What'up guys?

Would you kindly help me out with this? Take a look at my pc:

GeForce FX 5500, 256 MB video card
Intel Pentium 4 1.60 GHZ processor
1024 ram

Well, i'm no real expert at this, but i think that's all that matters, right? If you need more specs i'll give it pronto

I recently bought Team Fortress 2 on Steam, and even though my pc seems to fit in the minimum requirements, the game is unplayable, even on the lowest settings

I wonder if i need to upgrade my PC or it's probably something on it's software?

Thanks in advance

you don't have a monitor!!!

You're better getting a new PC. There's not much you can do on the software side, the PC doesn't meet the reqs (TF2 requires 1.7GHz according to Wiki).

You do meet the minimum system requirements.
Team Fortress 2 Minimum System Requirements
CPU: 1.2 GHz Processor
RAM: 256 MB
Graphics Card: DirectX 7 capable graphics card

How long has it been since windows was loaded in the machine?
how many processes do you have running in the background?

Radeon HD 4830 - 75 bucks at newegg
Phenom X4 9500 - 90 bucks at tigerdirect

Here's your help.

I'll take a look at these, thank you, but you think it's all i need?

Perhaps, i have this PC for a long time, but i'd like a cheaper solution for now, and then start saving for a new pc

Well... a while, i guess, like a year

Right now, 50 processes

You suggest i format my pc?

Are you running XP I assume? Well if you want to run some up to date games (like Crysis, Fallout 3 etc.) I would recommend at least another 1GB of RAM. Anyways it shall work fine most of time.

Edit: and be sure to have a PSU of at least 350W. 30 bucks stuff.

You probably don't need to reformat your computer. But you have you get the processes that you are running down to about 30 or less. That is probably causing alot of your problems.

Yep, i use XP, should i get Vista?

1GB of ram should work fine with my current pc or if i get the stuff you recommended me?

Well, there goes my new guitar savings! :(

I have no clue of what half of them are, and since it's been a while since i last formatted i think it's better to do this

NO, don't get Vista by any means. If your games can't run, getting Vista is the worst thing you can do.

And getting RAM won't help you, the RAM you have isn't the best, but it's decent, most games (except the newest) require no more than 1GB. By far the weakest link there is the processor, it's slow, that's why games don't run, not for the RAM. This is why I suggest a new PC, if it were just a RAM or graph card problem, I'd just suggest upgrading, but when it's a processor problem, it probably means that the motherboard is old too, so upgrading will be difficult