Massive performance problems.

[lollies]

I got a new "gaming" laptop recently, apparently it's supposed to be pretty good, but that's not my experience so far.
For example one of the games i'm trying to play is Half Life 2. Now on the Can you run it website my laptop passes the recommended settings, it even says it should run fast on this laptop.
However when I play the game it's a different story.

When i'm playing on the HL2 recommended settings, I got 15-35 fps. When i'm playing on max settings, I get the same. When I play on SUPER DUPER MINIMUM 640x800 lowest of the low settings, I still get 15-35 fps?

What am I doing wrong?

I've made sure v sync is turned off. Made sure my settings in the Nvidia control panel are fine, Made sure fps_max is set high...but still, it's unbelievable slow.

My specs;
Alienware Aurora m9700
AMD Turion 64 ML-37 2Ghz rated at 2.6Ghz
1 gig of ram
Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GS 256mb

Is this laptop really that slow? Or is there something wrong with it?

 

[MindoverMaster]

I think your ram is quite low. If you are running programs in the background, you can really minimize your usable ram.

What OS are you running? Do you have the latest driver? Do you have the latest patches for the game?

 

[Press_Corpse]

X2, RAM would really wake that laptop up and the drivers would only back those up as well.