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[Iowa]

Well, I figure it's about time to upgrade my PC, primarily to make it so that I can run games made past 2001 but more specifically i'm looking to run World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2, Painkiller, and Doom 3 (and maybe FEAR).

Here are my current system speculations:

Windows 2000
Intel Pentium 4 (1.7 GHZ)
Integrated sound card (?)
16mb Nvidia Vanta
128mb RAM
20GB hard drive

I plan to upgrade my video card to 128mb and my RAM to 1GB. If I have any money left after this, i'll try to at least up my HD capacity to 50GB, but I doubt this is all possible on 150 dollars.

But i have a few questions:

-Will this upgrade make the aforementioned games work? (for WoW I should be fine on Internet connect speed, I have upwards of 200kb/s)

-Does the brand of video card i get matter? (Nvidia or ATI)

-How do I determine my video card port number? (or that I am buying the right type of video card for my PC)

-If HL2 will work, will I be able to run STEAM without completely raping my system resources and connection speed? (I've witnessed this on lesser computers)


Any advice/knowledge would be very much appreciated on these and other subjects. k: