Good, Inexpensive Video Card?

[BlazeGirl12]

I have a Lenovo v570 laptop that runs the Sims 3 decently well, but still with several crashes a week. When I downloaded the Crash Log Analyzer, it told me the majority of my crashes were related to insufficient graphics capabilities. While I probably won't be getting a new graphics card very soon (just upgraded my memory), what is a good and reasonably priced video card that would work well for this computer with Sims 3+all expansions+three stuff packs+a decent amount of store content? I believe my current video card is an Intel HD 3000.

Thanks to anyone who can help!

[LivvieLove]

Unfortunately, with Laptops, it's almost impossible to change out your graphics card, especially if yours is an integrated graphics card. I had a Lenovo laptop for a while and struggled to run the Sims, unfortunately, you can only upgrade memory (and only in some cases on some laptops and not by very much) as the rest of the laptop is usually complete.

So, even if your laptop had a separate graphics card that wasn't integrated, you would need a very, very specific card that would need to fit in a very specific size of slot.

However, upon looking up your computer, you have a secondary graphics card that's in there, but I'm unsure of how that works, or if that's even the right laptop you're using. I'll wait for someone who is more aware of that kind of knowledge to give the final verdict.

In most laptop cases though, you simply can't switch out parts.

Edit to say I found this: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/IdeaPad-Y-and-U-series-Laptops/V570-Switchable-graphics-applicable-for-switchable-graphic/ta-p/479237
Hopefully the tutorial will help you determine if you have a second graphics card within your laptop that you can turn on.

[BlazeGirl12]

Unfortunately, I don't have a second graphics card. However, I did just download Delphy's Dashboard to clean up some whacked-out package files, which doesn't really have to do with graphics but hey, it might help with something. I've also recently upgraded to 16GB RAM, which helped somewhat. Thank you for checking!