What is my biggest pc problem? Dual boxing graphics issue

[Aldercy]

whats the biggest need of upgrading?

First priority would be your memory. Your memory capacity is too low by a factor of 2. 4GB would suffice for dual boxing.

The next priority would be your graphics card, not because of its age but because it also has a rather low memory capacity.

HTH

Actually with XP 2gb of ram would suffice. Although he did mention that the system did not run as well as he would like his main issue was with artifacts appearing on one of the screens. This is more likely to be an issue with the graphics card not being able to keep up with drawing the two windows at the same time. With the price of the 9 series of NVIDIA cards I would suggest looking into them as a first upgrade. The 9600 and 9800 would be a significant improvement over what you’re currently running. I am curious about your current graphic settings in game; are they all set to the lowest? What's your current screen resolution?

You can try adding to your memory as suggested, though if it was a memory issue it would not be affecting the drawing of the screen to the point of causing artifacts as the OP described. I would only do so in this case if you could afford both the upgrade of memory and video card at the same time, and if your going to do that I would check if your main board supports DDR2 800 and replace what’s in there completely (that is if the main board supports 4gb, which will depend on its age). And even if you do upgrade to 4gb, unless you’re running XP 64 then you’re not going to see all of it anyway. There is not enough address spacing in a 32 bit OS to fully use 4gb of memory meaning that you can only address 3gb of the memory you’ve installed. Many uninformed people will try to tell you that it still uses the 4gb even though it doesn’t report more then 3gb, but this is simply not true; you cant use memory space that you cant address through the OS.

You really do need to be careful with the overlap; even 1 pixel of overlap can throw your performance out the window.

I hope this clears some things up for you, good luck on your upgrades.
- Aldercy