Okay, so I meet the requirements for the game. That means I should be able to play it on the lowest settings right?
I have and HP G62 Notebook:
AMD Athlon II P340 Dual-Core Processor 2.20 GHz
3.00 GB RAM
AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250

I've already tried the ENB Series patch, tweaking the INI to remove shadows, vsync, and mouse acceleration, and tried the FPS patch v1.1 for ATI cards, but I still get lag when I'm battling things like ice wraiths on LOWEST settings. Is there anybody that could help me out with this? I really want to play this game

Min req is to have 512MB of video memory. Check (and if necessary adjust) that setting in BIOS.
Try msconfig (Start -> Run) tool and uncheck everythign that you don't need in the Startup tab. Run HDD defrag - may help.

gl

I have a very similar set up for my laptop and i can't even run css properly on the lowest setting. how can you play skyrim at all?

Get a mac

Srs though, based on my exp with BF3, I think the vid card is the bottleneck here like it was with me. Laptop makes it kinda hard to swap out though eh?

Oh yeah check out Zonata's excellent post here to see if it might be something else such as sounds trying to be all fancy.

in your laptops regard I would say you cant play because you probably have an integrated video card. I dont think it will be strong enough to handle the load the game will put on it...

Oh i know all this already. I know it can't take the load put on it lol. it only handles css for short bursts of time. i'm not even attempting to try and play skyrim on my laptop i'm just getting it for my xbox.