Hello, so I purchased a Dell G3 17 “gaming” laptop about a year and a half ago. IT fit my budget perfectly etc. or I would have gotten myself something better. Anyway It ran BFA pretty well, high to ultra settings 60-80 fps on average in cluttered areas even and never had issues with it until Shadowlands, which I knew would possibly be a slight problem after reading the new requirements for the expac.
In short, I cannot run SL smoothly at all it seems, ive turned the graphics down to 4 and 5, still no performance change except for fps and random in game lag, my fps is anywhere from 35-60 depending on what im doing in game of course. However I also seem to get what I call stuttering consistently even if im at 60fps.
So here is what the laptop has
Dell G3 3779 , Win 10 home 64 bit
i7-8750H @2.20GHz(12cpus)
8mb ram
NVIDIA GTX 1060 Max Q Design
1 TB HDD and a not so great 125 SSD
So I have no room for the game to be on the SSD so its on the HDD and I know ideal would to be on the SSD, so my question is, wtf can I do in short of purchasing something better? Currently Getting something better is not even an option. Can I get a external SSD ? Any Help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks in advance!
Can probably swap out that 1tb hdd for a 1tb ssd
external also works, but its not as good as swapping out the hard drive.
not sure if this is the same model, but should be pretty similar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTU16uszwJM
Good idea to get another 8gb SODIMM DDR4 to get to dual channel while you’re in them guts anyway
the stutter could even be because of the RAM
Hey thanks for the quick and informative response! Very helpful thanks, I think the model in the vid you linked is just the 15" version as I have the 17" So prob not much difference other than that. Ill look into this for sure, I was worried I couldnt swap out anything internally as Ive always heard you cant really upgrade laptops…so im glad it appears I can, Thanks again!
Some things you can’t, like GPUs and CPUs.
For full-featured PC laptops (not Macs or chromebooks, probably not thin and light PC laptops either) generally storage you can upgrade, and memory usually has some room. Although some laptops have soldered memory and may or may not have another memory slot.
Look at your manual online, it may have this information available. But almost certain you can swap out the HDD for the SSD, at least.
Might even be able to upgrade to 16GB chips as well.
I would check the MOBO specs of that laptop to see how much RAM it can handle.
And you can clone the current drive over to the new drive (and increase the partition if you buy a bigger one) with a program called EaseUS Partition Master.
You’ll just need a hard drive case to plug the new drive into a USB port to clone it. You can find those pretty cheap on Amazon. I just bought two for about… $15 each?
I have a pair of Sabrent USB enclosures (2.5" and 3.5") that I use for purposes like this. Works good.
I think those are the ones I just bought 
They have a 2-in-1 now, maybe try this
Thank you for the very helpful info, thanks also to Salherza, both of you have helped perfectly! Much appreciated!
Yea with my Dell laptop with 1060maxQ I was getting some weird micro stuttering going on when playing games/WoW. I forget what I did to fix it.
If you do swap out the HD for a SSD just make sure it’s the same thickness but I would sooner replace the SSD with a larger one that again isn’t too thick (or more like double sided)
I updated wow on my laptop since it’s been ages since I used it (let my dad use it to surf) Dell Inspiron i5 7300hq, 8gb ram, 500gb nvme SSD, 1tb hdd. Getting 60-99 fps running around from Oribus to Revendreth and to the world boss which dropped my fps to 24 at first then averaged 35. msaa 2x.
Looks like my video driver updated to 2020-09-23, version 27.21.14.5241. I guess windows did update it since I don’t really update them that often.
is that the 1060 maxQ?
I tried wow on my laptop recently, i5-6300HQ 16gb 2133, GTX 960M 4GB
it ran like a potato 
Yea 1060maxQ