PC upgrade, opinions wanted

crazzyjake

I have two laptops and in order to play todays games I need an upgrade for one of them.

On the one hand I have a Dell inspiron 9100 that I believe is one of the few laptops with the ability to upgrade the graphics card. it has a pentium IV 2.4ghz cpu and only 512mb of ram so i would have to upgrade that as well to im thinking 2gb which right now you can get on the cheap.

My other laptop is a more powerful HP duel core pc with 2gb of ram already installed but with a crappy intel graphics card that can not be upgraded in anyway except one device that I believe is coming out shortly in the asus xg station, which provides an external more modern graphics card usable by laptops.

My question is which option is better and why, upgrading my Dell seems like the more viable option and probably the cheaper one as the xg station requires a seperate display device as well as the unit itself which will probably be upwards of 400 dollars in my estimate. The problem with upgrading the Dell is that the pentium 2.4 might be too dated for todays games? I don't need to have all graphics maxed on , I'd just like to be able to play on average settings and still be able to avoid horrendous performance. With this in mind, which option do you think is most viable/cost effective for games like conan and the upcoming titles like warhammer. thanks for any input you can give and not flaming my post for my pair of crappy computers as I haven't done any serious gaming in a few years.