Laptop Gaming Blues (Left 4 Dead 2)

Ahhh it's been an incredibly quiet week here in 'sunny' Scotland I have to say - No Uni, little work and very odd sleeping patterns have been the norm lately. Even now I'm using a combination of fudge yogurt and Bucks Fizz to keep me going, even though it's just 10pm. To keep myself busy today I decided to reinstall Left 4 Dead 2 onto my laptop.
I've rarely played games on a laptop before so this was going to be a bit of an experiment. You see, I use an Acer Aspire 2920Z laptop (which I have never heard of before) and I wanted to see just how poerful it was. Plus I haven't play the game since my PC died in September so thought it would be good to return and enjoy this game.

I remember when I got L4D2 the Christmas when it came out and feeling a bit underwhelmed at first when I played it. The difficulty curve was steep, I thought the characters weren't great and I was mixed about the new Infected. Very quickly though I began to love all of these things, and in truth L4D2 is far superior to the original - despite being nearly the same!

My first problem with the game here (though this is more a problem with Steam than the laptop) is that after you install you need to get all the updates for the game.Just so happens that involves getting a couple of new levels and game modes so it was five hours later when I could finally get around to playing the game.

Anyone remember how bloody long it took to install Half Life 2 when it first came out? Seriously, it would have been faster loading up a Spectrum or Amstrad tape than waiting for the installation to complete!

Anyhow I've managed to install the game and the menu is working as smoothly as I could ask it for. Then I started the game and that's where things went wrong! The game ran so slow on the laptop, it was like watching a stilted action movie, just little momements every second or two. It was just torture. To try and solve the problem I set all of the game settings to as low as possible to try and remove some strain from the processor. This had a minimal effect so I've went to the big guns - I defragged the whole damn drive so it's as neat and tidy as it possible can be.

I haven't tested it yet, so not to keep you on tender hooks I'm gonna try it now and see if the defrag has done it's magic!

It hasn't

I'm not giving up here - I'm sure there's more I can do. For example, apparent the processor uses a lot of power via the USb ports and what's connected. I'm going to remove my exterior sound box so sound goes through the laptop instead and see if that works!

Ummm better-ish - the loading times for the levels are now very fast, although gameplay is only marginally improved. What next to do? I could try without the mouse, but then I would be screwed gameplay wise as using the damn touch pad would be a nightmare for this game. I can't even use it properly to type!

Decided to see if clearly some more drive space might give the game a hand. I haven't played GTA San Andreas in a long while so I won't miss it. Plus it was a nightmare to control anyway and was sluggish at times too. That's about half a Gigabyte back to us, I'll remove a few more things and see what will happen now. I must admit I completely forgot about the option to remove all the files you haven't used in a long time - for me is adds up to nearly 3000000 kilobytes! This'll hopefully do the laptop some good as it is quite a lot of memory that takes up for nothing!

Drat, despite clearing out another 5 GB of data the game ain't running any faster! I think I might as well give up for the moment and think about other options for improving the processing speed without having to shell out the cash!