How do I improve my pc so it meets Second Life system requirments?

I have Microsoft windows XP Home addition version 2002 service pack 3.

AMD Athlon XP2400+
2.00GHz, 368MB of RAM

Can anyone please recommend to me how or what I need to meet Second Life system requirments, what Graphic card I need to buy etc... What do I need to ask for at the store etc...
And also do graphic cards include more memory?
If not what do I need to buy to improve memory?



Help please I really want to play second life I have heard so much about it.
Thank you, Megan.

You need more ram. You should have a bare minimum of 512 megs, a gig would be much better, 2 gigs better still.

It sounds like your machine is old enough that it may have an AGP video slot instead of the more modern PCI-E slot. If that is true that limits your choice of suitable new cards a good bit, although there are plenty of used cards on eBay.

Before you get a video card, assuming you need to, you should find out what your power supply's output is. You can find that out by unplugging the machine and removing the cover and reading the label on the power supply.

I think there are some other folks that might make a better selection of AGP video cards than I would. For PCI video cards there's a lot choices. You need to know your power supply rating in order to do a proper job of picking a video card, either picking a card that doesn't need a new power supply if you want to spend as little as possible, or for better performance, pick the card you want and buy a power supply if needed.