bottlenecking?

i just bought Lord of the rings: battle for middle earth 1, and im running it on high settings, but it lags in big battles; the system requirements are...

1.3 GHz processor
256mb ram
geforce 2 gts or better

i have...

Amd 1.6Ghz
1 gig 266mhz ram
xfx 7600gt 256mb

is the reason for the lag my processor bottlenecking my graphics card? i only have 18% free Hardrive space left is that it? would a disk defrag help?
any suggestions or advice would be very helpful. i dont think this game is suppose to lag on my PC, im lost...

a defrage may heklp in places, especially loading but i think your cpu is not capabl;e of supporting big battles at high details.

if it is high gfx details it should be that bad but if you have alot of units on screen then it is the CPU that calculates the movement of them.

this is probably why it lags.

like mactronix said, their are usually 2 different requirements, minimum and recommended. minimum ain't worth the paper it is written on. recommended is in truth the minimum for smooth gameplay and really you should have more than the recommended for anything other than medium settings.

You need to switch to a higher resolution. At 800*600, the game is more CPU dependant, and having a AMD 1.6 (I'll take a shot in the dark and say you have an Athlon XP 1400+) is your bottleneck. Increase your resolution to 1280*1024 and you WILL see a performance boost since your card has 256MB onboard RAM. Your system ram is fine