dprince

I've had my HP Pavilion xt178 notebook for about 3 years now and it's been serving me well. I knew going into it that I needed to purchase a laptop that wouldn't become obselete in the years to come. I have heard how difficult it is to upgrade these little space-saving machines so I tried my best to get the most for my money.

Anyway, fast-forward 3 years and my laptop seems to be slowly dying. The main problem that's been bugging me for a while now is the random restarts and shutdowns. I'm running Windows XP Home (all updates installed), 512 MB RAM, and a 32 MB ATI Mobility 6 video card. The reason I mention the video card is because when I'm playing graphically intense games like Guild Wars, the restart problem is much more likely to happen.

Now I already know somebody is going to say "Notebook computers aren't meant to play games unless you spend $2000+ on the thing and make sure you've got a high-end 128 MB graphics card." I'm just looking for any possible solutions to this problem.

I've already set all the in-game settings to the lowest possible settings and terminated any unneeded programs before loading up Guild Wars. When I checked Task Manager while the game is running I noticed all the system resources are being used (CPU Usuage: 100%). I also noticed in this past year my computer heats up very quickly, especially in the fan area (the air coming from the vent is very warm). Sorry for the long post, any suggestions would be appreciated.