Thinkpads Forum

I have a thinkpad t60 sxga with x1400 video card, 128mb. I am playing sims 2 and it is really laggy. Do you guys think adding another 1gb of memory ram will help out? This might be a stupid question but do they have anything that will upgrade a video card with buying a new laptop? Please any suggestion is good and thanks in advance.

btw Ive looked everywhere to find a better deal on more t60's. Does IBM sell any of their refurbise to the public, also if there will be another good sale like they did right before xmas.

Getting more memory never hurts.

That game should run smoothly on your system as it is, though. Try downloading the most recent video card drivers. Also check the settings in the game to make sure it's using hardware rendering, etc.
You also might want to disable Symantec/Norton if it's running in the background (and the network while Norton is off.. )

I don't think the video cards in Thinkpads are upgradeable, but they may be. It looks like you can remove them, which leads me to believe that you might be able to drop in a v5250 w/ 256mb if you're willing to a) play around with the insides of your laptop and b) void your warranty. I saw a write up on the Chinese site "Thinkpad Club" where they put a t60p together from scratch, including the FireGL v5200..

Hey, just an FYI, you cannot upgrade the video cards in Txx series laptops. The graphics cards are sodered to the mobo. Your only option would be to get a docking station and put a pci-express graphics card in the available slot. Just remember that the pci-express lane is 1x I believe.

I stand corrected, thanks rosemary.

A card running in an Advanced Dock @1x PCI Express speeds will likely not be faster than an ATI x1400, either, so if I were you I'd focus on other optimizations.

Some suggestions -

1 - upgrade video drivers to the latest ones

2 - ensure that video settings under powerplay are set to 'max performance', and that its not overriding any settings to set antialiasing to 16x or anything like that. Turning off vsync can also help a lot.

3 - defrag your hard drive

4 - run a full virus scan

5 - Make sure you've got nothing hungry (e.g. a virus scan) running in the background while you're playing.

Check the processes, what is the Windows pagefile size currently in use, physical memory in use? also, there should be no process eating up CPU resources, otherwise, it will cause lag when gaming