Hi - I'm in serious need of some upgrades but with funds limited I'm trying to decide which way to go - and I'm no expert.
The biggest issue I've got is with sound (in other respects my SL experience is not bad but could be better). When I first log on to SL (unless it's a very busy sim) streamed sound is fine but after 30mins or so it collapses to an undefined fuzz. Notably, once I've shut SL down this will often continue for a short while in other applications. I'm running a 1500+ CPU, no sound card and 1GB RAM. The inclination is to dash out & buy a sound card to take the workload off the CPU but clearly the latter is a somewhat underpowered anyway and for choice I'd rather upgrade the CPU as this will impact on performance in other ways - unfortunately it has to be either / or for the moment.
The CPU is sufficient for the most part although streaming video is rather laggy as well and as I have a decent, if unspectacular, Radeon 9500 graphics card I'm guessing upgrading the CPU may help there as well.
Finally, my phoneline will only support 2mbps so my attempt to upgrade the speed of my Broadband package earlier today fell at the 1st fence and this will presumably also be having an impact.
I strongly suspect that a new sound card will have the most sigificant effect on SL's performance but I'd be interested in any advice available.