Yeah if you got a laptop your kind of out of luck... You can change a bunch of settings but you won't be able to fully enjoy the graphics CS:S is capable of...

these games are designed to work with the min spesc printed on the cover because they target the larger market.
While that may have been the case not to long ago (year or 2 ago), that's no longer the case. Yes they may work but not satisfactorily... I read somewhere that now game development companies are aiming for the folks with the 2 thousand dollar gaming machines... This could be for a number of reasons. For one, the PC gaming community was complaining that the games weren't fully taking advantage of their PC's hardware (vid cards, cpu's, etc).

Anyway, the pc gaming scene is now seeing that they have to upgrade some part of their PC every 6 months or so just to keep up with the new games...