been there, got the shirt

I'm late to this thread but like most, I guess, I bought a Dimension 2350, in my case as a PC for my son. I have learned a lot in the ensuing 6 years about the dire onboard graphics, PCI and XP in general. There is actually a perverse pleasure to be had trying to extract the last 1% performance out of this humble machine. My Son is now a young teenager and "S.T.A.L.K.E.R : shadows of Chernobyl" is the latest challenge. It actually does work too, though only in basic graphics mode. Half Life 2 is quite reasonable.

Mine is:

2.6Ghz P4 Dell 2350 with 1Gb RAM
FX5500 PCI Graphics card (o/c 290/350 with ram heatsinks and a blower)
400Watt Sweex PSU
2 new hard drives (Maxtors 7200)

I use the passmark Performance tool as a benchmark to see if any changes improve performance as it's easy to convince yourself something has improved.

A few tips :

disabled as many services as I could

I also disabled/removed all unnecessary hardware. In the BIOS I disabled the parallel and serial ports and the floppy driver (never used it). I removed the PCI modem card that came with mine too. I then re jigged the PCI graphics card until it was in a slot with an IRQ shared with the minimum of other devices. At one point it shared an IRQ with the Broadcom onboard network controller and the SoundMAX onboard sound card ! Sharing with just one of the USB controllers was the best I could achieve (top slot for me but may vary for you)

I keep all my drivers up to date (DirectX,nVidia, broadcom and soundmax) and remove the old drivers first. There is a good tweakguide athttp://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_1.html

I also cleaned up the old devices that XP thought it had. To do this you have to in cmd :

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
Devmgmt.msc

This launches device manager and you have to set "Show hidden devices"

I could see each card I'd had, still listed. I think XP remembers every device you ever plugged in, but wanted to be sure it was using only the correct device and driver for my current card.

I'm tempted by the 6200 PCI. Makes no sense (I know , I should save up for a new MOBO, but ...) on the other hand there is a pretty healthy market for old graphics cards on ebay. I've normally got around 60% of the price of the old card.

Anyone see much benefit of 5500-> 6200 ? PCI of course