Slow game - upgrade specs?

[Lanarion]

I love the game. It's awesome. In particular I love the Uillean pipes playing during the campaign map, it makes me as an Irishman proud, and adds real depth to it

But my problem is this. I have quite a decent computer (or at least, it used to be) but I can only play ETW at *absolute* minimum settings, which is slightly annoying.

My specs are:
3.2ghz Pentium 4 (think it's dual core, not sure)
2 gb ram <--- is that the issue?
XP
Nvidia 7800gtx 512mb (special xps offer)

I've just updated the graphics driver, which might help. But is there anything really obvious as to why it's running so slow? And if it's just hardware, what would be the obvious upgrade. I'm not rich, but i have a little spare lying around, perhaps £100 or so.

Cheers!

[carlisimo]

Your computer is not quite decent. The P4 is sadly outdated in its architecture - even a single-core Core2 (which doesn't exist) with a low clock speed would be more capable than a fast Pentium 4. The 7800 GTX is also outdated (though I thought ETW would run a little better than that, with specs like yours). Your RAM is fine.

Odds are your motherboard has an AGP slot for the graphics card; new cards use PCI-E. You can't install a modern CPU in a motherboard built for a P4, either, nor are you likely to have a powerful enough PSU (power supply) for modern equipment. I'm afraid there's not much you can do besides optimizing your OS.

Run Lavasoft Ad-Aware to clean out spyware; defragment your hard drive; disable things that start up with Windows (go to Run -> msconfig -> Startup tab); you might even want to reinstall Windows.