Video cards for laptop

well i recent invested a good chunck of change into a laptop, and now that i have it i am trying to do some thing that require a nice graphics card, however mine is only 32mb which SUCKS, so i have heard from a lot of people that i cant change my graphics card in a laptop. Does anyone have any suggestion on a way to boost my video memory? i would even go as far as to buy a new motherboard with a new video card on it.

i use a durabook, 1.8ghz processor. 992 RAM

Buy a new laptop.

Upgrading a laptop is not for the faint of heart of the inexperienced.

if i can get the hardware i have a friend who can do all the work, hes been tinkering with comps since the screens were green and the disk were actually floppy

If your laptop has shared memory then you can buy more ram and allocate more to the graphics chip, you should be able to do this in the BIOS.

i think you can get usb video.. never tryed it or anything but might be what you need..

thanks for the ideas. i am going to try am allocate more memory to the vid card, if that doesnt work then i will work on an extermal US drive type deal. If anyone else has a suggestion feel free to hand it out, thanks again to those who respomded.

I haven't done a video card in a laptop but I have upgraded memory, hard-drives, wi-fi cards and processors in laptops. I even re-soldered the PSU connection on the back of a HP laptop (MAJOR PITA).

Everything except the PSU on that one HP and doing the memory on an HP tablet PC was easy. The PSU plug, I literally needed to dissassemble 3/4 of the laptop to get to the plug. Then it was like .3 seconds later I had the plug finished and I took another hour to put it all back together. Best part was, I only had one screw left over out of 91 seperate screws!

The memory on the HP TC4200 was a major PITA as well. The one socket was right on the bottom - real easy to get to. The primary socket was underneath the keyboard - but to get the keyboard off you needed to pull out something like 47 screws, the HP buttons panel, etc... Real pain.

Never did a video card. But if I could in the HP NC6220's that my company forces us to use I definately would. I wish I could do a better proc than a Pentium M 780. The specs say the max is a 770 - so I at least beat that and it runs as a 780. Maybe if I can find a better bios image I could get a core duo to work.


I remember using punch cards with Fortran.

To my knowledge, a video card in a notebook can't be "upgraded" - because it's embedded into the motherboard. I had a notebook with shared video memory, you could dedicate anywhere from 4 to 64MB to the video - it made NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER in performance when you changed the amount.

And there's no such thing as a USB video card... USB TV Tuner, yes... I think even things like USB TV-Out or Projector-OUTPUT type cards - but they aren't video cards, with graphics processors, etc, etc...

I put up with mine for 4 years - your only option is to buy a new one with something that ISN'T an intel graphics media accelerator, or ATi HyperMemory, or nVidia turbocache - because it all means the same thing: not worth the investment.

I just bought an Acer TravelMate 4400 with a Radeon X700 - only 64MB of DEDICATED video memory, but the GPU under the hood helps. In all honesty, it performs almost as well as any Radeon 9x00 series desktop card - I'm very impressed and pleased with it.

NuAngel

There are some that you can upgrade. MiniPCI-E cards.

Hard to find and expensive, but they are out there.