Avatars flickering different textures?

Hi everyone. I'm a total newbie, so bear with me!

I registered and logged in to SL just fine, but once I got in, I found my problem--I went into appearances to change my avatar and my av started changing repeatedly. It would change to random textures (grass, signs, etc.) maybe two per second, slowing down the program terribly. It wasn't just me, either; there were two other people in the area at the moment and their avatars were flickering different textures as well.

I have all my graphics drivers updated (granted, I am not much of a techy-type, but this computer is only a few months old) and all my settings are turned as far down as I get get them to see if it would cure the problem.

What should I do? It's bad enough that I can't even run the program and I might have to uninstall it and call it a day.

Never mind--I finally found the correct keywords with which to search the forums and discovered quite a few users having the same problem due to a old or unsupported graphics card. I thought mine worked when I checked it (I'm away from home right now so I can't dink around in the settings) but I guess it won't.

Ah, SL would have been fun, but my pockets are empty for computer upgrades, lol...