thanks again for all of your input. Last question, what is everyone's opinion on external graphics cards?

There was someone going to make it for ExpressCard, but it didn't work right, and never made it to market. Speed issues of the bus, and some cooling too, I think... been a while.

They've come out with ExpressCard 2.0 (Don't know where they came up with that number...) and so the thinking is that maybe now, there can be External Video Cards.

I'll believe it when I see it. I can say this: Unless your computer has an ExpressCard 2.0 slot, you won't be gettin' it, methinks.

Unless I'm mistaken, any current stuff is very expensive. More than your laptop in many cases. And they're presentation materials... i.e. still shows, *maybe* movie type stuff but in no way anything like what Co* needs, and definitely not 3D at 15FPS in Atlas Park, much less Grandville or something.

We're just not there yet. And it looks like you don't even have a PCMCIA or ExpressCard slot, so that laptop's out. Might think about getting a better GPU'd laptop maybe?