/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Alright OP, I've been turning laptops into towers for a while now since I get (mostly partially broken) laptops cheap from friends looking to upgrade and love to tinker. As I was reading your post I was also watching Brad Pit kick ass in Troy on my dedicated media center laptop-tower.

For starters you should format the whole thing with a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 version. The freed up space can give you a noticeable increase in speed and re-installing drivers ensures you get the latest (usually faster) drivers. As for physical upgrades you can't do much about the GPU save for keeping it cooler and thus faster. I can squeeze around twenty more frames out of my Emulation games with a fan pointed at it. So I suggest you get something to set it on, so that you can point a small fan at the bottom and if you want you can remove some of the bottom panels.

Many don't know this, but Windows Vista/7/8 all have something called ReadyBoost installed, it's a program that can convert USB sticks and SD cards into virtual RAM for your computer. So think about grabing a nice 4-16gb one of those and stick it in; it will prompt you about it. Make sure your stick or card has a decent write speed and your stick is in a USB 3.0 port. I find it helps quite a bit, especially when starting my PC and when running RAM intensive programs like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Excel. Switching to an SolidStateDrive is always an easy and effective upgrade, relieving the bottle neck of the spinning disk hard drives. Lastly I've hear that you can purchase these computer accessories that fit graphics card pins and converts them to work for USB, basically making them external graphics cards. I've been thinking about investing in one but am still doing research on their effectiveness as a graphics card.

Hope that helps OP.