Hi there friend!
Well, obviously the best thing to do to maximise gaming performance is to buy better hardware, remember, a gamer can never have 'too much' performance!
But if you are not interested in upgrading at all, or dont have the money there are other things you can do. =)
I'll be blunt, the rig you have there is...dated. I would strongly suggest you look into buying yourself a new one soon, whether you build it yourself or buy it off the shelf. But those specs can still run most of the games out today, although not on very high settings, obviously. =)
First things first, RAM. An Ideal amount of RAM for a medium performance gaming rig is 4gb (8gb is preferable), but in this case it wouldnt make a difference to you as you have a 32bit OS. a 32bit OS can only utilise 3.2gb of RAM unfortunatly, and so you would need to upgrade to a 64bit in order to fully utilise 4gb of RAM.
I would suggest cleaning up your system, aka, spending a few hours running registry defrags, deleting old files, removing unwanted programms, that sort of thing. Ideally you should just go and re-install the OS, as this is bound to make it run faster. Let me know whether you are fine with an OS reinstall, or whether you want to manually clean it up and I shall provide guidance if necasary.
There are several 'Game boosting' programs out there that can be of some assistance. Generally, when activated, they stop any services that are not going to be used when gaming, and therefore free up both RAM and processing power. You might want to look into this? I would advise you only to download these programs from trusted websites, such as Cnet, to minimise the risk of getting a bogus program and infecting your PC.
But to be honest all games today are made to be able to run on virtually any machine, no matter what the spec (Within reason), as the game manufacturer wants as many people as possible to buy thier game. So you should have no problem running any games on your rig, albeit it will have to be on very low settings and at a low frame rate most probably. =/
The best OS to use is entirely down to your own oppinion. There is no 'no.1' OS. I personally like Windows 8, due to its low resource demands and smooth UI, but alot of people dont like it and prefer the likes of Windows 7 or XP. (No one likes Vista XD) But if I had one piece of advice it would be to upgrade to a 64bit OS. The benefits are substantial, and not just in gaming.
Hope this helps, and if you have any other queries, please dont hesitate to ask!
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