Getting old gaming laptop back up to par

[CootNasty]

I have an alienware 17 gaming laptop I bought new back in 2013-2014. It has an I7 processor, I added a SSD, and it has a GTX770m. However, most of my games on it are incredibly laggy. What can I do to fix this? I'm I'm curious software options before I start looking into swapping out hardware. Thanks!

 

[CootNasty]

I have an alienware 17 gaming laptop I bought new back in 2013-2014. It has an I7 processor, I added a SSD, and it has a GTX770m. However, most of my games on it are incredibly laggy. What can I do to fix this? I'm I'm curious software options before I start looking into swapping out hardware. Thanks!

Mainly, its Valheim I've been dying to play but it gets so laggy and buggy its virtually unplayable.

 

[Brian Boru]

I'm curious software options

Assume you're on Windows 10 64bit, with at least 8GB of RAM.

First thing to try is before game launch, go into Task Manager and turn off any other apps which are running. Make sure there isn't any full disk scan or indexing going on.

If you're playing online, what's your internet connection like? I'd guess you need decent broadband for that.

GTX770m

Your CPU is fine, so if it's hardware, that's likely to be the problem. Valheim's recommended specs on Steam say GTX 970—that's a desktop GPU, which will be more powerful than a laptop, and then there's the considerable gap between 770 and 970.

Do you maybe have 2 GPUs? I had an Alienware 17 for a few years, and it had 2. Of course, I have no idea if a/the game can use both.