There used to be times when games had 2D graphics and they didn’t demand as many graphical computations as they do now.

Games like Mario, Contra, and Crash Bandicoot were in their prime and kept us glued to our chairs while we played them for nonstop hours.

Nowadays games are made to look even much more realistic than movies and real-life because they are developed in some noteworthy engines such as Unreal Engine 3, Cryengine, and Unity.

This is why the system requirements for such heavy-duty games have also increased tenfold, rendering our old or low-end laptops up to no good or borderline weak enough to run them at steady frames.

Although some might argue, these games are still playable, without meeting even the minimum requirements, gameplay sessions aren’t as fun as they are supposed to be.

The issue arises when it comes to upgrading your system and unlike a desktop PC, tweaking the hardware for your laptop can be a little tricky and not as easy as you would with a PC.

And to be honest, calling it “Tricky” would be a downright understatement. So if you are lurking the internet for answers regarding how to upgrade a laptop for gaming, here are some methods and techniques.

However, first, take a look at why upgrading a laptop isn’t as promising and quite harder as compared to a desktop.

Caveats Of Upgrading Laptop

As mentioned above, unlike a desktop, a laptop isn’t as flexible and only has limited space to compose its hardware together in order to function and fulfill your everyday tasks.

The reason behind such an ordeal is that laptops are made for portability purposes, which is why manufacturers tend to make them smaller and compact so that consumers can take them almost everywhere without feeling weighed down.

Since keeping it slim is in the trend, laptops having narrower nooks and crannies as compared to a full-fledged desktop, adding or upgrading newer parts isn’t as easy and sometimes you cannot do it off the bat.

Although there are some laptops that provide some form of hardware upgradings such as SSD and RAM capacity, however, these things aren’t as promising such as a CPU or a Graphics Card Upgrade.

To sum it up, here are some workarounds that may help and even make your old buddy have a fresh breath of air.

How To Upgrade A Laptop For Gaming

Trust me these methods are very effective and worth the time, so follow carefully.

1. Get Those Drivers Up To Date

Keeping your old laptop without updating its drivers can quickly make it obsolete and rather slow over the duration of time.

As older drivers for your operating system and laptop usually are buggy and less versatile, updating them can not only get rid of those pesky bugs but may also provide you with brand new features.

Moreover, updating drivers which drastically improve your gameplay such as Graphics card driver works wonders when updated because they are gaming-oriented and usually uplifts your frame rates in games to give you a boost by delivering much more frames than you would have before.

2. Hard Drive Defragment

Storing different sorts of files all across the sectors of your hard drive may clutter and create a whole lot of mess for your hard drive directory system which might not be the best thing for your laptop in order to fetch files as quickly as possible.

This is why defragging it every now and then to organize every file together to create a much more manageable environment can potentially speed up your laptop while gaming where file fetching is extremely important.

3. Invest In Solid State Drive

Solid-state drives or SSD are called the magic elixir that speeds up your laptop in unimaginable ways. It can cut those annoying boot times in mere seconds and more importantly you won’t have to wait in queues while your game loads up its necessary files.

In other words, a Solid-state drive is a lifesaver if your laptop actually supports hybrid storage and will no doubt bring some fruitful results you wouldn’t have expected otherwise.

4. Routine Cleanup

I cannot emphasize this enough, but cleaning your laptop every now and then can have a massive impact on how it produces results in your gaming sessions.

As your laptop sits on the table collecting dust may give rise to a number of unwanted byproducts such as heat which will not only slow down your laptop and make those frames look choppy but also inevitably damage your laptop hardware if you are mindful of those temperature levels.

5. Overclocking 

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend this technique, however, you can use it as a last resort if you are feeling desperate.

Use a third-party software such as MSI Afterburner to overclock your hardware to get a little bit of boost out of your graphics card by fiddling with its frequencies and clock speed.

Be advised that this method can harm your laptop hardware if you don’t know what you are doing, so make sure you have ample knowledge before you proceed to do the overclocking method.

6. Fiddle With Power Profiles

If you are using a laptop with windows based operating system, you can head over to the windows power profile in the control panel where you can tweak and even change the power profile from battery mode to performance mode which will no doubt make your laptop faster than its previous form.

However, keep that charging adapter in your backpack at all times, because performance mode tends to drain your battery life rather quickly.

7. Use The Windows Game Mode

Windows has a special game mode that lets gamers enjoy their games at steady frame rates up to 60Fps. 

This proprietary utility switches off any unwanted background applications and focuses all the resources to your game so you can have all the computational power you may need in order to enjoy buttery-smooth gameplay.

Final Word

Gaming laptops are a unique breed of laptops that strive harder to provide portability and performance at the same time. Since those attributes barely go hand in hand it may create a little problem for users who have older gaming laptops which no doubt becomes obsolete with time.

However, you can take a peek at my article about how to upgrade a laptop for gaming which will no doubt sort you out and drastically helps you in your gaming sessions.

That being said, have a nice day and happy gaming!