I own a year 2000 toshiba laptop, single core pentium 4 1.7ghz, 512mb ram. I can run nquake okay, but even on faithful preset, I get frequent pausing for precache or something. The fastest preset is fine with no lags, but I can't see switches or buttons because theres no textures. How do I turn textures on, or is there a way to make faithful a little bit faster without me having to use no textures?

gl_textureless 0 ?

no textures will not save you ANY fps. if anything maybe 1 meg of gfx ram.

If you are using a laptop with an intel gfx card your bottleneck is the lightmaps.

try local game with r_fullrbight 1 then use, timedemo demo2
set r_fullbright 0 and timedemo demo2
compare your fps

in realtime in-game turn OFF r_dynamic (set to 0)

use simple items also will save u fps
turn off wall torches
turn off dead bodies
etc etc

if u tame your gfx u can get more fps. glquake in 1998 i could get 100fps on a voodoo 2000. so theres no reason why your laptop cant manage atleast a solid 72fps.

peace.

Cheers I think it's something to do with all those HD texture packs that's bundled in nQuake. I am now trying out ezQuake and it's perfect speed now.