I will go with phishphreek80 on this one. That is not a "top end gaming card", and seems a little out of balance with the rest of your specs from a gaming viewpoint. This system is somewhat similar to yours, and has an ATi Radeon with 64Mb. It only has a single core 32bit Intel processor (2.26GHz) and I would consider that to be a more balanced build.

In your Windows advanced properties please check that you are giving priority to "Applications" and that you have a decent sized page file (although with 1Gb of RAM, that generally isn't an issue).

I cannot think of any tweaks that would immediately help. This is a Win 2000 box that is 4 years old. I ran WinASO Regdefrag 1.2, and the registry defragmenter from Sysinternals, and they found nothing to do, even after that amount of time! So I don't think that will help. XP is even better than Win 2000 in that department AFAIK. I only think it might help if you had experienced some sort of "event" and had to repair the Registry?

This is a good Windows tweaking site: http://www.x9k.net/

phish~ has forgotten more about gaming than I shall ever know, but from my limited knowledge of the hardware aspects, I would say that a new video card is the solution. He does have a good point about the drivers though.................ATi don't have the best reputation in that area

You will probably be tempted to overclock your video card. If you do, please follow these suggestions:

1. Replace the thermal paste with a silver based compound.
2. Give it a better fan.
3. Look for heatsinks for the memory chips.
4. Upgrade the case cooling.

Good Luck

EDIT: Is this a laptop we are talking about?