Gaming on a laptop

[Planetscape]

I'll admit, like most students, I got a cheap £400 laptop to do my work on. Now I want to be able to play games on it and it looks like I have all the right specs except when it comes to the video card. So any games I manage to get going on here are slow, crap looking or unplayable.

I have a HP G6031EA Notebook PC
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual-Core (1.70GHz)
RAM: 1982Mb
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
Memory: 103Gb HDD (a further 500Gb external HDD)
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce Go 6100

With selling it to get a PC out of the question, can I buy a new and better video card for it or tweak it in some way to make it better? Please help Wiredsoc!

[Fawksie]

OK, after much searching, it seems that your only avenue for external graphics is the Magma ExpressBox, which uses your ExpressCard slot to break out a PCI-Express connection for a card housed in an external case. However, it costs about as much as your laptop, and the current version only supports 6 inch single height cards with a maximum draw of 55W. And the performance will be sorely limited by the fact that ExpressCard only allows one PCI-Express lane, rather than the 16 that most graphics cards expect.

Better off looking for a desktop I think. Other people are better placed than I to suggest parts or full machines though. Give us a visit on IRC and there might be someone knowledgeable around.

irc.wired.st-and.ac.uk #welcome or http://wired.st-and.ac.uk/Other/IRC/