Well, I am at my wits end with this rig. Better get the specs out of the way early ... that will help the conversation along:

ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Mobo rev1
Athlon 1700+ 1GB RAM
ATI X800 XL
Lite-On 52x24x52 CD
Lite-On 16x DVDRW
WD 80GB Drive
Maxtor 160GB Drive
Antec Big Black Steel Case
Antec Smart Power 400W PSU SL400

So ... about 2 years ago I decide I want to upgrade the graphics card. Thats when I bought the X800 XL. The thought was ... My Graphics card was weak. It was a NVidia 64 4200 or something ... at any rate, a card I bought for a previous system.

Well, since that time, I have been running this rig and it seems so slow when rendering graphics. Heck, even playing a silly .mp4 file with quicktime seems like a strain for it. I tried some holistic fixes, like downloading a driver from ATI, but all that got me was an error everytime I boot, looking for some new hardware device. I run a native resolution of 1280 x 1024 on a Sony HM440 CRT. I also have a Dell 1905 FP attached to this card as the "extended display".

As another example of poor performance, I ran the catalyst test or something that comes with the disk and it was like 11fps when looking at a silly silver ball out in the middle of a lake (hope that makes sense to someone).

So ... the question is, where do I go from here. I would like to get this thing running smooth and at least as capable as it can be. I know I need a new rig, and that is definately on the radar, but for now ... is there anything I can do?

for the video playback, my guess would be improper codecs. Try downloading a good codec pack, like the cole2k packs. Using the default codecs that come with windows I had a slideshow playback on an AMD 800 system with a G4TI4600. new codecs and very smooth playback with minimal CPU utilization compared to 100% with the default ones windows had.

Try running a benchmark and/or game and compare it to the THG charts. If it's way off there is something wrong.

HTH