[Maxinion]

Other random performance tips:

Turn off all the "eye candy" in Windows XP. Don't use those round buttons, go back to classic view, etc. You don't need shadows, etc. All these things eat up RAM.

Turn off your anti-virus, and all background programs. They eat up RAM as well, and every little bit helps sometimes.

Sweep up the spyware! Go get Spy-Bot and Ad-Aware, and run them both. Together, they'll get rid of pretty much any malicious software attacking your computer and eating up resources. Just google for them.

Lastly, you may want to restart your computer before playing. Some badly written programs don't clean themselves from memory after you close them, and so as your computer stays on, its performance starts to degrade ever so slightly. Restart, and you get a "fresh start," as it were.

These will give you a TINY (~1-2 fps? Something like that, more if you close or sweep some really large/bad programs) benefit, but for me they've become second nature, so they're no longer very annoying to go through.