What should I upgrade?

Modern Warfare 2 is one of my the most frequently played video games on my desktop computer, and has been since it came out. I also play a lot of Call of Duty 1, 2, 4, 5, CoD1: United Offensive, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Call of Duty 1-5 don't have any framerate problems on my computer, or any problems at all. Bad Company 2, however, and Modern Warfare 2, have massive problems. When I'm not running the game with a framerate of 3 to 8, I'm locking up for about .5 seconds every 1.7 seconds or so, and if I'm not doing either of those, I'm locking up to the point where I have to restart my computer.



I'm running both games with all of the settings low, I've installed tons of antivirus, registry cleanup, drive cleaning, and etc. programs, I've opened up ports, reinstalled both games, cleared up programs I don't need, set the processes to High, closed programs running in the background, etc. to no avail.



My specs will be listed below. I'm on a $100 budget. I plan on upgrading either my RAM, Graphics Card, or Processor. I probably don't have enough money to upgrade my Processor, I've done research and know I can upgrade my graphics card to a 9800 GTX+ for around $100, and I'm pretty sure (haven't looked it up yet, but I'm guessing) I can upgrade my RAM around 2-4 gigs for around $100.





Specs:

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+

RAM: 4 gigabytes of DDR2What should I upgrade?
Your graphics card is alright, and 4gb of ram should be enough.

If i were you I'd save up a little bit and upgrade your processor to an intel i5, or at least an i3.



EDIT: If you're really desperate to update now, update your graphics card to the one you mentioned, just know that you will still have framerate issues, your game will just look better doing it.What should I upgrade?
definitely upgrade the video card. athough with 100 dollar budget it might not be possible. look for ati hd 5770's. those are good cards and will run your games flawlessly.



i have a 9800gtx+ i am looking to sell. i am hoping to get around 70 for it. if you look hard enough u can find that card for 65. maybe even 60 on ebay. mine is the evga card. works great but i upgraded to a gtx 465