i need help. im trying to get into pc gaming but.

so im getting kinda tired of my 360 freezing up and the rrod , so i recently decided id invest in upgrading my pc. the only problem is i have no idea what to buy for it. ill read my specs off my pc, bear with me im new.

amd athlon 64 x2 dual core processor 4200+

1024 mb memory

320 gb hard drive

nvidia geforce 6150 le graphics.

its an hp with windows vista

and thats seriously all i know. now i dont know if i need to upgrade my graphics card or what not because i dont even know if thats good or not. so please just suggest to me some things i need to buy to make it more gaming accessible.

(i dont want to play crysis, im just a huuge rts fan)

Another 1024MB of RAM would be nice, quite a few games are starting to require that much, especially while running Vista.

A new graphics card is also a must - those are integrated graphics you've got right now. Fortunately, the 6150 chipset is only made with PCI-e graphics cards, so you won't need to mess around with finding out if your computer is AGP or PCI-e, it's definitely PCI-e, which is a good thing.

What exact card and RAM you get depends on several factors however:

1: What type of RAM is that? The Athlon X2 chips only support DDR and DDR2 type RAM. Find out which you have, and you'll be halfway there.

2: How many RAM slots do you have, and how sticks are you currently running? Odds are that's either a single 1024MB stick, or two 512MB sticks. Most motherboards have either 2 or 4 RAM slots, which could mean you have anywhere between 0-3 free RAM slots.

In order to find out that information, download a program called CPU-Z, and check out the information under the "Memory" tab, which will tell you how many slots you have, what type of RAM you're using, and how many slots are actually in use.

For the graphics card, all you really need to find out is some information about your power supply. Unfortunately, there is only one way to do this, and that's by opening up your case and visually inspecting the power supply itself. There are two things you need to look for:

1: Somewhere on the power supply there should be a sticker that lists the maximum wattage of the power supply. This is important to know, but more importantly I'd say would be the amount of amperage (a) available on the +12v rail. It will most likely be a numer between 13-20a, and there might be more than one rail (+12v1 and +12v2) - if this is the case, then there should also be a maximum wattage or amperage listed somewhere on the sticker - something like "max combined +12v wattage = 300w".

2: There's also a 6-pin power connector you'll want to have - it will look like this, although it might not necessarily say "PCI-e" on the conenctor itself. It should be the only 6-pin connector coming out of the power supply though, and it might be tied up in a cable bundle somewhere. If you've got one of these, all well and good. If not, you still have some options.

can u reccomend and good graphics card for under 100 bucks. im not trying to play games like crysis, just a few rts games like c&c and maybe a few sims games. ag3ntz3rox0x

Just get my card. Runs crysis medium and everything else maxd.