noob here

Hmm, that's a pretty old rig you've got there. I'm guessing you're right at the bottom end of the recommended specs?

In general, though, the best ways to squeeze the best performance out of a rig is...

1. Make sure your drivers are up to date
2. Kill any unnecessary processes. Anti-virus software is often a performance killer, but since you're connected to the net whilst playing, you probably shouldn't turn it off. Changing AV software might help though - I've heard AVG hogs far fewer resources than Norton, for example. But make sure you turn off email, messenger etc whilst playing games.
3. Defrag your harddisk - especially make sure the page file isn't fragmented.
4. If you haven't reinstalled Windows in a while, do that. Your registry inevitably gets bloated after years of installing and uninstalling stuff. A nice clean system will usually boot faster and you'll see an improvement in performance. Maybe also take the opportunity to do a ghost image of the clean install to save time next time.
5. Start saving up for a new rig and treat yourself  

Lower your resolution in wow.

lower all the video settings bar the view distance (that needs to be atleast half way up)

As the above person said kill any un needed processes.

I have an amd xp 2000 with 1 gig ram and a 9600 pro and mine runs fine. im not too sure how much of a difference the 2 gfx will be.

also if you have any addons in wow make sure they are to a minimum, i noticed when i use lots of them it tends to hog my system recourses.

You could just buy my ATi X800 XT PE off ebay… going fairly cheep just now at 99p  

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ATi-X800-XT-Platinum-Edition-Arct...

@ Xstec - lowering his resolution to something that isn't his native resolution will look pretty rubbish.

is the x800 better?, (I got into computer building around the end of the 6 series time)

If he is after better fps then looks will probably need to be sacrificed.

Spuddyt: the nvidia 6800 is slightly faster than the x800 pro.

Just as well it's an X800 XT PE... ooh it's at £5.50 now  

Dropping ur view distance should have a noticable improvement in performance. If you have vsync enabled, turn on triple buffering. Wow also tends to enable 2x multisampling by default on most configurations, so dropping that down to 1x may help frames, although you will notice visuals will not look as good.

Other than that, I'd suggest you may want to invest in a more powerful video card.

truly, you sit upon a fortune  

For £5.50, you may as well keep it as a backup. Or use it as a paperweight.