How to Improve Gaming on your Laptop

Gaming on a laptop is a great way to ensure that you can play while you're on the go, but it isn't always guaranteed to give you a great experience. If you want to improve your overall gaming performance, you might need to take a closer look at your machine. Below are a few tips that will help you to not only get a little more power out of your laptop but to adapt your games in a way that makes playing them a more pleasant experience.

How to Improve Gaming on Your Laptop

Make Sure You're Up to Date

The first and perhaps most important step is to make sure that all of your software and your hardware drivers are up to date. If you're running outdated software, you might have missed patches that can improve the performance for certain types of games or that can fix underlying issues that reduce your computer's performance. These issues might not seem like a big deal at first, but they can have a huge impact over time.

If you note that you're having problems, go to the websites for your various components to figure out if there's been an update. It's not that uncommon to find out that there's a specific fix for a gaming problem on a video card's site, for example, even though you might not see that fix out in the wild.

Make Sure Your Hardware is in Good Shape

It's also a good idea to double-check to make sure that all of your hardware is working as it should. Don't be afraid - this doesn't require a lot of technical know-how. Instead, it requires a quick visual inspection of your laptop.

For most, this really just means dusting off the fans and ensuring that your battery connection is in good shape. It also tends to mean that you're sure that there are no parts rattling around inside and everything is actually connected. You'd be amazed by the difference you can make with a quick clean and a few light readjustments.

Check Out Your Internet Connection

Your next step should be to make sure that you have an excellent internet connection. There are two factors that govern your internet speed, one of which is your laptop's wireless card. Since you're probably not going to be able to change that, you will instead need to look at the other issue - the speeds from your ISP.

It's relatively easy to check out your internet speed, usually through going to a reputable speed testing site. If you aren't getting the speed you're supposed to get, go to another area of your home and check it out again - if there's not a change, there might be a problem on your service's end. Make a quick call and see if there's an issue with your connection being throttled or if a tech needs to come to check out your connections.

Look at Your Power Settings

If you want to get the most out of your laptop, you may also need to check out your power settings. Working with your computer in a power-saving mode is great for preserving battery life and keeping your bills down, but it's not necessarily going to help you very much if you're trying to maximize game performance.

The go-to move here should be to switch your battery mode back to regular usage, or to a gaming setting if one exists. If you still feel like you aren't getting good performance, you might want to plug your laptop in. Not only might this help your machine's performance, but it will stop you from having to shutdown mid-game.

Change Game Settings

Finally, you'll want to go into individual games and change your graphical settings to maximize the amount of performance you get in any individual game. It's generally a good idea to set a baseline with a high-performance video game that you like - if you know that you can only run it in 'Medium' settings, for example, you'll want to default to that for most other similarly high-performance games.

This takes some trial and error, but it can make a huge improvement. Doing little things like turning down texture detail and turning off shadows can end up having a big impact on your video game. You may not have to drop down too far to radically improve your experience in any given video game.

Making gaming better on your laptop is largely a matter of double-checking your settings both for your machine and in your games. Take care of your laptop, keep it updated, and make sure that everything is working as it should. A good laptop should allow you to enjoy many of your favorite games, so make sure that you're getting the kind of experience from it that you deserve.