Originally posted by rodak
intel pentium 3 at 1ghz ati 9600xt 128 mb agp slot graphics card and 512 mb of ram running windows xp is the basic info guys. the machine is a dell xps b1000r that I bought back in 2001 if I remember correctly.
One issue with older Dells are their proprietary motherboards, which means most others won't fit their case. You are probably limited to a 2X AGP slot, maybe a 4X at best. Naturally, that old gal won't have a PCI Express slot either. You 9600XT card is designed to utilize an 8X AGP slot, so your MB is the choke point. At the least, you should consider adding another 512 MB of RAM.
Another option is to dump the Dell MB and case, buy a new MB (with 8X AGP slot) and P4 processor. You can move all the drives, sound and video cards to a new case (with at least a 400 watt power supply). That is probably the least expensive upgrade I can think of that can get you back into the game. Any computer shop can do this for a few hundred dollars. I did exactly this with my wife's 2002 Dell. I can run AH2 on it with a frame rate limited only by the refresh rate of the monitor.
My regards,
Widewing