Hi agoldstein7,
With a new Dell PC you started out with more than enough system resources to run most any application including online gamming. XP has a a wealth of services that can protect your system with the service Pac2 upgrade. You indicated that this is a new system so this would be the best time to install the Service Pac. Online gaming sites can place a lot of bad things on your sytem. Service Pac 2 integrates a realy good popup blocker into your Internet Explorer. It also adds one of the best personal software firewall packages to your system that money can buy, only it's free(No I am not a Microsoft Representative). Performing the following steps after uninstalling third party utlities other than Antivirus should prove helpful:
1. Open Internet Explorer.
2. Click on Tools.
3. Click on Windows Update.
4. Follow the update wizard to install all available updates both custom and expess. Keep visiting the site until it tells you that there are no updates available.
5. Next, visit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=321cd7a2-6a57-4c57-a8bd-dbf62eda9671&displaylang=en to download Microsoft Spyware. Do not let the term Beta scare you. This is a time proven application refined by Microsoft to work with Windows Operating systems error free. The language is in plain language to allow you to make an informed choice of what to block.
6. Keep your existing Antivirus.
These steps will leave you with protection from virus by your existing antivirus program, Protection from Popup adds by service Pack 2 (SP2), protection from Intrusions using the SP2 firewall and spyware detection and elimination using Microsoft Spyware. And best of all it's all free except for the Antivirus.
Let me know how things turned out.
