Do you all think I need to upgrade my memory or my graphics card, or both? This is the HP Notebook I'm using: http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04281145
This was a new laptop in August 2014 and sells for $350 at Walmart. I paid $100 from my friends that own the local Pawn Shop about 2 weeks ago. I restored to factory settings as soon as I bought it. Why the hell does it take like 6 hours to do that?? LOL Anyway, I'm not buying a new one. This is it.
Your laptop has an integrated graphics card, which is bottom of the totem pole for graphics cards. You have to spend around $1,000 to get a decent gaming laptop. It's not possible to upgrade a graphics card in a laptop in most cases. Sorry for the bad news, but it is what it is.
What he said. Laptops are far less upgradable than desktops are, and aside from RAM, you basically need to buy it the way that you want. I've been out of the game for a year now, but I worked selling them for 14 years, and when I was last employed the LEAST you could buy a mediocre laptop for was about $600. A good one would run you $800+, and thats not a "gaming laptop", just a quality one like the one I use myself. If you bought a machine for less than $400, its likely going to only be usable for some internet browsing and word processing. I would tell my customers that those were only really for people who hardly ever used a computer, or for young kids.
get what you pay for with laptops. going cheap gives you a piece of crap. 2013, bought my wife a 400 laptop, even for doing standard word processing and internet stuff, it wasn't reliable. a year later, bought her a kickass 1500 laptop. of course, now she won't let me use it for gaming.