I have a:

MSI KT3 Ultra
Ge Force 3Ti 128mb
512Kb PC2700 (un-branded)
Soundblaster Player 5.1

Can anytghing be done to improve the performance of the above items?

My system isn't smooth most of the games i play show this the exception being Quake 3, why, I don't know. Someone, please help. (It's past my bedtime, my girfriends out, drank too much Stella, & i need help) with my pc!!

Thanks.

Overclocking is the "black art" of getting extra performance out of your pc buy running its components at a speed faster than standard eg running a 1ghz processor at 1.2ghz. This is done buy adjusting bios timings for the front side bus, clock ratio etc but it's really quite a trial and error proceedure. The downside can be a shorter lifespan and system lockups should you get things wrong. It's a big field and I would suggest you do a bit of research before you start. A google search will produce hours of reading and you'll also see some very fancy "rigs".
Before you do though you might want to do a bit of maintenance on your pc. Use disk cleanup and defragment your drive. Also, if you have a pile of programs in your start menu that you dont always need to have running, disable them from automatically starting cause they're drawing resources that would be better used for the task in hand. Also make sure you have the latest drivers for your system and check which version of directx your using.

you will find quake 3 and its varients run very fast, presume it has a good set of opengl instructions. a lot of people can get in excess of 300fps on gaming machines. you shouldnt however notice slowdowns in your games unless your cpu is something like 600mhz.

if its windows xp try turning all its fancy stuff off and ajust for best preformance. also block off a sector of say 512mb for virtual memory after a defrag

Overclocking
I don't really have anything against overclocking and I might tinker with it as time permits, but overclocking is not needed at all from a practical point of view.

There are four items where overclocking is typically done (if and when it's done) - the processor, the RAM bus, the processor on the video card and the RAM bus on the video card. Overclocking can be done on each item independently, and each makes a different contribution to improve computer performance.

Overclocking is the act of running your computer components beyond their specifications. And therein lies the first problem. It's possible to damage your computer by running in excess of the specifications. It has happened that overclocking the RAM bus has corrupted the hard drive. You should also assume that overclocking will shorten the life of the components you are overclocking. It definitely voids the warranty. Overclocking can be tedious and tricky. Not only might overclocking require modifications to your hardware, but the way you find how much overclocking you can do is by pushing it until your computer fails. How does the thought of doing either one of those sound to you? If your like me then it doesn't sound too appealing.

And overclocking will increase the heat generated by your computer, which means you'll likely need to spend money to add more cooling capacity, when really you were hoping to get more for your money by overclocking

"What is Overclocking?"

.......it's greeaaaaaaaat!

- doin it for years, no moments yet, touch wood!just make sure you know what ya doin (research) and take your time!

Advent - you are mostly correct there mate, just a couple of points i thought might help.

You can damage components my upping the mobo FSB too much, but most new boards now lock PCI & AGP settings to help overcome this - the nforce2 boards definitely lock the speed to prevent HDD corruption. Latest Epox nforce2 board goes up to 250Mhz FSB apparently!!

Most companies will void your warranty for o/c'ing, except Gainward - who include o/c as part of their graphic card warranty!!

Personally, unless you're an enthusiast i wouldnt look at o/c unless your system is ageing or you are happy to be patient and accepting of the odd component failure. As long as youre careful you can mess about safely with speeds if you read up a bit first.

Like i said, I don't really have anything against overclocking.