Couldn't say that I know too much about video cards, but I do know that some of them are made more for gaming, others for things like 3d modeling. Make sure to read the packaging and do your homework online and see what quadro was meant to do!

 It also could be another (faulty?) component in your system.

-Jake 

like i think i mentioned before elsewhere, a quatro is not going to out-muscle a high end fx card. its designed to be more stable, and have better drivers for 3d apps. that is all.

also, your machine is a laptop. your friends is a desktop. meg for meg, a desktop will out-perform a similarly spec'ed laptop any day of the week. laptops have to be stepped down a bit, so they dont just fry.

also, your ram. not all ram is equel. your 2 gigs ram may be a much slower speed ram than your friends. in fact, considering its a dell, that is very likely.

other things to consider are, the spin rate and quality of your hard drives. and of course how well optimised your operating system is.

as you can see, there is a lot more to bare in mind than "this piece of hardware cost more, thus it must be faster".

You PC is good enough to study but not gaming. So take your chance and try to make good grades, make your parents happy and let them buy really gaming PC for you. One of the options is to make really good research about interesting history research paper topics