Constant lag no matter what, is there no way out?

[adoin]

Hello there, I hope I am posting in the right place.
First off, the spec. of my laptop :
AMD Athlon(tm) II P340 Dual-Core Processor 2.20 GHz
4.00 GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650
I run Windows 7 64-bit.
The problem is that I cant seem to run games without getting lag. For instance, Dragon Age- the only requirement that my laptop might not meet is the processor(dual core, 1,8 minimum), however, I can even top that. I can make graphics the best quality, or make it the worst, it lags almost the same.
Oblivion, that thing requires a Pentium 4, yet I still get lag! (again, the same situation, where I can put the best or the worst graphics on).
The lag that I am talking about is not terrible, for instance the games run at around ~30 or more FPS (judging by the eye) and every once in a while drops to around ~15.
It is not much, but definitely makes the playing experience much less enjoyable.
I do turn off all of the background programs, I even use this little program game booster. The hard drive is not crammed to the top, I even separated the drive to a few parts for games and for Windows.
So yea, any tips? Or am i doomed to play in this ridiculous situation, where no matter what graphic settings you put on, you still get lag?
PS: When games are turned on the ventilator blows out quite hot air.

 

[Tmagic650]

How big is the hard drive? How big are the partitions? When you partition a hard drive, you waste a lot of space and slow down its data access. Something you never want to do with a laptop

 

[adoin]

The hard drive has 500GB of space. I made 3 partitions, one for windows(75GB), one for data and another for programs/games(195GB each). So the partitioning of a hard drive may be the cause of this slowness then?

 

[Tmagic650]

I would say yes... If a laptop is out of warranty, which I believe this one is, I always delete the old recovery partition and install the OS fresh on a single partition. This may help you too

 

[adoin]

Ok, I will try that, thanks a lot!

 

[baroquer]

Check CPU usage

In that case, i will check CPU usage while playing game first.

 

[greatman05]

AMD processors are generally weak for gaming now, especially in mobile applications; Intel has trumped them in terms of performance. The processor you have, according to NotebookCheck, isn't really that strong so you're going to have some performance problems. The HD5650 is a pretty good midrange card, so I think you're being bottlenecked by the processor; performance benchmarks with the HD5650 and an Intel processor show that it performs much better in this combination compared with a HD5650 and an AMD processor (NotebookCheck). Your best bet would be to turn down the resolution unless you're already at 720p or lower, and turn down the details unless they're already low; in that case, it might be time to do the research and prepare to buy a new laptop with better specs.

BTW, I highly recommend NotebookCheck; they tend to be very consistent with their reviews. Their reviews also cross-reference pretty well with other popular review sites, so they're a pretty good first-stop just to check what the trend might be for the performance of a particular product.

 

[Tmagic650]

I agree with you greatman05, I work on a lot of lower end AMD CPU notebooks, and the Intel counterparts play most games much better. The multitasking is also much better with Intel laptop motherboards