Dell :: XPS M1530 Just Not Performing

I've been running my m1530 for about six months now, and frankly I am just not impressed with performance. The only current game it seems to be able to run at a decent rate is Civilization 4, or the orange box (and I realize the half life 2 engine is not a "current" engine, at all). When it comes to Warhammer Online, Company of Heroes, Age of Conan, or World in conflict it really can't handle any of them, and it doesn't matter what the settings are, almost all of these games are just as sluggish at medium-high settings as they are at low settings with every last feature shut off. The only setting that seems to have any apparently effect on performance in the games is the resolution. The screen I got with it is a 1680x1050 screen, and when playing at the reduce 1440x900 and 1280x800 it does play better (still sluggish, ) and it looks like absolute a$$!

The important specs on it are as follows
T8300 CPU
8600gt GPU
4gb RAM
1680x1050 Screen

I've tried installing Windows XP to see if performance would get any better, but after battling with sound drivers for a day, gave up on that fight. I've tried beta drivers, I've tried different drivers from laptopvideo2go.com with modified .inf files. I'm running out of areas to look, is the GPU just a pos, should I sent it in for replacement?

I can understand Warhammer and World in Conflict not running at their best, their both resource hogs of games, and on a mobile chipset it could get a bit sluggish. But Company of Heroes, a game released....two years ago, should at least run slug free at low to medium settings. The biggest performance gain I got from Company of Heroes settings was changing the Shader Quality from Direct3D 10 to High, I assume that means it would be rendering in directx 9 instead of 10, that increased my framerate by about 125%..............