performance problems

I have a p4 3.2 gig with 1 gig of ram. ati 9600xt with latest drivers.
Only 28 processes running and my vid settings are d3d set to quality and opengl set to quality and still get substantial skippage in games. turned aa off and at off and still get skippage. Have no viruses and have everything up to date.
Any ideas on how to get games to perform better.Or am i just expecting to much from vid card?

 

can you define "skippage"? and can you tell us what game you're playing? because if you like doom3 and expect over 60fps... yeah

anyway, one possible problem is agp not being enabled. go to start / run and type in "dxdiag" w/o quotes. go to the display and see if agp texture acceleration is enabled. if it's not, you'll need to download motherboard chipset drivers. just tell me the motherboard chipset brand and i'll give you a link to download.

 

games with video skippage, but no sound skippage and it skips like a strobelight, quite frequenlty. Agp texture acceleration is enabled, and it is games like tiger woods pga 2004. halflife 2, warrior within, the punisher, far cry, need for speed underground 1 and 2...I will probably answere my own question when i tell you it is a dell optiplex gx270...Vid card was later purchased.

 

I think it would be a good idea to run a benchmark program like 3dmark2003
It can be downloaded from futuremark.com then compare your score to these
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041004/vga_charts-04.html#3dmark_2003
Your computer should be graphics card limited so your score should be very close to the 9600xt,if not theres a problem.