I need more power, Scotty

Soldato
Joined
2 Jun 2007
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Location
Mornington Crescent
Right, Portal has finally appeared, with great fanfare, on my laptop. Great news, except for the minimum specs.
I'm running a 1.7Ghz centrino processor, 1Gb ram, 128mb go5650 graphics. Not a top of the range system, but I was hoping it would be able to cope with these games (It can just about play NWN2, and thats minimum is a 2.4Gz).

The game will load just fine, but while its playing, every couple of seconds, the picture and sound will freeze for about half a second, then continue with that half second missed. Which makes it extremely difficult to follow dialogue, as well as do things in action scenes.

When I first loaded the game, I went to the graphics options and changed down everything in the advanced section (reccomended had most things on medium/high) and put them to low, and kicked the resolution up to 1280x800. After encountering this problem, I tried reducing the resolution to 1024 then back to 800x600, but with no effect. Same wit turning the audio quality to low.
So, I assume I'm being held back just by the processor, so it there any way I can squeeze a little more out of it? Closing programs running in the background will help, and I've gotten rid of the ones I don't think I need. Is there anything else I can do, besides turning on the close captions, so I can at least follow whats going on?
 
That kind of stuttering is frequently caused by the program having to wait for disk access. This might be solved with a faster disk but it's quite likely that another gig of memory would help a great deal.
 
Disk access? Oh dear.
I'm running what I assume is one of the 5400rpm laptop drives with 3Gb space free. Deleting stuff isn't going to help, is it?

I do have a 500Gb WD usb2.0 external hard drive. Its got a faster speed;
# Data Transfer Rate: 480 Mbps
# Average Seek Time: 8.9 ms
# Spindle Speed: 7200 rpm

Comparing that with what I've found on the internet for the internal drive:
# Data Transfer Rate: 450 Mbps (Media transfer rate) 100Mbps (Interface transfer rates)
# Average Seek Time: 12 ms (5.5ms average latency)
# Spindle Speed: 5400 rpm

Looking at the figures, would it be better to install steam on the external drive instead? I hadn't done that in the first place, since I'd assumed that the internal connection would allow for faster transfers that an external drive through USB, but looking at this, its not the case?
 
Internal:
cdrivefl8.jpg


External:
ddrivepq3.jpg


Seems like a easy win for the internal drive.
Would moving a couple of gigs worth of stuff and then defraging the internal drive give much boost?
 
Lack of Ram? That strikes me as quite odd, since the minimum says 512Mb, so my 1Gb should be enough, especially since I turn everything to the lowest possible settings :(
 
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