Poor performance/problem with games...

[kl123]

I have sempron 2500, asus a7n8x, geforce fx5700le 256mb, 512mb ddr 400 and seagate 120gb 7200 8mb. My problem is that whenever i want to play newer games (e.g. half life2, americas army etc.) it doesnt work as it should. Even if i have 60fps in America's Army (you can't reach more fps in this game) it lags from time to time as well as half life 2 (played offline). I am not talking about internet connection's lags, it looks like the game slows down for a second. HDD works then and you can hear some sound errors. Such "bug" only takes a second or a few and repeats after some time, sooner or later. I have the newest drivers, AGP aperture size in Bios is set to 128mb. No viruses, trojans and HDD is reguraly defragmented. I don't know what it could be... Plz help!

P.S
English is not my first language so some mistakes could occur. ( if any )

[waresoft]

Have you tried a Nvidia tweaking utility or a tweaking utility for your OS? Sometimes they can help out alot. Try shutting down some services to free up ram and processor cycles. Try using PerfectDisk to defragment. XP's built in defragmenter is terrible.

Are you using a pagefile? If you are, you should let Windows manage it. I know you hear different stuff on different forums. However, when Windows manages your pagefile and you defragment it on boot with PerfectDisk, it will be large enough that it won't fragment. When you do that, it will actually outperform a fixed size pagefile.