I was told I need to upgrade my hard drive...?

Do it...

That drive may not be the bottleneck, usually it is the video card, which is fixed in the laptop and not upgradable.

Only possibility is your 500GB drive is a slower 5400 rpm drive. Going to a 7200rpm drive with more cache memory may speed things up a little bit, but just in the loading of files for the game.

Going to a SSD disk, though smaller, will speed things up some more. However, if the game has a lot of motion and rendering of graphics, your video card is the bottleneck, and no disk drive upgrade will help significantly...

A second hard drive will not improve anything except give you more storage...(that laptop seems to have space for a second drive...)

That all said, the 260 video should be enough for most games, except maybe some top end games. Make sure you do not have any background software running (like any torrent engines), and turn off any scheduled updates or scans - those can all slow down your system while gaming. 6GB is enough memory, as most games use only 1 or 2GB tops...

With 6 gig ram I would think its the laptop graphics capability that is limiting your gaming.

Hard drive would only effect gaming if there were not susficent ram then the hard dricve is accessed as vertuial ram memory and th3 speed of the hard drive then effects the gaming as reading and writing to the hard drive can cause lag but with 6 gigs of ram the entire program is in ram and therefore the gaming should not be effected by the quility of the hard drive.

As I understand it graphics cards for laptops cant be upgraded for most models ?

not sure .

I wonder never have considered it but if there were a software imulator which could act as a graphics card which resides in a ram drive for video paged memoy access might be the solution ?

Faster ram might help and lowering the graphics setting for the game as well .

I dodnt think getting a new hard drive is going to be your solution.

But if you plan on getting a new hard drive then they are pretty simple to install setting them up for access to recovery partitions and such can be time consuming.

I have a link to the way iv built my system for this all the files you might need are here to do this might be worth looking into .

you can also use nortans revovery disc if it will work in win 7.

http://www.4shared.com/folder/hNpULkAO/_online.htm...

I think you should need a more better CPU like Intel I3 core or more higher, then a memory card with a 4G or 8G. About HD or Hard Drive for me it is a data storage. You have 500GB and I think it is enough, maybe you have to check your Micro chip, Memory card and Graphic Card.

HD doesn't affect gaming performance it is the processor, the ram and the graphic card. Your ram is fine i think the problem is with your processor or the graphic card. see the system requirement of the game you are playing and compare it with you pc specs.