[deathspeed]

in my experience, it has always been easy to add notebook RAM.  Usually you just have to remove a single cover on the bottom, possibly secured by a screw, to access the RAM slots.

[-Norbert-]

Plus FSO is a single-threaded, not very well-optimized engine. Swifty's "deferred lighting and shadows" branch, despite having more graphical capabilities, actually gives me better performance due to also including optimizations.

And with that being said, as well as what Alzurana said, is there anyway for me to boost the performance a bit?

Well, you can try one of Swifty's builds (that's the newest one I could find). It's not up-to-date with the latest trunk changes, but you can see if it gives you a better framerate.

I'll try it and update you.
EDIT: Okay, so, I tried it, but, it won't open. Not sure how to install it. 

Just drop the files from the .zip archive into your FS2 base folder and select the FS2_open exe-file in the launcher.

Unless you know what you're doing, I'd stay away from the .patch file.