hey, anyone have any utilities that they use to prep their gaming? I use enditall that shutsdown all unwanted tasks to free up some resources, seems to work pretty good, i just wish it was able ...

Nah, I pretty much just let it ride. Maybe I'll shut down some server or two, but typically it doesn't make much of a difference.

you must have a decent rig p4 1.2GHZ with 512MB here

1gig of RAM is essential! buy another 512mb for $39: http://www.slickdeals.net/#p6034

do you think a 1.4 to 2.2GHZ upgrade for 100 bucks is noticable?

Probably. Depends on other factors as well, but it should give you a decent boost. What video card do you have?

radeon 9000 but it only has 32MB so that doesn't help for the texture loads

Wanna buy my old radeon 9600 for cheap? I just upgraded to a 6800 GT