Changing 3-D settings???

My laptop is 2 GB RAM, GeForce 8600M GT, and Core 2 Duo 1.5 Ghz. I want to alter the 3-D settings through the nVIDIA control panel, but don't know what's too much for my system to handle, or something which it can easily handle and will make games look a lot better. So I'll give the setting, what it's currently at, and maybe you guys can tell me what it is and how high I should go with it.

Anti-Aliasing - 8x (what is AA exactly? Could I do 16x fine? I heard some people say it lags framerate or something)

Anti-Aliasing Setting - 4x

Anti-Aliasing Transperency - OFF

Force minimaps(do I need this?)- OFF

Texture filtering aristropatic sample optimzer -OFF

Texture filtering- Negative LOD bias-CLAMP

Texture Filtering- QUALITY(other choices include high quality, and high performance. I guess I should go high quality since it's the best, but can I handle it?)

texture filtering-trileaner optimization - OFF

Triple Buffering -OFF

Verticle Sync-use the 3-D application setting

well..if you want more performance out of your laptop, i would turn off AA, and anything to do with it. i would turn on triple buffering (is this for D3D & OGL or just OGL?), if your card has some dedicated memory (i think it should..). texture filtering performance, anything else you can find put on performance. because this is a laptop, with a pretty weak card, this is my recommendation (just remember that this is supposed to be a laptop, and its not a high performance gaming machine.)

AA gets rid of those pesky jagged edges on images in 3D games. it kind of blends the lines to make a nicer apperance but takes alot more work to put out a frame)

not being totally familiar w/ the Nv control panel... but set all AA and AF (anistropic filtering... called texture filtering there) to application preference or application control (whatever it is called there... 3-D app setting). That way you can set it in the game itself (so that older games will run w/ it but you can turn it off on newer ones that tank your system) You can set it to quality, so that when the app turns it on you will be running the best possible quality.

yes, triple buffering is openGL. You can turn it on.

basically, if you set it to be controlled by the application then you can tweak on it in the game and set results based on what you are seeing. But really you can turn whatever else you want on and if it gives poor performance, turn it off. It is all subjective in the end.