and due to financial difficulties I can't build a pc atm, so since I trust u guys, meaning you know your shit, I wanna ask how can I make this old laptop a little gamer friendly without burning it. It has a 4gb ram and I was thinking of getting an 8 gb in order to get some fps. I use it for mmorpgs mainly and the performance is understandably quite bad, so if you have any ideas please let me know.
I remember when i had a laptop with 3 gigs of ram, that thing performed horribly since the ram was also the frame buffer for games, Just go and get a stick of patriot, kingston, adata wahtever you prefer ill give you some links. always check amazon for deals.
interesting well found out that you can only use DDR2 pc 6400 800Mhz ram anyway, so yeah it would no longer be worth upgrading. just wait for black friday and pop an ssd in there like this one. if you are not too concerned about space. this will breathe some life back into that pc.
Well reading and looking at your options i don't see to much for upgrading. Personally i have seen fps increase from 4gbs of ram to 8gb in laptops, it does help regardless what seem may say. I would go with adata ram personally it seems to work the best in my experience or mushkin like this set http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226021
Also if your brave enough you can upgrade the cpu, it's not the easiest thing to do if you have never done it, but some can be quite easy if you don't have to break down the whole laptop like most dells. But than again this isn't always a cheap option due to already using an i7 to upgrade to a more powerful one in the same socket isn't always easy to find as well. For example the i7 920XM is around $250 off of ebay (OEM) and is comparable to the performance of my Athlon II X4 640 with a 15% overclock. So if one was to do something like this it would cost almost $350 after parts and thermal applications and about ~2hr in labor time.
So to put it simple i would see if the RAM helps any, it certainly won't hurt anything. Hopes this helps!
And if also make sure to update your drivers from the info you gave your running a either NVidia 210m or 230m, but i can't tell from the info you provided completely.
Wow thanks for all the responses guys, I think I'll just gonna go for the mushkin ram option, I'm surely not brave enough to change the cpu, and buying a ssd for this laptop seems kind of waste, also according to the manual I don't think it supports it anyway. Software wise I have trying plenty of things, the vga is NVidia 230m got the latest drives and even tried the nvidia performance prog, which apparently doesn't support this card, I have overclocked using the evga precision, but the overheating is ridiculous so i don't use it. Since I live in Europe I"ll just buy the mushkin which goes for around 80 euros and just save up money to build a pc in the next few moths.