I have the Emachine T3302 which I bought from Best Buy and haven't upgraded any of the hardware. I am currently using the on-the-motherboard video display. I have a feeling I'm not using my graphics chip to its maximum as both mplayer and xine have problems with choppy playback. In Gnome, the Windows move all choppy ever since FC5 and cairo. (And forget playing bzflag. I tried that and was almost immediately kicked out for lag despite being on a cable modem - and the tank moved like it was in molasses)

This computer is FC5 and I think I originally installed FC4 on this computer. If it matters, I copied most of the home directory over from a slower computer which had originally started with either FC3 or FC2. I suspect something is up with the graphics chip not being fully taken advantage of because the system is an AMD Sempron 2.0 Ghz chip with 512 MB RAM - yet the previous computer I had Linux on was 128 MB RAM and Pentium 2 500 Mhz, but most of the graphics ran a LOT better!

If you can point in the right direction or let me know what information you need, I'm not a total linux or lq.org newbie, so I know about dmesg, grep, etc. I just haven't done anything with displays yet so I don't know what other info you need to know.

Also, I'm not against using nvidia or ati drivers if that will help.

Thanks in advance,

According to specs I found here this is a good strong machine for office use. However, it has only 2D graphics what makes it totally inappropriate for typical home use (games and multimedia besides office apps). If you want to use it at home better start shopping for an AGP graphics card.

Thanks! That was very helpful!