XP Home and XP Pro are supposed to be mainly identical in basic features and
performance. Pro supports 2 physical processors (Home supports dual core
CPUs, though), Pro supports features that may be important to corporate
networking, and file encryption.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/p...choosing2.mspx

(comparison between Home and Pro)

As for your hardware, is this your mainboard?

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p...2-LSR&class=mb

(My guess is that MS-7060 is a Microstar mainboard, rather than a Medion
model.)

It has onboard graphics, which are usually worthless for gaming. The onboard
graphics are using 32 MB of your RAM, which is why it's being reported as
480 rather than 512 MB.

To upgrade the graphics, you'd need an AGP card. The Radeon 9700 is an old
model, but not a bad choice (if you can find one at a decent price). The
9600 is newer, but far from new. A card based on an nVidia Geforce 6600,
6600GT, or vanilla 6800 might be a better choice. None are really cheap. I
suggest an online vendor like www.newegg.com over a Circuit City, Best Buy,
etc. I don't own the games that you mention, so I don't know what graphics
cards they require. Newegg has the advantage of a graphics card selector
online. It's easy to use.

Your mainboard has only 2 DIMM slots. The SiS chipset seems to not support
dual channel memory, so you may have 1 or 2 DIMMs installed. If it's 2,
you'll have to remove one or both to upgrade.

You ought to be able to get acceptable gaming performance out of the
machine, but it might have been cheaper to buy a system that was built for
the purpose. (I assemble my own systems, although I probably don't save
money as a result.)

Have fun.


Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

"Darunia" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> Greetings,
>
> I just had a few questions about how my current PC is, how it will run
> certain things (especially games) ^_^ I bought it for around $600
> dollars through some sale from Aldi's foodstore, I went to start, run
> and ran DXDIAG (there any better programs to see more details?).
> This is what it came up with:
>
> ---------------
>
> Manufactu Medion
>
> Model: MS-7060
>
> OS: XP Home (I've heard it's bad, XP Pro that much better?)
>
> Processor: Pentium 4, 3.00GHz (2 CPUs)
>
> Memory: 480MB Ram (Dad says they lie, and it's actually 512) ??
>
> Bios: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v.6.00PG
>
> HD: 160gig
>
> Video Card: SiS 661FX Rev 01 (...32mb? sucks. hopefully getting a 9700
> Pro or 9600 XT in the next day or so, as far as my research tells,
> these are best for under $100 dollars if I snag a good deal.)
>
> DirectX Version: 9.0c
>
> Sound: Realtek AC97 Audio
>
> -----------
>
> That's it. I think it was a very good deal for the price, as we are po'
> folk =P However, I would like some hardcore imput on what I should do /
> replace / mod / purchase to make this a uber gaming machine. I
> currently play World of Warcraft, which runs real choppy & laggy (due
> to video card most likely?) I had to switch the target path to -opengl
> to stop it from crashing my computer. I'm trying to run games such as
> HL2 and CS:source, with no luck. Anyways, hope you can decipher this a
> bit and help me out! Thanks for all the imput beforehand, it's much
> appreciated!
>
>
> --
> Darunia

In the AGP Geforce 6800 line, there were three basic models that I recall:
6800, 6800GT, and 6800 Ultra. The 6800GT and Ultra have 16 pixel pipelines;
the 6800 has 12. The GT is clocked higher than the 6800 that has no suffix;
the Ultra, higher yet.

Maybe the 6600GT would be a slightly better deal, though. It has 8 pixel
pipelines, but the GT is usually clocked at 500 MHz. The 6800 has 12 pipes,
but it's only clocked at 325 MHz; in terms of raw pixel-pushing, it looks
like the 6600GT may win by a small margin some of the time. It's also
slightly cheaper, and slightly newer technology. The 6600GT is much faster
than the 6600, though, and I'd guess that it's worth the extra money.

I'm not familiar with the particulars, but i would regard any card with an
LE suffix with great suspicion. Some of the ones that I've seen with that
designation had severely crippled performance (like having the data path to
the graphics memory at half the width of the normal cards) without having a
price that was low enough to justify it.

I like my AGP 6800GT, but the AGP versions appear to still be expensive, and
they seem to be getting harder to find in stock online (newegg, mwave,
monarch).

"Darunia" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> Thanks once again, the info was great. That is my exact motherboard!
> I've decided I'll most likely go with the 6600 or if I get lucky, the
> 6600 GT. I'm not quite sure what this vanilla 6800 is? After I purchase
> the video card, I'll be looking at getting another 512 MB DDR possibly?
>
>
> --
> Darunia