My Laptop Hates Great Justice

I recently decided to renew some time on City of Heroes, remembering that my laptop could run the game fine back when Architect came out (the last time I played). I wound up downloading the game, getting some time shovled onto my account on the backs of the time card gremlins and everything seemed to be going swimmingly. Until I got to the login screen. It stated clearly that my computer seemed to be running on old drivers that may not be compatible with city of heroes and could cause stability issues.

I did not think this would be a problem. I was very, very wrong. I can generally go for about 5 to 20 minutes before the game crashes and I have to wait for the game to finish freezing, Vista to realize something is wrong, and finish closing the game before I can start the game back up, only to have it crash again shortly thereafter. This is, of course, excessively frustrating. I want to throttle the makers of my laptop (Toshiba) for not only using customized drivers for their product, but never updating them since the product's release in 2008.

Full details of what I'm working with are here: http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...ily=1073768663

I have attempted downloading Nvidia's driver to update that, but it fails to detect compatible hardware. An Intel driver update similarly failed to complete, going so far as to 'install' then pop up with a window which could be best summarized as 'oops, we're not compatible, canceling installation'.

If anyone knows of a solution I could use to fix this problem of attempting to run the game with "out of date" drivers that, apparently, refuse to be updated, I would be quite happy. I recall that my desktop (which died a few months ago when the video card, or something caused it to refuse to display anything ever again), could run City of Heroes just fine, and it was not as technologically capable as this laptop.

I almost forgot to mention clearly that I did not purchase the going rouge expansion because I wasn't sure at the time if I really wanted it. I now know that I would quite enjoy purchasing it, but I'm not about to sink 40 or 50 bucks into purchasing it if the game is going to fail to run properly on this laptop.

When the game is running, it runs fineish. It's a little slow sometimes, but it's not lagging me badly, and when things (such as character models) are close, they look right. Unfortunately, I've been crashed by such varied things as the game failing to load a pair of wings, a female character's gigantic hair, and of course a few times the screen has gone to crap on me and instead of seeing people, or people with gaps in their model, it's showing me torso's and perhaps some legs, with heads missing entirely, and even floating arms. In other words, the game stops displaying properly, then freezes, then crashes.


Edit: And then I opened up my eyes and looked at the threads in this forum. Now I feel silly, as it's time to look at those.

Edit 2: I managed to get my driver updated by something mentioned in the main thread for driver issues. And now I feel extra silly for not having actually looked before posting.

If it doesn't, we are here to help.