After playing Oblivion for nearly 3000 hours (yes, really), and doing a lot of modding for it, I've decided it's probably finally time to give Skyrim a spin. The problem is, I'm not sure if it'll be all that fun on my 8-year-old laptop, and I'm not about to buy a new one just for a game. I'm much more concerned about framerate than I am about gorgeous graphics; even Oblivion with must-have improvements like Streamline, 4GB RAM expansion, INI tweaks etc. only hits 10-15 FPS at times.

Here's my specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo P8400, 2.27 GHz

Nvidia GeForce 9600M GS, 1GB

Windows 7 Pro x64

4 GB RAM + 16 GB ReadyBoost

5400rpm hard drive

1440 x 900 max resolution; typically play at 1200 x 750 or less

This is above the minimum requirements for Skyrim, but not by a huge amount.

EDIT: I'm also interested in anything like Oblivion Stutter Remover, Streamline, etc. that has been created for Skyrim which improves out-of-the-box performance.

EDIT 2: And yes, I will be reading the "Can my PC run Skyrim?" thread. But there's a LOT there so bear with me I'll note though that my GPU is most of the way down on the medium/low list.

Your GPU is almost at the minimum req. (maybe a bit above)

Actually your GPU is quite slow, even for an "old" game like Skyrim.

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As for your ReadyBoost, if you had very low system memory (let's say 512 MB of RAM), ReadyBoost will offer some improved performance.

But you have 4GB of ram, so i don't thing that you will gain anything from that.

Also to notice that a USB storage device is slower than system RAM anyway. So, it’s better to store SuperFetch data (that's how Ready boost works caching data files in your RAM) in your computer’s RAM rather on a USB drive.

So at the end, ReadyBoost will help a lot (the faster the USB drive the better) only if your computer (let's say) doesn’t have enough RAM. If you have more than enough RAM (so in your case) ReadyBoost won’t really help.

Yeah, I figured the ReadyBoost was probably just wishful thinking, and in practice it has turned out to be. The only time it seems to help is when there's an intensive background app running at the same time - which for my machine can be anything as simple as Windows' Indexing function. Oblivion doesn't tend to access the ReadyBoost, in other words; other apps do.

I suspect it'd be pretty clunky on my machine, but from the reading I've done I think it's worth a try. I've been able to get quite a bit to run on my machine that wasn't supposed to be possible, so I know my way around performance tweaking

Thanks for the info.

EDIT: At least I'm not crazy and trying to run Fallout 4 on this machine - though I'm tempted to try it

> EDIT: At least I'm not crazy and trying to run Fallout 4 on this machine - though I'm tempted to try it <

It will not run because that GPU is too slow. However the main reason is, because the GeForce 9600M GS is a DirectX 10 GPU, and Fallout 4 needs at least a DirectX 11 capable video accelerator.

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However if you own Skyrim, you could try at res. 1280x720 and maybe a bit lower. (low settings)