What to upgrade?

[disco]

Alright, here's the problem:  Lately I've been wishing I could play games on my laptop besides Diablo and Starcraft on my computer without lag.  The problem is, after some talking with my friend I'm not sure which part(s) to upgrade.  So far I've decided I will definetly be getting new Ram (1gb stick) but I can't decide whether I should get a new processor or graphics card and I can only afford one right now.  I currently have a Intel Celeron processor and an Intel Extreme Graphics 2 for Mobile (upon mentioning the latter my friend seemed conviced that was the problem.) 

So my question is, which one of these should I upgrade in order to play games like Guild Wars, or World of Warcraft without or at least with less lag?
*Suggestions and links would be greatly appreciated. Sorry if this is the wrong section for this.*

[LordNevar]

I would go with the video card. With that amount of RAM you should be able to load it directly into memory without depleteing your ram usage. This way the video card will only have to worry about the graphical aspect of the game as usual, and the ram will pick up the slack from the processor. You shouldn't have any problems with the processor allowing for this. Your games should run smoothly.

[Eric]

Keep in mind that the majority of the time the processor has cached the needed memory before it's actually been requested so a processor upgrade would be much more benefitial than a memory upgrade providing that you have atleast the recommended amount of free memory available.

[Adron]

I don't think either of your explanations are satisfactory. More RAM does not pick up slack from processor fully utilized. And the processor does not cache memory dependant on having enough free memory; it always caches memory. To the limit of its cache.

Disco probably needs to compare his lag to how overloaded cpu vs too slow graphics card usually affect a system.

[Eric]

And the processor does not cache memory dependant on having enough free memory; it always caches memory. To the limit of its cache.

If you're having to rely on virtual memory due to the fact that you don't have enough physical memory then this is usually more of a problem than a slow processor.

[Kp]

And the processor does not cache memory dependant on having enough free memory; it always caches memory. To the limit of its cache.

If you're having to rely on virtual memory due to the fact that you don't have enough physical memory then this is usually more of a problem than a slow processor.

He can easily test for this problem without needing any upgrades at all.  If the disk is audible when active, listen for heavy disk I/O when playing.  If the disk is quiet, he could temporarily reconfigure the system not to use virtual memory.  If he's really running out of memory, the game should halt/crash when the system is configured to disallow virtual memory.  If the game continues to run fine, memory exhaustion is not the problem.

[Adron]

He can easily test for this problem without needing any upgrades at all.  If the disk is audible when active, listen for heavy disk I/O when playing.  If the disk is quiet, he could temporarily reconfigure the system not to use virtual memory.

Yes, this is an excellent suggestion. Just looking at the hard drive LED when he experiences lag should tell as well.

[Kp]

He can easily test for this problem without needing any upgrades at all.  If the disk is audible when active, listen for heavy disk I/O when playing.  If the disk is quiet, he could temporarily reconfigure the system not to use virtual memory.

Yes, this is an excellent suggestion. Just looking at the hard drive LED when he experiences lag should tell as well.

I considered suggesting that, but was concerned about spurious hard disk activity from the game loading data files (or background programs doing unrelated disk I/O).  Loading data files could hurt the game's performance, but adding memory won't avoid that problem (unless the extra memory ended up caching just the right data).