hi and thanks in advance for any help you can offer me.

im looking at upgrading my cpu as its starting to reach its limitations i think. i have a usage indicator on my vista desktop and whilst my pc is idle on the desktop it runs at about 20% full. whenever i play games it rockets up to 90 - 100 % and thus the games slow down.

my system is on vista and the current cpu is a duo core intel pentium d cpu 2.8ghz. im not sure how good that cpu is and what i can upgrade my system to but im aware that my motherboard has its limitations.

if anyone can offer advice on what my system will take and the fitting aspect also.

thanks again.

You need to ID the model of your computer or the motherboard and then you might be able to find out which cpu the motherboard will support.

You probably should consider your graphics card before your CPU. It depends to an extent what sort of games we are talking about but in general most of the effort goes into generating the images. So if they slow down i.e. the fps drops, then it is usually a shorfall in the graphics solution. And if the graphics card is struggling, more of the load will be passed down to the CPU.

hi and many thanks for the replies. firstly this is the details of my motherboard >>>

Dell DM061
Bus Type Intel NetBurst
Bus Width 64-bit
Real Clock 200 MHz (QDR)
Effective Clock 800 MHz
Bandwidth 6400 MB/s

the game im using on my pc is football manager. i use my xbox for all other games. so whilst not a graphically demanding game, it does use quite a bit of memory. also when i play the game the cpu usage goes right up to between 90 - 100 % when processing the game. with the latest edition (fm2010)released this week im worried that the new game will be even more demanding on my pc and run slowly.

again any help or advice appreciated.

As far as I can find, this is a socket 775 board and supports a cpu with a FSB of 800 MHz and 1066 MHz.

Core 2 Duo E6600 and E6400 are listed as compatible which perform better than your current Pentium D, but these processors have been superseded by newer models and now might not be readily available new.

Whether the bios will recognise the newer processors isn't clear.

HERE are the Dimension E520 specs which uses the DM061 motherboard.

TBH though your existing processor should be able to cope with the game fine, so it could well be a bug in the game causing the problem.

Have you installed the latest game patch updates?

Is there a 2D and 3D mode? If there is, try switching to 2D mode if your graphics chip isn't that great. Or as Hopper suggested, you may need a better graphics card, if this is the case.

Extra memory might help as well being as you're running Vista. 1GB is the minimum for Vista to run FM 2009.

Might also be worth having a look at the game troubleshooting sites.