This month I got a laptop from my Pops which he exchange for mine that was a Dell Latitude d505 which is pretty much an ancient garbage for me. The Laptop he exchanged to me was an Asus X451MA which he claimed that he bought at a very cheap price at a tech store. He explained that the laptop was onced pawned at the tech store and the owner never claimed it back to them so they sold it for a very cheap price.

The Laptop had a specification of 2.16 Ghz Quad-core CPU, 4gb of Ram, 1gb of VRam(GPU) and running at WIndows 8.1. The Computer seems to be quite good at browsing through the hard disk, no problem there, but I sensed that any other software seems to be lagging a bit much even though it met with the specified system requirements in which they could run specially games. I got CoD MW 1, 2, and 3. CoD 4 MW was quite running good but the rest of the CoD franchise are running lag even at the lowest settings. Even when running Fruity Loops, Adobe Premiere, and After effects I could sense that it lags a bit much when using it.

So maybe I came to a conclusion that the hardware might be the cause of it. But It've been that Windows 8.1 is an OS running extensice background processes that've cause it. Maybe I could switch to Win7.

Older OS's tend to run older games better, and vice versa. There's way around it, but choosing the best OS for you is a cleanest, simplest solution.

Yeah I really had a hard time with the compatibility issues with Win8 especially that it's 64-bit... Got to workaround the other softwares to make it run. Is that the problem I'm facing now?

The fact that it's a 64 bit os shouldn't matter much. But yeah, you can start research which os most of your games are optimized for, win 7 is likely what you'll want.

I think I'll change my OS for now and see the difference. I have a backup on my softwares on my external hdd anyways. Btw we really had go far to the main topic (the titles topic).

you can always remove processes that are not essential to windows,
heck i've used gamebooster when playing games to shut down explorer.exe (windows) just to free up processing power, you systems specs aren't as good today as they would have been three or four years ago, keep in mind games today end up needing both gpu and cpu to run proficiently, as well as a generous dose of ram.
a quad core is great, but they also have more then meets the eye to them, that very same cpu could have whats known as threads, so instead of it being understood as a 4 core cpu, could very well run like an 8 core, [2 threads per core] but it doesnt have the room to being stuck at 2.16 ghz

in short, check what architecture your cpu is, and upgrade, add a couple ram and a newer gpu card and you should be alright, if not time for a new power supply, motherboard, and get rid of win 8.1, its not optomized at all, and i believe MS is allowin people to freely upgrade to the newest os, or do what i did, change the os because its an old computer and use linux

I'd say it's the graphics card since 1gb vram is really low for a graphics card. Also for gaming all the specs you listed are a little low. I'd say at least 2-3gb vram with a newer graphics card. Also anything under a 3ghz CPU is quite slow for gaming. I would recommend at least 6gb RAM for gaming as well.

Laptops are not the best for gaming since they overheat easier They also cost a lot more as you start to get into a gaming one, like an Asus ROG or Alienware.

So I don't think it's the OS but the lack of gaming hardware in the laptop.

For the newer games all the specs are recommended to be higher than what I said as well.

Did you update all of your drivers?

Also just looking at the minimum system requirements on steam COD 4 requires less specs than COD 2.

The minimum is never desired for gaming since those cards listed are about 10 years old, which is too old in my opinion.

>>4 Some games are wacked on a 64-bit system vs. 32-bit (I had major issues with Crysis 1, for example). I didn't think they should be theoretically, but that's my anecdote.

As for the OP, it is more than likely the software that came preloaded, or the configuration, and not the hardwrae specs being faked. When you say the laptop had a specification, what do you mean? If it was just what the person told you, it could be faked. If it was just the stickers on the laptop, they could have taken them from somewhere else. If it was on the actual machine, I don't know of a way to fake that.

>>>10 yeah, I meant that the preinstalled OS (software) faked the actual specifications of the laptop by showing fake numbers of ram and vram. Just recently when I uninstalled my display driver the 1gb of vram suddenly dropped to 256mb, this had me on my knots... btw my vcard is an intel integrated graphics.

Check this out.. Its a prank of fake PC specs to shock your friends.. This works in Windows 8.1 & Windows 10...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmVshN_nwzw