text: Good answers, all. For gaming, Max out your Video RAM, bump your system RAM to 1 gig. \n\nAnd go through your Start-up programs to cut back on the number of TSR's that boot. (Minimize the number of little icons in the lower right corner of your screen by the clock). Defrag at least bi-weekly if you are gaming a lot, like daily. \n\nWhen you use a piece of a game program it pulls it from the main game folder into RAM, then when you're finished with that game module or file (like a sound file or a graphic image file), it gets placed back out of RAM onto the HDrive. But not necessarily where it came from, just back to some open memory address on the HD. Kinda like you going to the Library and taking a book off the shelf, looking at it, ripping out 15 pages, then putting the book back on another shelf, but putting the 15 pages on 12 other shelves. Kinda hard to finish the book. Same for PC's and any program you run on them. It has to go looking for those "pages".  Defrag puts the "book" back together in page order.