My laptop, Need advice

It's a laptop. Only the high-end ones have options to upgrade video.

If you're gonna use Dx8, you should get Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising (it seems to choke on Dx9). At $2-$5, it's quite a steal. Obviously Morrowind, Deus-Ex, Original HL.

You could find a copy of Doom95 and tell people you run Doom on your machine (of course they will assume you mean 3, but they'd be wrong), as long as you can stand it's amazing (compared to the DOS version) 640x400 resolution. Doom is still a great game for mindless killing, but Serious Sam looks much more spectacular while accomplishing the same purpose.

Hmm thats a good idea with Doom =] I want to install lots of those older games too so I have like lots of choices to play. Ill look into Hostile Waters tho, never heard of it. I was thinking about Serious Sam too, so I will probably get that.

Also will look into Stronghold 2 (Heard of it but no idea what it is) and I will probably get Ghost Recon now as well.

Well since it is your laptop you can do as you want, but i do not recomend installing too many really big games because (on my laptop atleast) it seemed to slow it down, but i had Unreal Tournament 2004, Diablo II LOD, Warcraft III and Frozen Throne, and Baldur's Gate I and II with the Expansions both I&II, along with some other games that were not as big but i ended up taking up about half of my hard drive and it seemed to slow down my laptop. It sped up once again after i deleted some of the games/videos that i had on there. I now have only 2 big games , over 1 gig, installed at a time and it seems to have helped.

Except for Valve games (which like to have Steam running all the time), having games installed is not going to slow your computer down unless you're a moron and

1. Didn't set aside enough disk space for the swap file or
2. Don't defrag your HD regularly

Umm well call me a moron possibly then becasue i dont know what a Swap File is.

Halo CE.

Starcraft
CnC Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge
Civilization III

A swap file is used for virtual memory. When you need more memory than you physically have, Windows moves memory bits not currently in use onto the hard drive that you specify (or your Windows drive, if you didn't) to make room in physical memory. For this to work smoothly, you need about twice the swap space of your physical memory, and it should be as unfragmented as possible. If you let Windows manage your swap and you overload your HD, you're bound to run into trouble, because

1. By default Windows is constantly growing and shrinking your swap, letting you give it less and less room and
2. If your HD is fragmented and the swap grows into the fragments, it takes longer for Windows to work its magic

So, for best performance, defragment your HD, then go into the virtual memory settings, and set both the minimum and maximum swap size at 2 times or 2.5 times your physical memory. After doing this, you can fill and fragment your HD all you like without fear of losing system performance because the swap space will be constantly reserved in unfragmented disk space.

The original Unreal Tournament.
Maybe Quake 2. Or even 3 if it can handle it.

That is cool because i already did that when i first got my computer but i didnt know that was called swap files.

Hostile Waters is a very good RTS/Action hybrid that never made good sales due to, IMO, poor marketing and poor box design.