While it seems you have the right parts, actually scaled back on a fire breather's RAM to exactly 512M due to some nuances with Widnows 2000/XP. Turns out that when we try realtime games, the extra might be adding overhead as the OS shuffles dlls in memory. It seems that it frets that the spare memory can be consolidated and does so at an inopertune time. I will NOT debate this area of Windows and will share my experiences. Try exactly 512M RAM.
Next is that video card. Which FX? The home armada of machines now has FX5700, FX5600, FX5500 with the 5500 being some oddball with 256M RAM. The others are 128M. Doom 3 will arrive any day, so it is hoped the 85 buck FX5700le will be ok. What I do know is to avoid the FX5200 or ATI9200 cards. Not that they are bad cards, but they are value items that still outperform cards from 2 years ago.
The OS on the machines are very tweaked if I compare to other people's machines. For instance, no parasites are allowed. no P2P, services that we don't need are disabled (thank you Black Viper) and we don't run Zone Alarm since (a) we are behind a router, (b) we are parasite free, (c) we can use ICF and that helps performance immensely. I like zonealarm, but sometimes you can do without. Depends on your setup.
In closing, this checklist:
1. Latest BIOS.
2. BIOS defaults.
3. Motherboard drivers installed.
4. Set the IDE to PIO, OK your way out, then set to DMA, OK your way out. I will not explain this Microsoft'ism.
Bob
I have a AMD 64 Bit 2800 Processor, with A Geforce FX, 2 harddrives that are big, 768 meg of memory, fans and gadgets up the wazoo, windows xp home, Cable internet connection. I just want to play call of duty at 1280 by 1024, and to run it smooth as can be. Everytime i look at a tree or something it gets all slow. What next for a gaming pc. I know your all going to say graphics card but thast the last resort to things i would upgrade. Bob im counting on you to reply to this one i need your help.

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