Q: I use a Hp Pavilion dv5000 laptop. Whenever I play a PvP game on World of Warcraft I lagg and get booted, this also happens when I'm in with a lot of people. I recently upgraded my RAM for 1GB to 1.5GB. From what I have heard the problem is my graphics card. My question is do I need a new graphics card or is it something else. Also is it possible to change the graphics card for a HP Pavilion dv5000?
A: Nobody except for Rodger R knows what they're talking about. Latency is the delay between responses of two points. In this case, it is your computer to the server. If your latency is high, it means that it takes a long time for information to go from your computer to the server, and back. If you are on satellite, gaming is not for you. Satellite has a physical minimum latency of 1000ms (which is 1 second). If you have dialup, your latency will be around 200ms to 300ms on average, which is ok for gaming depending on what kind of online game you are playing (for example, it can work in Half-Life considerably well if you configure your client correctly, and just fine in Quake, but you will never be able to play a game like Battlefield 2 online on this connection). If you are on neither, chances are that you should contact your ISP and let them know about this latency. If this latency is normal, then you should probably seek to move to another ISP that provides better quality for internet use. :) First of all, you have more than enough RAM in your machine to play WoW without any RAM related problems or issues. Second of all, if your video card were lagging, your CPU would be the component slowing you down. How so? Because it cannot keep up with the video card when processing data; in other words, the 'amount of MHz' your processor is clocked to just isn't enough. If your video card were chugging, that means your video card is being pushed to its limits and is struggling to render higher framerates. There is a distinct, visual difference between lagging and chugging. If your hardware is lagging, your framerate is generally unaffected and smooth (assuming that it can handle the game without any problems and smoothly). If your video card is chugging, you can obviously tell that it is skipping frames and struggling to render more frames per second. Final answer: your internet connection. WoW does not boot people off for having a bad framerate, and thus it cannot be hardware lag or the video card chugging. Oh, and your laptop's video accelerator is perfectly capable of handling WoW at a decent framerate.