I recently bought Skyrim Legendary Edition on Steam during the sale. To my complete surprise I can play Skyrim on Medium difficulty. It runs pretty well but my laptop sounds just a little loud when I play and I would hate for something bad to happen. Basically my question is what tweaks could I make to the video settings to make it run just a little smoother? I'm willing to lower a few settings here and there but I'm just wondering what would be best to lower? Are some settings useless or more important than others? Are there changes I could make that I would barely notice graphically?

Congrats for purchasing Skyrim L.E...

First of all the sound that you hear, is the sound of your fun under your laptop, and that's normally because skyrim is a game that stresses the Processor well enough.

So about you second question i don't know - because i don't know your laptop configuration...fair enough, eh...

And welcome to the forum !!!!!

Well what about anti alising or draw distance? Which setting would help my computer the most if I turned it down a bit. It runs decent enough on Medium its just slightly slow for me. Also moving around is a bit stiff compared to when I played on the 360. Im using a 360 controller but its still stiff.

Anti-aliasing off - for sure !!!!!

And i think you mean View Distance !!!! (you can crank all the sliders a bit down, and click on Object detail fade [v]

(Object detail fade is useful to improve performance by decreasing the detail on distant objects.)

And you can set Distant object detail to "Medium"

Those settings are in the OPTIONS menu if you start skyrim either from SkyrimLauncher, TESV or from your STEAM shortcut.

but again without knowing your specs i can't give you more precise answers !!!!!! (Cpu, Graphic accelerator, RAM, resolution)

Awesome! Its running a little better now. I also noticed that when I connect my hdtv to laptop skyrim pops up on the tv but the sound is still coming from my laptop which is also still displaying Skyrim. Whats that about??

Yes when you did a anolog connection, or a DVI connection

Only with HDMI you get (picture + sound) from your HDTV Television !!!!!!

See below: (first picture is a anolog connection (sends anolog video signals only), second DVI connection (sends digital video or anolog signals only)

http://www.playtool.com/pages/dvicompat/vgaadapter.jpg

and that's a HDMI cable: http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/hdmi-2-1.jpg (video + audio support)

I have HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I used #1. Ill try again today.