buying a new PC

[bosox188]

well, right now i have a 2.0ghz, 512RAM, 80 GB, radeon 9600, and it ran half life 2 PERFECT....now after reformating my damn computer, it drops to about 5 FPS in certain places....and no one on the entire world has any idea why.......the only suggestion i get is to add more ram....but why would I go to the trouble of spending allllll that cash when i dont even know if its going to fix the problem..........this is my last resort, I have to either figure out why its not running like it used to, or pretty much buy a new pc.........btw, how do i update my chipset drivers?

I don't know how it ran perfectly before, maybe the settings were different or something. But look at my specs, I have a 9800 pro and 1gb of ram, and HL2 still slows up for me. In big areas or when there's a lot of people, HL2 dips even under 30fps, I almost never have higher than 50fps for long, I can't even run 1280x1024 with no AA/AF decently. I guess it's my Processor, which would probably be the case for you as well I need to upgrade that.