Upgrading laptops graphics

[J awk]

I currently have an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 series in right now with only 256 mb memory and I wanted to know if I could upgrade to something like 500 mb or preferably 1gb. I've heard that some models of notebooks can't be upgraded, I'm running an acer aspire 5552 but I'm a little confused on how I could go about upgrading the graphics to run swtor better. Any help would be appreciated.

[chaud]

Can't be done.

[funkyfloyd]

welcome to laptops.

precisely why i dont own one.
as chaud said, youre out of luck.

[inux94]

Can't be done.

Thanks for the detailed information, honestly I'm disappointed you even wrote that.

OP; Laptops are very complicated, most cases impossible to upgrade anything except the RAM & battery etc... It's very hard to change most components of a laptop.

[Deleted]

Also on a card as weak as an HD4200 no amount of VRAM will make it any better, I believe it's an integrated card with the primary focus of accelerating video decoding so your CPU (that uses a lot more power to do the same thing) isn't relied on as much. If you want to find a decent card then you need to see how it actually performs in real video game benchmarks because the specifications (especially RAM) will give you near zero insight into what kind of performance you're going to get with it.

[J awk]

if I upgrade my 4gb ram to 8gb will it do anything?

[Deleted]

The problem about upgrading a laptop is that the case is build around the hardware in most cases. So replacing anything in a laptop may and may not work. Furthermore you need to make sure that the other components are compatible and that your battery/power supply can actually handle the new part. I would not suggest going that far as upgrading a laptop in 70% of the cases is more expensive than buying a new one.

[Deleted]

if I upgrade my 4gb ram to 8gb will it do anything?

Again, highly unlikely. RAM is just very fast temporary storage, and is not the bottleneck in your performance. Your graphics card simply cannot process the information quick enough to provide high fps.