[Sir Krustin]

With most modern games, I recommend at least 256 mb ram, memory's cheap these days - no reason not to upgrade.

One other thing to look at is your system tray, items like virus scanners, firewalls, ICQ, Adaptec DirectCD, seti@home, etc suck CPU cycles and -- more importantly -- bus bandwidth from your "main" application, which is already bandwidth (video *and* sound) intensive.

Right click *everything* in your system tray and disable/close it. Some icons, such as Adaptec DirectCD, do not give you this option - use CTL-ALT-DEL and select the process you want to kill, then click "end task".

Some people suggest closing everything except "explorer", but I think it would be prudent to leave your virus scanner running, and if you have an "always on" internet connection such as DSL or cable (like I do) you might want to think about leaving your firewall on as well.