Ello,

I bought Oblivion after the spectaclar failure of my desktop computer which i played skyrim on. The only working computer i have left is my laptop, which isn't baaad but it's a pain to play skyrim on. So i bought Oblivion to have something that would run well on my computer. Problem is i'm spoiled by Skyrim's facial graphics and animations. I don't mind the colors, infact i prefer the cartoonish look of Oblivion. So can ya'll recommend any mods for me that will make faces and animations look better?

TL;DR - I need facial and animation mods. Halp.

- Muncywolverine

You're going to have trouble running modded Oblivion on a laptop that just "isn't baaaaaad." Texture replacers are going to up the gpu's workload, and if you're running with an integrated video, well.... You might have all you can handle just running the vanilla game at large textures.

Plus, there's not a ton of animation mods out there. A few sixy walk mods. But no animation mods that will make Oblivion look like Skyrim.

Also, if there were mods to make Oblivion look just as good as Skyrim, they wouldn't be playable on your laptop. Skyrim itself will run better than a modded Oblivion. Nature of the engine.

Does your laptop have the latest drivers for its video card? I did install Skyrim on a four year old laptop, and I was able to have it run fairly smoothly with some of the sliders moved further right than the defaults, but I was being plagued by shadows until I downloaded the newest drivers for it.
Now to Oblivion and mods, I started out using Rens Beauty Pack, then moved to Cobl Races and then to Race Balancing Project for my Hair and Eye choices.
I use high resolution textures (4096) for my Oblivion install, but there are lower resolution skin textures that can look as good on an older monitor as the higher resolution ones.
Personality Idles adds random animations to NPCs in the game, and looking through all of the Animation mods on TESNexus does not really take that much time.
If your laptop does not have an integrated chipset and is not that old you can run a mildly modded Oblivion, but the minimum requirements of a lighly modded game is a lot more than the minimum requirements to run an unmodded Oblivion.

Pick up http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5643 by ShadyTradesman to help with the faces. That alone will go a long way.

I have a super conservative starter mod list https://sites.google.com/site/khettienna/recommended-oblivion-mods. For anyone new to playing Oblivion at all, I would stick to just what's in the "Required" and "Almost Required" section. I'd also recommend http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=22282 that prevents a lot of crashes, which I seem to have forgotten to add to my list.

I also quite recently witnessed first-hand the disaster of watching someone who has never played Oblivion before try to learn the game with Darnified UI's No Quest Added Popup, so you may want to turn that off for a while.

when you say new to oblivion do you mean new new or modding new cause im a hardcoe vet (PS3) but im just now getting to mod as just acquired a comp good enough to run it and im tired of vanilla Oblivion and wanna shake it up throw some make-up on it and take it to the annual ball if ya know wat i mean

Oh, in that case, disregard, I was under the impression you were new to playing it at all. I'm sure you'll get what you need in your http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1364993-best-mods/.

Here is a good list of mods, dealing with both Animation (like you wanted)

As well as some others that may benefit you...

http://sites.google.com/site/ballofflame/balloffire

I would recommend http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=39823 for those who want good facial textures, but it doesn't suit you since your laptop lacks power. You can try http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=20022 as well.

Thank you for the suggestions Blahs44 & khettienna, I found the general mod lists really helpful.

Also, checking out Running4Cover's Stealth mods list forum thread. There's a lot of great stuff in there if you feel like going the stealthy route.