Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20170901233307/@comment-1496755-20170905162415

I think it was called a "jumper" actually - two metal pins that I had to touch with something made of metal (in this case - a screwdriver) for a few seconds. There was no visible effect of doing that, so imagine how relieved I felt when I reconnected the PC and it booted properly... before that it was like dead - black screen, nothing happening, couldn't even enter the BIOS to undo my changes. I really freaked out for a few seconds - I thought "They asked me to make it work better and instead I broke it down completely". Well, at least now I know how to avoid (and fix) such situations in the future - it's useful experience ;)

I have mostly played with software - hardware makes me nervous because my knowledge of electronics isn't that great, I am generally clumsy, and I'm always afraid of breaking something down when I tamper with the insides of a machine. But that night, it was an emergency, so I did not hesitate to open it up and look for that jumper.

Oh, I know... until I moved to my new home, this was my video card. Luckily, I already had sufficient experience with squeezing the most out of "low" and "medium" quality settings, thanks to my laptop, whose video card is even worse.

It does have 4 GB RAM already (which is good), and the CPU looks decent (Windows gave it a rating of 6.0)... I guess that old on-board video card is the real drag. It has a rating of 3.3 and I can see how poorly it performs even in older games. In fact, performance seems even worse after the upgrade to Win 7. Stuff that was decently playable under XP is laggy as Hell now.

Like I told my parents - if they want a real improvement, they should start thinking about buying a new PC altogether.