tons of game lag offline and online

ok heres the thing afew days ago i started to get lag on my game its hard to say how it is lets see its like the game is running fine no problems at all and thin its like it stopes and goes stops and goes runs fine for a min or 2 and starts that stuff again below is a listr of games that this happens on and the spec's of pc

Tribes
Hardtrucks 18 wheeles of steel
battlefield 1942
nascar racing 2002
midtown madness2
monster truck madness2

P4 asus mobo
celeron 2.0ghz running at 2766mhz
ASUS geforce TI4200 128mb agp x8 driver upto date
onboard sound driver upto date
512mb dual channel pc2100 about to upgrade to 1280mb of ram
windows 98se still looking for a copy of xp cheap lol
52x32x52 liteon cd-rw
sony 16x dvd-rom
as you can see i should not have no truble running these games at all
and as you can also can see by my chose of games i am a redneckhttp://forums.majorgeeks.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

 

compatability maybie....or maybie a memory leak.. i wish i could say, because last week NEVERWINTER NIGHTS started playing slow and laggy, and so did 42'...even worse Diablo2 lod...on or off line. my pc's a third of yours but played these games a week ago smooth
i have an
AMD 761 duron
ABIT kg7 RAID
win xp pro
blah blah

unfortunately theres no high speed here, and im lookin into a new laptop, so no wireless either(for a few weeks).
could it be new game patches that are win xp sp2 compatable, just dont work with sp1?
i'm sorta wondering..because neverwinter is an awsome game, and now its become unplayable....
on or offline

 

I got the same problem on my laptop with any 3d games...After a few mins of playing lag free it starts to horribly chug.

p-m 1.4ghz
512 ddr
ati 9000 64mb
wxp-p

 

maybe its not a video problem just hear me out maybe its a sound problem maybe the sound starts laging causeing the game to lag i have been messing with sound settings and now one of the games is starting to play fine i am now thinking its a sound problem i am still working on it if i get it fixed i will let you all know how to fix it