What can I do to boost my computer to play games smoother?

As the title shows, my computer is crud. Basically on any game or any mmo, I'm left to always keeping the display settings on low or i'll lag hard and cause me to restart.

I would buy a new system..but at the moment, I'm pretty much broke lol. So I'm planning on just switching up the parts for now. I've already added some RAM, but that didn't do much. I have a Compaq Presario 061. She's old, but not completely terrible. I'm running Windows XP Home Edition on it. The tower includes,
Processor: AMD Sempron(tm) 3200+ Processor, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.8GHz
Memory: 1982MB RAM
Videocard: ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 Series

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by MathGeek on July 6, 2009 at 9:39pm: What is the most you are going to spend on parts?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael Armeni on July 6, 2009 at 9:58pm: You might be able to put a 7200 RPM drive and a PCI graphics card. (Not PCI-Express pretty sure your computer isn't new enough for that, but maybe an AGP card); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Maxime J on July 7, 2009 at 10:13pm: Yeah, sounds like a graphics card is needed!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Greg De Santis on July 6, 2009 at 10:11pm: Well this is as simple, reliable and as basic as you can get without permanently changing anything in your system settings, services or registry - you can download a free program called Game Booster 1.1 and with one click you can game smoother. It is not a miracle in a can, but it does noticeably help out.

Game Booster 1.1
http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4842-game-booster.html

And a video explanation of the program and what it does:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9p1fz_speed-up-your-pc-games-with...; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by isaac alberto gonzalez hernandez on July 6, 2009 at 11:01pm: you will right click on mi pc>properties>advanced>performance> choose set for better performance and then run the game also turn off any other programs; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Dust on July 7, 2009 at 2:51am: erhmmm.... what games are you plan to play with your machine?
if you are lucky you can play games from 2k6 and older...if you want new games, buy a new pc.
or if you dont want to spend much money, buy a console; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Brian Buckley on July 7, 2009 at 3:33am: second graphic card; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Griffindork on July 7, 2009 at 5:59pm: If you haven't already turn off system restore if you so wish (its useless in 99% of situations)

and disable any un-needed services and start up programs in msconfig.

If you need directions on how to do either of those just reply to this saying so. I'll happily oblige but i think that most know how to do that. But i may be wrong >.<<br />
hope it helps =D; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by reaper on July 7, 2009 at 10:30pm: its hard to breathe new life into a sempron build outside of a grahpics upgrade....but on those low end specs you're better off selling the parts and building a phenom or core 2 system as those cpus and boards are cheap nowadays; ▶ Reply to This