Ok. I have a couple questions:

1) My mom bought this computer about... 7 years ago (i think)? It's a Dell, has 510MB RAM, and a 40G hard drive (DxDiag.txt). How horrible is this compared to recent/newer computers?

2) Should I just give up and buy a whole new computer system? or just upgrade the graphics card, memory, and hard drive?

3) I'm a "Gamer" and what I'm running right now won't let me play much of anything. I have a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 graphics card. Is that a good graphics card in terms of gaming? The games I have now are Spore, Sims 2, and Sims 2 pets. I had to uninstall World of Warcraft because I only have about 6G's left.

It would be awesome if anyone could give me a few tips. Thank you for your time :] (I have the specifics of my computer in an attachment)

Hello and welcome to PCHelpForum.

I have marked your thread as "Open" in readyness for the team to answer your questions.

JB.

Yessir-- that is no gaming rig by today's standards.
It won't do much good to try to upgrade the Video or RAM... the hardware has changed a lot since that model-- the Video card interface is completely different now, for instance.

To advise you we would need to have some idea of your budget--
you can spend a small fortune on an up-to-date rig.
Serious gamers can and do spend $4000 or more-- but you may not need a cutting-edge machine.
You can also go the budget-gamer route -- or in between. More money usually buys incrementally more speed -- and perhaps greater longevity for the hardware-- it will take a little longer to become obsolete.

Let us know.

yes thats a lil old for "gameing" It just depends on what you want to do with it. Sounds like its your main rig?? It is just a lil to old to upgrade just parts, im sure adding another 512 of ram wont hurt but it wont get it to "gameing specs" As far as spore goes you are barley meeting the minimum sys. requirements. I just built "a low end machine" for under 400 so parts are getting cheaper these days.

You need a new pc to game. period

Absolutely-- new rig time.
The Dell has a VGA video-card... won't be widely available in a few more years-- it is 20-year-old tech...
The new standard is PCI express--many times faster-- plus there are multi-core processors + hugely faster RAM speeds.

Definitely. A new rig is the way to go