Since my motherboard on my PC died awhile back I've been stuck using my laptop to do anything. It's got pretty good specs (7600 gt nvidia dedicated card) and a 2.2 ghz dual core. Sadly not like my desktops 3.1 fx-62 cpu and ati 7650 (all water cooled) which never experienced slowdowns anywhere.
This laptop suffers from poor heat dissipation issues, and requires almost complete dissasembly to just clean the fins on the heat sinks. After putting blocks under the laptop to raise it up about 1/2" the thing stopped overheating - was only in the time about 2-3 before the laptop would shut itself down (max temp threshold had been exceeded) did I experience any noticeable slow down or jerkiness.
What helped the most was switching from XP to 7, since I use Photoshop a lot XP would frequently crash or just be unable to handle what I was doing. After switching to 7 only crashes have come from overheating, SH3 runs a lot smoother even with higher settings than I did when I was using XP. My previous video card was the same as yours and worked great. Since usb ports are always active (always polling for new devices and drawing power) if you have some that you don't need/use and can disable or shut off that might give you a little more performance.
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