I am not a gamer, so when I bought my system I took the standard MX 400. My system is a 1.4ddr Athlon with 256ddr Ram This I felt would be future proof for some time. However, I have just started to use Macromedia software for web design and graphics etc, and I have noticed my system can be quite sluggish when multi tasking. I am using FreeMem Pro to manage my memory so I always seem to have enough, none tied up in old dll's etc. A colleague suggested as I am doing a lot of design type work, it is my graphics card that is letting down the system. Is this so? I was told when bying my system that a Geforce 3 would only be needed for serious gaming using complex 3D and lots of frames. For anything else such as office, or even design I was told it would be overkill and at the time the £300+ price would have been a waste of money. As I would be spending a lot of time at my computer I put this money into upgrading the monitor rather than the Graphics. Any suggestions, tweaks etc?

Which drivers are you using for your Geforce card? Have you tried the reference drivers from Nvidia? I have found them to be excellent. Also... if your motherboard has a VIA chipset... you will want install the VIA 4-in-1 chipset drivers. If you do have the VIA chipset onboard... install them first, then the nvidia drivers. Test. I run the Geforce 2 MX here with a 1.2 gig Athlon. I have not noticed any lag in modern games or when working with large applications such as Photoshop. It's a good little card.

might also consider using Win2000 as it uses system memory more efficiently AND is much more stable than ME.

Its not the card its the RAM. I use DW4,Photoshop,PSP,Fireworks etc etc and it needs MEGA RAM!!! The more the better. As stated however, its only going to be so good running ME. XP or 2000 would not be a bad choice but more RAM will certainly help things jimi_l

Simple qeustion: How does that square with ME not liking more than 512mb of ram??? Puzzled?

Thanks everyone. I was going to get more RAM and might still as it is so cheap these days, but Freemempro seems to be a good little application right now it is saying 94 meg free ram. Does this sound good under ME with 256 meg ram?

Ram and system resources are different things. System resources,for Win9x and ME go down from boot due to its design.There is no fixing that.The best thing to do is visit a site like this for getting as much as you can out of it.XP and 2000 do not share this issue. http://www2.whidbey.net/djdenham/ That basic flaw aside,adding RAM makes graphicly intensive software run better by eliminating excessive swapping on and off the disk.While these two isues are unconnected,they none the less seem to compliment each other.Benchmarking has proven this. MS actually reccomends adding RAM to help control system resources but gives no explanation as to why these supposedly "unrelated" actions are connected. As far as the 512 meg thing goes, have a look here>> http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=512&rnk=7&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=WINME Jimi_l