ovshanevo wrote:
I know this is a massive noob question, but I am unable to find an answer since the answering need to be to my com's specs. What should I up grade video card, memory, or processor(?)?
Memory: 4 Gigs Ram
Processor: Athelon Dual-core 4200 and 2-CPU's(?) ~ 2.2 Ghz
Video Card: Nvidia Gforce 8400GS, 2500 MB's (I am guessing this is actually 256mb processing)
I don't know much about computers, but is there anything else I should check up on before I do an upgrade?
{EDIT}
And I am thinking specifically for WoW.
More information about your computer's mainboard might help a little, but uh...
Most likely, upgrading your RAM isn't going to help you very much. You already have 4GB, and that is more than enough for most games, and certainly enough for WoW unless you're going for ultra hardcore settings. Your average WoW gamer should get 60+ FPS out of 4GB of RAM, easily.
Your CPU is most likely a waste of time to upgrade; you'd have to find a CPU that would fit your mainboard (which you don't likely know what socket type your mainboard even has) and replacing a CPU is something that only a person familiar with computer hardware should do: It is the easiest part by far to break on your computer. A CPU has dozens of tiny little pins and any force applied in just the wrong direction/way will permanently destroy the CPU and void any warranty it might have had, not to mention the CPU heatsink/fan can be difficult to attach and remove if you're not familiar with how to do it. Furthermore, you have a Dual-Core, and outside of upgrading to a Quad-Core, you wouldn't see much of a performance upgrade.
That leaves us to your video card. I highly doubt you're running AGP, unless your computer is 3+ years old. It is most likely a PCI-e, which means it should be able to take most video cards out there. Someone above mentioned your PSU, which is a valid concern. Most cards on the market in the <$100 range, though, should be decent upgrades but yet have low power consumption. Your main power hogs comes from running multiple cards on SLI or some-such, or the huge high-end behemoths.
There's something else you ought to try:
Ask a friend who's familiar with computers to check your system's startup registry. This is something I preach to my friends all the time: You want a
clean start up: Only security software and things absolutely necessary to the OS should be loading on startup. You do not need Instant Messengers, Email software, and other things of this type loading on Windows startup. Things like these should be used on-demand (click the icon when you wish to sign into IM) and unless you seriously want AIM, or MSN, or what-not running while playing WoW, it is very strongly recommended you don't run them while playing WoW.
You'd think this would be common sense, that you shouldn't run unneeded software when you're not using it, but you'd be surprised how many my friends have whined that they can't get more than 30-40 FPS while they're running 50 idle programs in the background that they're not even using while in-game. Anything from Firefox, to AIM, MSN, Email, is running in the background and gobbling up CPU/RAM. You'd press Ctrl+Alt+Del and check Task Manager and get a huge long list of crap that's running that isn't needed.
The only thing you really need on start up are the following:
Anti-virus.
Firewall.
Device Software (video driver progs, like Catalyst, Razer's software, etc)
Things like Daemon Tools if you use that.
System services (anything Windows put there when you first installed it)
The problem is, many, many programs think that they should run upon Windows Startup, and most of them are enabled to behave like this by default. Rather than going through each program and putting a check in "load on windows startup" it is better to uncheck the boxes within Windows Startup instead, but this should only be done by someone who's familiar with how to do it, though you could find a guide on the net to do it, just google "msconfig" and find a guide for the OS you're using (XP, 7, etc).
The reason you should uncheck the boxes in startup rather than each program, is many times, a program's systray manager will still load (and still eat up resources) and/or during startup, the program will load and then immediately exit which still eats up system resources when starting the computer up. I know Winamp behaves like this, it runs a hidden process in the systray, unless you disable the whole thing altogether and only load winamp when you plan to listen to music.