66% more computers have better performance then me

Don't feel bad. I think 57% had better than me. A lot of it has to do with RAM and your processor speed once you get past the card rendering graphics and whatnot.

Not going to buy a gig of ram for a game though.. unless it's damn good.

Yeah, as mentioned you have on board graphics... to play BF2, you're gonna have to invest in one of those cards listed as supported. Also, I'd highly recommend having a gig of ram if you get a lower end card.

I'm sadly having the same problem with FEAR, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Dragonshard... all the demos come in full format. When you buy the full version, you can adjust the settings to make it work somewhat. (Demo's don't have the error returns built in, thus why you just get a black screen.)

This is why little ole me stopped playing graphical computer games. My advice: Buy an Xbox 360 this Christmas and never worry about hardware for the next couple of years. $400 seems expensive for a console at first, but when you'd normally drop $200 a year for graphics cards, twice that for memory upgrades, and god knows what for processor and other upgrades, it's a steal.

Edit: Munsia, I recall you mentioning in another thread how you loved Ghost Recon. GRAW is coming to the Xbox 360 in early Feburary 2006. I'm also looking forward to Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, and any Battlefield release (not to mention Halo 3 someday).

Just so you all know. When Windows Vista comes out your going to need 2Gig of ram.

Your going to need 512Mb just to get the operating system to work nicely.

Yeah, I don't like Winblows. I have 2 gigs of ram and 500 gigs of hard drive space already, but I'd rather those resources go to what I'm doing and not the operating system.

I'd like to introduce you to Belarc Advisor
Belarc Advisor

this little guy makes a scan of your computer and produces a html
report on it's specs. He is very useful.

I'm soooo staying with my windows 2k...
Vista, what for?