I'm at my wits end and need to get someone elses input before my solution turns into one where i throw this comp out the front door :-). My computer "USED" to run great, i could put any game in and it would work like a charm then out of the blue for no apparent reason, that i can see, any game i put in starts off ok then within a few minutes the sound gets really choppy and the graphics lag and stall then it's fine for a few minutes until it starts again, none of us have actually been able to finish a game in a while due the aggrivation this is causing. All my drivers are up to date my last resort was reformatting but that didn't do a bit of good. Nothing has changed on my comp except for the cable modem i added a while back, and i almost think it was about then that the games went bad. I don't know what else to do....my specs are below ....i'm running DirectX 9.0c....display is NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 200.....sound is SoundMax Integrated Digital Audio. OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600 OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation System Name HOME System Manufacturer Compaq System Model 5430US System Type X86-based PC Processor x86 Family 15 Model 1 Stepping 2 GenuineIntel ~1794 Mhz BIOS Version/Date Compaq 686Y2 v2.06, 12/3/2001 SMBIOS Version 2.3 Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32 Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1 Locale United States Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)" User Name HOME\Dana & Tam Time Zone Eastern Standard Time Total Physical Memory 512.50 MB Available Physical Memory 308.40 MB Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB Page File Space 1.22 GB Page File C:\pagefile.sys Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated Thanks

Several things jump out at me from your specs. 1> the mx200 is only 64megs of sdram memory. 2> going from 512megs of ram to 308 looks like a bunch of services/processes are running in the background. Ok from here I would first go to the services screen and streamline what you need and don't need. CAUTION: know what does what before you make any changes. Check out this web site first. www.blackviper.com It's full of things about the services/processes you need to know. In laymans terms. Next I would invest in a vid card that has ddr ram. My mx400 cost me 40 bucks and runs just about anything I throw at it. Now since the sound chip is an onboard chip it robs the cpu of time and memory. A good card is the c-media cm-8738. It's a 5.1 card with all the goodies to make great sound. 50 bucks. BUT Check the processes and the services before running out to spend more money. Oh, Also check the startup tab in msconfig to see if you have a lot of unneeded programs loading at boot up. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...

I just reread your post and noticed you have SP2. My question would be then did it run ok before you installed sp2? If it did and you really want to play those games you might consider removeing it. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...